Chinese after-party for Oscar champion

Boyle laughed off the issue: "It is democracy," he said. "India has a billion people. They disagree with everything all the time, and they are so full-on, never half-hearted. It is full of debate there and it's good debate."

The controversy, Boyle believes, stems to a large extent from India's own film industry.

"Bollywood tends to depict only near-childish fantastic pictures of the middle class - that tends to be Bollywood's big obsession," he said. "Some Bollywood people think films should not focus on slums, while others say that's exactly how Bollywood pictures would improve, by actually catering to more ordinary people."

Boyle, who denied he was being lined up to direct the next Bond film, shares his views of Hollywood.

"Hollywood is business, just like Bollywood," he said. "It turns out hundreds of films and caters to different things. It does not really suit me.

"I like to take a limited amount of money and try to make it feel like 100 million dollars on the big screen. You can do that slightly better outside the Hollywood system. I call it working off the radar, so that nobody knows what you are doing."

If you were making Slumdog Millionaire in Hollywood, Boyle explained, its central character, Jamal, would never have been tortured at the start of the film and the kids would never have been blinded.

"They would say 'forget about that, people will leave the cinema if you show that scene'. And you would never have the song and dance at the end, because the tone changes too much. What they do is go for the middle ground - but it is things off the middle-ground that really interest me."

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