Danny Boyle Interview

Yeah, that's me geekin' it up with none other than Danny Boyle who graciously granted an interview for us while he was on tour promoting his new film Millions. Based on the well known young adult novel, Millions tells the story of two brothers who mysteriously happen upon a huge bag of money just before Britain is set to convert to the Euro. The style is pure Boyle but the story, full of visitations from smoking Saints is a wonderful blend of faith and fantasy.

It was a great conversation that crossed through a lot of subject matter and ended on a case of mistaken identity and a scoop about his new film, Sunshine.

INTERVIEW WITH DANNY BOYLE

DAVE: Danny Boyle and children’s fiction - not something people would ordinarily put together. How did that happen?

DB: (laughing) Yes, they were very reluctant to even send me the script because they thought I would either hate it or turn it into a slasher movie. We certainly didn’t take the story in that direction. So many scripts you get strike you as the next logical thing to do career wise or business wise and of course that isn’t why I make movies. I knew the writer of Millions a little, he had done 24 Hour Party People, and so we met and found we worked really well together. About a year later, we found we had written this wonderfully unusual piece. It was modernized, slightly in the future because of course the British haven’t joined the Euro yet.

DAVE: What was it that drew you to that particular story?

DB: It was a very personal piece for me although I wouldn’t call it a strictly autobiographical piece. The story is about an imaginative boy, really, and I saw so much of myself in that. And the way the character grows and changes reminded me a lot of how I’ve come to be who I am today. I have three kids of my own but even though the piece is based on a young adult novel I can’t really say I did it for them. In the end it was a story I wanted to tell because of my own background, really. There were so many personal reference points in it I just fell in love. Of course what you want is to tell the story in the most vivid way you possibly can. That’s the goal, not to rehash my own life on film.

DAVE: Watching the film I couldn’t help but feel your deep connection with the material in it about the relationship between the two brothers and the younger child and the mother. Those elements were so alive they almost threatened to pop off the screen, out of the rest of the story. Did you find that sense of personal connection and telling story the movie had to tell made for a difficult balancing act?

DB: I didn’t try to balance it much, to be honest. I just wanted to tell the story as vividly as possible. I’m not really a believer in balance or restraint, particularly when I’m shooting. For instance there’s a sequence in The Beach where he turns into a cartoon character and starts marching as if he was part of a video game. Everybody told me, “What are doing that for, it’s going to be a disaster.” But whenever I hear people say, “Don’t do that!” I immediately think “Yeah - do do that”! There can be missteps involved but I find the advantages outweigh that especially when you get to the editing room.

DAVE: Talk more about the editing process. You have such unique signature on your films. How much does editing figure into that?

DB: I think most films are made in the editing room. The great rumor about John Ford, how he would only shoot exactly what he needed to make the film he had in his head. That way nobody else could edit his movies because there was literally nowhere else to take the story when you began to assemble the footage. That sort of technique really isn’t used much anymore. We all sort of tend to get lots and lots of material and then edit.

One of the things we do that is different than many is we spend tons of time on the script even to the point of acting bits out. Then when we get to day one of the shoot we don’t divert from the script. When others are inside a film they always think they’ll be able to explore that world. But there are all sorts of cul de sacs and when they go to edit they discover the way the audience is going to experience that world or that story. Instead of letting yourself get sidetracked into those cul de sacs the script becomes the thing you know you have to get.

I like to push my actors. I’m not a big fan of distant acting. I like them to be very in the moment and to take risks. Some people find what I like almost theatrical but I find it helps people to lose themselves in the film. I don’t want people to stand outside the story judging it objectively I want them to sink inside it, to experience it.

DAVE: It’s interesting that your last two films got labeled so quickly. People always say in conversation that, “Trainspotting, oh that’s a drug movie” or that “28 Days Later? That’s a zombie movie.” Of course neither is true. The easy way out would be to label Millions a “kid’s movie.” Do you think there’s a way you can avoid that?

DB: I’ve spent the last fifteen years of my life watching kids movies with my three kids. I feel like I could go on a quiz show about them. Millions clearly isn’t a kid’s movie. It lacks that knockabout element and it takes a more sophisticated look at kids than a kids movie would. The kids here are a way for the adults (which includes the audience) to see themselves. What have we lost and gained since childhood? You could tell that the child actors in the film were more and more aware of that as the filming progressed and by the end they were really buzzing with it.

I hope that sort of energy helps people, especially people who’ve already seen the film or are reporting on it, offer a more complex view to others rather than just applying a simple label like kid’s movie.

DAVE: So working with child actors was a good experience?

DB: When you have kid actors it’s incredibly easy to put your thumb marks in them so I do my level best not to do that. That’s really the secret to getting a great performance from a child actor. The audience, when they see a child “actor,” they are immediately annoyed. What I want as a director is for the child to seem like a child, not an actor.

DAVE: You have this marvelous ability to weave fantasy elements through stories that take place in the “real” world. Now most writers when they adapt a work that does this start by yanking out the fantasy elements because they are concerned it will yank the viewer out of the story. But you take the opposite route.

DB: Oh, yes. I’ve been proved right, too, haven’t I? Lord of the Rings, thank you very much. (laughing). I’m a big believer in the unreal as well as the real. Everything in my life has confirmed that. I grew up in Manchester, which is known and depicted in film as this fairly grim industrial kind of place. And yet if you take a subjective camera to it Manchester suddenly, very easily, becomes a vivid, funny really witty place. It’s produced some of the greatest music of the last twenty or thirty years.

In Millions I wanted people to see Manchester the way I saw it as a child. Now, as an adult, it rains there and it’s overcast and muddy. But when I was a kid I couldn’t wait to get out into it. My mother was always yelling at me to get back inside, or to put on a jacket. No, on film the reality of Manchester would look grim but I wanted that Mediterranean world that was in my mind growing up where all the colors that were there popped.

And the scene where the family moves is another good example. As adults you and I know that moving house is a nightmare. It takes forever and it’s expensive. But I moved house at that age and I remember running like mad from room to room, it was as if the house had just magically appeared! We had a scene where the kids rode the bicycles all through the house but we had to cut it. But that was the sense we were after when we did the effects that magically bring the house into being around them.

DAVE: Part of the fantastic landscape of Millions are faith and miracles, which are really powerfully and winsomely presented.

DB: My mum was a very devout Irish Catholic and growing up I went to a religious school, and I was surrounded by the saints. In fact, until I was fourteen I was headed towards being a priest. All of that seems a very real part of my life. But my idea of faith has changed since then. It involves a leap, a trust in people, a leap of imagination to believe in them. I think that’s a good way to live, that if you develop that and demonstrate it good will come of it.

DAVE: And yet in the film the good that comes seems to pretty clearly emerge from outside human origins. Without spoiling the movie what do you think of that idea that we are looked after, not just responsible for ourselves? That we should look up, and look to something more than just ourselves?

DB: Well of course as soon as you start specifying it you see all these little camps. Humanism? Religion? I think there is a connection. I believe it’s important to see beyond those labels or you lose the heart of it. I think the most important thing is to live generously.

If you cast a strictly cold eye on what I do as a filmmaker you could say that I exploit people by making them feel welcome and comfortable so they’ll work harder for me. But what I would say is that when you treat people like that then they work harder.

DAVE: Do you feel that tension between the supernatural and the natural in your own journey?

DB: Oh yes. In Millions everybody is on the kid about things being real. But of course the things the kid is concerned about are real; love, kindness, generosity. Everybody else is coaching him to be secretive and careful, “Don’t tell anybody! The government will take forty percent in tax! Don’t do this, don’t do that!” And of course the kid’s vision is the point of the film.

DAVE: It’s interesting that in his view of the world, which is one of faith and looking to God, he is led to care for others. It’s like the scripture that says "To save our lives we must lose them.”

DB: We are capable of it. Look what happened after the tsunami. Of course we shut that down often and it’s constantly picked at by the forces who only want us to think about what’s “real”, but if we don’t imagine a better world how will we ever get there?

DAVE: Is Danny Boyle like Don Quixote tipping his movie lance at the cold-hearted windmill of consumerism?

DB: (laughing) It’s so complicated. Of course in Britain we’ve made the choice to live within the paradigm of consumerism. But I like to think that our films are about what we do know that we’ve made that decision, to identify what remains of our principles and hang on.

DAVE: Your movies tend to focus on the inner life of their central characters. In Trainspotting you use the voiceover. In 28 Days Later you create this almost palpable aura around the inner drive of the main character, and of course in Millions we have this little boy who talks to the Saints.

DB: It’s a great way to draw the audience in, isn’t it? That subjectivity makes everything accessible. Of course in Trainspotting people found that occupying that space was very difficult. Part of the backlash against the film was that it didn’t judge the characters. But of course that’s the whole idea, isn’t it? To move people out of themselves into someone else’s world, their fears and worries and needs?

DAVE: Just like the little boy does in Millions?

DB: Yes I suppose that true.

DAVE: So, to close, what’s next for Danny Boyle?

DB: We’re doing a science fiction film called Sunshine written by Alex Garland who also wrote 28 Days Later. It’s the story of a mission to the sun. This crew is transporting a bomb the size of Kansas there to use in hopefully re-igniting part of it that has gone out. But part of the story is that seven years earlier another crew had tried the same thing and failed and that noone knows what happened to them. I can tell you that the crew does get to the source of all life in the universe. It’s a real page-turner but it moves from being a thriller into quite a spiritual film. We start shooting on July 11.

DAVE: Cast?

DB: We haven’t got any (laughing). Actually we’re still trying to decide whether we’re going ensemble or star. Space movies tend to work better as ensemble pieces but the budget for this is pretty large.

DAVE: One last question. Todd made me promise I would ask you when we’d see Hamish Macbeth on DVD.

DB: Hamish Macbeth?

DAVE: Yes.

DB: I think you have me confused with Daniel L. Boyle the Scottish writer. Actually sometimes I get his VAT returns, which is like a deduction you can claim on your taxes. We did collaborate on a series called Inspector Morse but not on the same episode.

DAVE: Well, can I ask one more question?

DB: Yes.

DAVE: Would you mind working on this Hamish DVD thing anyway?

DB: (laughing) Yes, I’ll get back to you on that right away.