Rahman kept the project hidden from his own agent while working across 3 cities at once
Dubai: AR Rahman won two Academy Awards for Slumdog Millionaire. According to the composer himself, the collaboration nearly didn’t happen at all, and once it did, he kept it hidden from his own team for weeks.
Speaking to Hasan Minhaj on his YouTube channel, Rahman described the warning he received when Danny Boyle first approached him.
‘Don’t do it’
“I call my agent, and one of the representatives says, ‘Don’t do,'” Rahman recalled. “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’s own read on Boyle was the opposite. “I said, ‘He gave it to me, he smiled at me. It looked very genuine,'” he said.
Ditching a film to work on Slumdog Millionaire in secret
At the time, Rahman had already committed to Ashutosh Gowariker’s What’s Your Rashee, starring Priyanka Chopra. Taking on Boyle’s film meant getting out of that commitment, and doing it quietly.
“I had to ditch that movie and secretly work on Slumdog Millionaire. I had only three weeks to work on this,” he said. “Secretly work on this, because if he fires me, nobody would know.”
The composing happened across three cities at once. Rahman worked in New York, Mumbai and Chennai, while mixing took place in London, where both he and Boyle were based at the time. Boyle would visit him every evening to hear the new material and share notes.
His own agent, Rahman said, had no idea any of it was happening until the film had already come out. “My agent calls up like, ‘Hey, you did the music finally. We saw your name on that,'” he recalled.
Writing ‘Jai Ho’ after the video had already been shot
One detail from the interview explains something about Slumdog Millionaire’s most famous song that most audiences never clocked: the “Jai Ho” sequence wasn’t originally written for “Jai Ho” at all.
“If I’m doing music, I need to make an original song,” he said. “So then I quickly made the stuff, chopped it, compressed it, and put it onto that.”
He had one advantage. Because the actors weren’t lip-syncing in the sequence, the timing didn’t need to match precisely to spoken or sung syllables, which gave him room to rework it. He said the process largely came down to feel rather than technical measurement. “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.
Refining the score on Boyle’s notes
Rahman also described the back-and-forth that shaped the score before the film’s sequences had lip sync locked in. He played an early version of the track for Boyle and asked directly what he thought.
Boyle’s response pushed him further. “I like it, but I want more strings,” he told Rahman, who says he acted immediately, building out a string arrangement and playing it back the same day. Boyle’s reaction: “I like that.”
Even then, Rahman had no certainty the track would survive to 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.
What stayed with him, he said, wasn’t the eventual outcome but the collaboration itself. “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.”
What the score went on to win
Rahman’s work on Slumdog Millionaire took two Academy Awards, for Best Original Score and Best Original Song for “Jai Ho.” The soundtrack also won two Grammy Awards, a Golden Globe and a BAFTA.
The film overall took eight Oscars from ten nominations at the 81st Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director, making it one of the most decorated films of its decade and the moment Rahman’s work reached a global audience far beyond Indian cinema.
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