AR Rahman won two Academy Awards for his work in Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire, and in a recent interview, the composer revealed that he was advised not to work with the director. In a chat with Hasan Minhaj on his YouTube channel, Rahman shared that the collaboration with Boyle almost did not happen. He also recalled that when he made the Academy Award-winning track “Jai Ho”, the video for the same had already been shot, and the makers had filmed it on Don’s “Aaj Ki Raat.”

Rahman recalled that he first got an email from Danny Boyle in 2008, in which the director asked if they could work together. When the filmmaker was in Mumbai, he met Rahman. Upon their meeting, Danny gave Rahman a DVD of Slumdog Millionaire and asked, “Here’s the movie I made. I am not sure. I have never made a movie like this. So please look at it. It will be a great honour if you do the music.” After watching the film, Rahman called his agent and was told not to go ahead with this project.

AR Rahman was advised not to work with Danny Boyle

“I call my agent, and one of the representatives says, ‘Don’t do.’ I said, ‘Why?’ to which their response was, ‘No, I think Danny’s a very different kind of director. He works with multiple people. He might throw your score out very soon. It happened to some of our clients. It’s controversial’,” Rahman said and added that his experience with the director had been very different. “I said, ‘He gave it to me, he smiled at me. It looked very genuine’,” he shared.

In the meantime, Rahman was to start working on Ashutosh Gowariker’s What’s Your Rashee, starring Priyanka Chopra, and he told Ashutosh that he would like to bow out of that because his schedule did not allow him to take so many films at the same time. “I had to ditch that movie and secretly work on Slumdog Millionaire. I had only three weeks to work on this… Secretly work on this, because if he fires me, nobody would know,” he said.

AR Rahman composed Slumdog Millionaire music in three weeks

Rahman shared that the work on the film happened across three weeks in New York, Mumbai and Chennai, and the mixing was happening in London. Danny and Rahman were both in London, and Danny would visit him every evening to listen to the new stuff and share his notes. His agent only found out once the film had released. “My agent calls up like, ‘Hey, you did the music finally. We saw your name on that’,” Rahman recalled.

Rahman shared that the “Jai Ho” music video had already been shot by then and the dancers were dancing to Don’s “Aaj Ki Raat”. When Rahman watched it, he said, “If I’m doing music, I need to make an original song. So then I quickly made the stuff, chopped it, compressed it, and put it onto that.”

Story continues below this ad

Since the actors were not lip-syncing, Rahman could take the liberty of adding a new song. Asked whether he was worried the reworked track wouldn’t sync properly, Rahman said the process came down to instinct. “Sometimes you feel it, the gut feeling that a song is slow, and if I can speed it up to the right speed,” he said.

AR Rahman composed the Oscar-winning music for Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire.

Jai Ho music video was filmed on Aaj Ki Raat

Rahman also described playing an early version of the track for director Danny Boyle before the sequence had lip sync. “I played him the song and asked, ‘What about this?'” he recalled. Boyle’s response pushed him to refine it further, “I like it, but I want more strings,” Boyle told him. Rahman said he acted immediately, “I told him I’d give him strings right away, put together a string arrangement, and played it for him.” Boyle’s reaction, according to Rahman: “He said, ‘I like that.'”

Even after that positive response, Rahman said he had no guarantee the track would make the final cut. “I still didn’t know if he was going to use it or throw it away. I told myself it was fine either way,” he said, reflecting on the uncertainty of the process. He added that the experience stayed with him because of who he was working with: “I loved this experience, working with a man who has great soundtracks in his movies. So no way, not even a percentage, I thought it was going to get a Grammy or Golden Globe or BAFTA or Oscar, or anything. I felt I was working with a great director who was going to place my music and then, all the stuff happens.”

AR Rahman won two Academy Awards for Slumdog Millionaire. He also won two Grammy Awards, a Golden Globe award and a BAFTA for his score in the film. The song ‘Jai Ho’ also won Best Original Song at the Oscars.