Celebrated British director Danny Boyle chats with Blockbuster.co.uk's Marshall Julius about his varied career and latest movie, brainy sci fi thriller Sunshine.
For a director whose latest movie takes us all the way to the sun, Danny Boyle is refreshingly down-to-earth. A British director to be proud of, he's the man who gave us
Shallow Grave and
Trainspotting,
28 Days Later. and now
Sunshine, a sci fi epic starring
Cillian Murphy as a detached but brilliant physicist sent to re-ignite our dying sun. The first time I interviewed Boyle was back in 1994 for Shallow Grave. Since then Boyle has carved an enviable career for himself, both in Hollywood and the civilised side of the Atlantic. Chatting with the director about his varied career and latest project, I first asked how he felt he'd grown since we last talked movies together.
"I've learned a lot of technical stuff, obviously," he replies, "but actually a lot of you tries to get back to that place where you made the first film! The one you made with a kind of innocence, when you didn't really know what you were doing: there's something rather wonderful about that. Although you can only fake it after the first one, there are still situations where the best decisions are made when you almost fall in that state again, of not quite knowing what to do. If you know too much and you apply that all the time, it gets a bit sterile. That's one of the reasons I keep ending up in different genres, because that's a way to kind of confuse yourself, to throw yourself, so you don't just make the same movie again. At least, you try not to."
The main reason for working his way through genres as diverse as
comedy, romance,
horror,
family,
drama,
thrillers and
science fiction, says Boyle, is not so much the fresh challenge each project presents as it is ".giving in to what excites you, when it comes along. It could be an idea or a script - you just go with it and hang the short-term consequences. You don't listen to the agents who tell you to do another horror film or thriller, because that's the way it works in Hollywood. You make a mark and then you emphasise that mark. Do the same thing over and over. But I've never wanted to do that. I've always wanted to move on and change. As I said, it's your only hope of getting back to that state of thinking, 'this is the corner we're in, what are we going to do?' It's a lovely feeling, in a way, because that's when you come up with your best ideas."
Top of my favourite Boyle flicks has to be zombie flick 28 Days Later. Shot on a shoestring budget in 2002, it's a grimly compelling tale of survival in a ravaged, desolate Britain. "Again," continues Boyle, "if we'd followed the rules, we wouldn't have made that film. I remember telling my American agent that we were going to make 28 Days Later. next and he could barely stop himself from saying, 'What?! We're trying to position you and you're making a zombie movie?' But we made it, and there you go, he loves it now."
There's an odd sort of snobbery about zombie flicks, more so than any other sub-genre of horror, yet for me they're some of my favourite films, from
George Romero's Dawn of the Dead to Boyle's blistering effort. "They're incredibly potent and clearly address something in society which is as meaningful as many a meaningful film," declares the director. "They're also quite cheap to make, and can't stomach stars. Stars don't work in those sort of films. So you have this kind of freedom from the prison of mainstream cinema, where there has to be a matinee idol and a huge budget, which are actually the things that suffocate those kinds of movies."
Regardless of his spartan funding, Boyle managed to pull off some serious cinematic feats in 28 Days Later., particularly the opening shots of the movie where a dazed Cillian Murphy wanders the streets of a completely deserted London. "If we'd had ten times the money," says Boyle, "those scenes wouldn't have been half as good." How then did he manage to clear the streets? To empty one of the busiest cities on earth of the millions who live there?
"This sounds like a joke but it's the god's honest truth," begins Boyle. "The police won't stop traffic for a small movie. They will for a film like
Mission: Impossible, but a lot of money has to change hands first. If you don't have those sort of funds, the police won't allow you to stop the traffic, but what they will let you do is operate what they call traffic marshals, which is basically people in yellow jackets authorised to hold the traffic for a few minutes at a time.
"On the first day we did it - at 4.30 in the morning but there's still a lot of traffic in London then - we'd hired a load of students to do it for us and most of them turned out to be girls. Quite pretty girls, and it was amazing to watch them work. Everybody was expecting trouble, because when you stop traffic in London people get aggressive straight away, but if a pretty girl leans into your car at 4.30 in the morning, smiles and says, 'excuse me, would you mind stopping here for a few minutes?' They all go, 'all right love, no problem.' For the next five days, because we did it over six consecutive mornings, we hired increasingly beautiful young girls to do the job!"
Three years in the making, Boyle's Sunshine is by far the biggest and most technically challenging project he's tackled to date. "I'm delighted with it," he says with a smile. "It's quite intense, and when you meet people who've just seen it, it feels like they've been taken somewhere different. That was always the ambition. To try and take people to the surface of the sun."
Key among the cast is lanky
Irish actor Cillian Murphy, who first worked with Boyle on the film that made him famous. "When we did our first film together," remembers the director, "when we did 28 Days Later., Cillian was modest to the point of shy. I had to punch and kick him a bit into the spotlight, to take over the film. But he's changed. He's aware now. I think he's done some good films in the interim, he did
Batman Begins which was excellent, he did
The Wind That Shakes The Barley, he's done mainstream films like
Red Eye. He's learned a lot about what his abilities are, and he's more aware of taking responsibility for the films he's in, which makes my job a lot easier, when you're sharing it with an actor. I relished working with him again. I really admire him for the way he's stepped forward as an actor."
Harking back to a more intelligent breed of sci fi cinema, the movie has a number of stellar influences. "It's 2001," begins Boyle.
Solaris for intelligence and the first
Alien film for approach. We seal the crew inside a ship, and the audience are sealed in with them. There's no alternative scenario, no cutting back to Earth, like you'd normally do in a disaster movie. It's hardcore. You're here for the journey. The audience is as cut off as the characters. That's one of the things that made Alien so frightening. They're trapped alone in the loneliest place there is. Those are Sunshine's main influences, not so much the playground sci fi where anything goes. I preferred a more disciplined approach."