“…as we drew closer to the shoot date,
Danny asked me to step in as the Co-Director…”
Someone I really respect sent me (& others) a message last week explaining why he could not support “my SLUMDOG campaign” & in the course of his message, he said this: “When the film was completed, Mr. Boyle took it upon himself without pressure or precedent to acknowledge Ms. Tandan’s extraordinary contributions to the production by creating a credit for her that didn’t exist before: co-director.”
I was stunned! I immediately asked him if he had any evidence for this, & I told him I’d been operating under very different assumptions for months now: “As I try to figure all of this out from what Danny Boyle himself told me when we spoke f2f (as well as everything that’s been published since, most especially by the WALL STREET JOURNAL), I sincerely believe that the critical moment came here:
“As I was casting with her,
I realized, because I’m not a fool,
that I needed her there every day.”
Someone just sent me a link to an interview with Loveleen Tandan posted in late December. While it doesn’t exactly validate my theory, it certainly does confirm my timeframe.
Why is this important??? While my friend in paragraph one above is more articulate than most, I think many others also have a fundamental misunderstanding about what happened when to get us to this point. Quite simply, they don’t seem to understand that Loveleen Tandan was hired to do a job (Casting Director) & when that job was done she was given a new job (Co-Director). Both of these jobs involved both financial as well as creative transactions. Sure Loveleen Tandan “helped” Danny Boyle during the making of SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE. That was part of her job as Co-Director. (The new job she was hired to do after she completed her job as Casting Director.)
Why are so many people fighting so hard to deny the obvious??? Years ago, another wonderful male friend of mine asked me why I was putting in so many hours of [unpaid] overtime on a minimum wage job. “Jan,” he said. “It’s a job. It’s not an adventure.” Since I am, indeed, a woman who has “helped” way more than her share over the years, I feel I’ve earned the right to say this:
AMPAS needs to recognize the job Loveleen Tandan did
as the credited Co-Director of SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE
& reward her for her contributions accordingly.
