Slum Dogme

Having shot a wide variety of films, including Dogville, 28 Days Later and Antichrist, Anthony Dod Mantle reveals why his Oscar-winning stint on Slumdog Millionaire was a journey back to his roots.

During the 2008/2009 awards season, British-born cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle was the talk of the town, walking away with the cinema world’s most prestigious awards for his camerawork on Slumdog Millionaire-the Golden Frog at CAMERIMAGE, a BAFTA, the ASC Award and an Oscar. Not bad for a self-confessed slacker.

We met Dod Mantle during the Edinburgh Film Festival, at one of the city’s more salubrious hotels. He had just flown in to support the late addition of Lars von Trier’s controversial Antichrist to the festival’s programme. We became admirers of his work after seeing what he did with a Canon XL1 on Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later, not to mention his celebrated capturing of the essence of India in Slumdog Millionaire, which, as it transpires, was an almost threedecade journey back to where his love of photography began.

“I am inherently lazy,” reveals Dod Mantle. “I was 24-years-old and doing bugger all, except turning vinyl in clubs, serving drinks and travelling. I went to France for a year, and lived in Scandinavia for a year and a half. The reason I got a camera was because of my girlfriend. I was meant to be buying frying pans because her parents were coming for dinner, but she loved me dearly and was very sweet and said, ‘If you want to spend the money we have for kitchen utensils on a camera it is important for your development, because you’ve been pissing around for 24 years. If you want to find a vocation and it’s that, let’s do that’. She encouraged me to spend the money on the camera and we went to India and I started taking photographs. It was kind of documentary stuff—people, the odd fluke that turned into an art —and it made me realise that it could be something else. What it gave me was that experience, that gift, of taking a photo that is really about yourself, then you put it somewhere and someone gets an experience from it too.”

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This article continues in movieScope Magazine, Issue 16 (March/ April 2010)