Danny Boyle: Man of Wonder - Extended The Culture Show

This programme contains some strong language and some violent scenes.

Choose life. Choose a job.

Choose a career.

Choose to make fresh, bold films.

Choose to take on the Olympic opening ceremony.

If you haven't guessed yet,

I'm talking about director Danny Boyle,

our very own Oscar-winning maverick, all-round cultural champion

and as of last summer, self-effacing national treasure.

# Lust for life... #

I caught up with Danny to discuss his new film, Trance,

London 2012's afterglow

and the highs and lows of a remarkable film-making career.

# Got a lust for life

# Yeah, lust for life... #

Danny, welcome to The Culture Show. At the end of the screening of Trance,

I was very theatrically handed a signed letter from you that said,

"Now that you've seen the film, do not reveal its secrets."

So, I'm going to throw this to you to say, what can you tell us about Trance?

What I can tell you about it is that it appears to be

about the theft of a painting...

Stop right there.

..which appears to involve James McAvoy, even though

he's actually one of the junior auctioneers at the house

that the painting is stolen from.

-Where is it?

-I can't remember. I got hit on the head.

THAT you remember.

Vincent Cassel and the gang, who, again, appear to be responsible for this theft

get involved with a hypnotist from Harley Street,

played by Rosario Dawson...

Have you ever been hypnotised before?

Whatever's in his head, she can find.

..and they set about using hypnotism

to try and recover the painting from the convoluted memories

or the amnesia that James McAvoy appears to be suffering

as a result of the heist that goes wrong.

Actually, what's really been stolen are some memories.

There's something hidden...

inside me.

What is it?

It's a memory.

A memory?

A memory of what you did.

From the first trance of the movie,

things are shifting and you don't know what's going to happen.

And, actually, it's pretty scary,

because you know that you can be tricked at any point.

And that puts you in a very strange position as an audience, I think.

I'm at Frank's house.

Jesus! What are you doing there?

-Elizabeth, they are going to kill me.

-'No.'

-No, they are.

You were right - this is what they always planned to do.

'Don't you see? This...this is why I had to hide the painting.'

You're going, "Wait, what?"

You kind of want to look back at certain points,

and you'll get to the end and go...

SHE GASPS You'll want to watch it again.

That was the same feeling I was getting just in reading the script.

I remember reading and going, "Wait...

"It just went on detour all the way over here. Where did that come from?"

-'Do you see the bedside table?'

-Yes.

'Open the drawer.'

'No, the lower one.

-'Is there a gun?'

-Yes.

-Do you think you can use it?

-'I don't know.'

I've never used one before.

One of the ideas of the film was to try and...

is to treat a cinema audience as trance-ees, if you like.

There is something...

And I've always used to describe films as... You know, you want them,

ideally, to mesmerise an audience, and, indeed, the source of that word

is Mesmer, who was the French architect of hypnotism originally.

So... And you want to involve the audience in that puzzle, really.

She put that there. It's not real.

He was quite open about not really having all the answers

to the questions that are posed in the script at times,

but that we would find them as we went, and that, in fact,

we were going to find more questions to ask as we went,

and we should embrace that,

in that the questions are just as important as the answers sometimes.

And I found that quite thrilling, because in this industry,

where everybody wants to know what the equation is, you know,

for success, which is impossible...

Two and two equals four.

It doesn't in art, necessarily. And he understands that.

And he goes, "Let's just find out if there's a more interesting way

"to get to the answer."

So, maybe it isn't two and two. Maybe it's two plus pink.

This film has a resemblance to Memento, Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, Inception,

those kind of mind films.

The mind is the scene of the crime.

But also, it's the classic set-up, two guys and a girl

within a bubble, and a bubble of their own making.

-What can you make him do?

-Anything.

The film darkens, of course, as it goes on.

I've been beaten up in loads of movies, abused in loads of movies,

I've been tortured in movies, I've died in tons of movies.

But it's never been as unpleasant as it was in this. I think it's Danny.

I think it was Danny making me feel bad about myself.

Just, like, making me feel pained and strained and stressed

and confused and stuff like that.

Maybe he did it on purpose, I don't know.

James feels like a very trustworthy kind of person.

And obviously, one of the delights of the film is within the bubble

that the three of them exist in, it begins to shift who's the protagonist

and who's the antagonist, and your allegiances do change, do vary,

and you might expect Vincent Cassel, who's so good at gangsters,

to be an out-and-out gangster,

but he shows a different side to himself eventually as well.

Even though he's a very visual director, you know,

one would think very technical, you know, in the way he shoots,

it's very sophisticated, very different angles,

reflections and stuff like that...

..one would think that, you know,

those kind of directors don't really care about actors.

And it's not the case at all, actually.

What I've learned working with Danny is that

he comes from the theatre world,

and he actually loves actors, and he spent quite a lot of time with them.

He has a very precise eye and look on what you do as an actor.

It's pretty rare, actually, to see those directors...

a director that is as complete on both sides -

technical and organic.

While shooting Trance, Danny's multifarious talents

were also busy orchestrating London 2012's grand opening.

As artistic director,

he delivered an ingeniously left-field celebration of Britain

that captivated viewers worldwide.

Entitled Isles Of Wonder,

even the most cynical of us Brits were transfixed.

Tell me now what significance it has for you.

Is it, as everyone wants to imagine, the proudest moment of your life?

-Where does it sit for you now?

-The Olympics could have been a disaster.

-OK.

-Quite easily. In fact, a lot of people were expecting it to be a disaster.

Our philosophy on it, actually, was very simple.

We thought if we get enough good people doing this work,

it might not be shite.

That was the limit of our ambitions at the time

because everybody was so certain that it would be shite.

We had a really, really strong sense of him not being afraid.

You know,

I kept saying, like, there's no second night, so doesn't matter.

A lot of people think all kinds of shite is good,

so even if it's shite, 50% of people might think it's good, you know?

So, we just were fearless about it, really.

Danny rightly felt confident accepting the role of artistic director

when first approached in June 2010.

When they offered it to me, I thought, yeah, I'm quite qualified for that. I live in the area,

I'm a sports fanatic and I have enough authority,

thanks to the films, to be able to force through what we wanted to do

with it, our kind of vision of it.

Danny's approach is always pretty much the same.

It's always, like, how do we make this story, this event, visceral?

How does it get you here in your gut?

And so, for instance, the first few minutes,

you have to deliver an image of the Olympic Games.

Now, like, in Beijing or in Seoul, or wherever,

the question would be, how do we make that extravagant,

how do we make it impressive, how do we show that we're a superpower?

And Danny's thing was, how do you make five rings visceral?

And that's how we kind of ended up with the Industrial Revolution,

because, like, what's the most amazing way of doing that?

It's to make them and to see the sweat of people's brows

and the liquid metal being forged in front of you.

Danny had started work,

so Underworld came to the opening ceremony

with certain ideas in place.

What was lovely

was to see the way that...

that music and thoughts on music and the beginnings of experiments

and suggestions started to glue ideas together.

# People try to put us d-down

# Talking 'bout my generation... #

The opening ceremony is...

It's not a musical,

but, actually, you know, it is driven by music relentlessly.

# We're so pretty Oh, so pretty

# We're vacant... #

Music means so much to Danny.

He listens to music, plays music, explores, and his friends feed him,

and he feeds them, with new music and ideas all the time.

It's part of the fabric of him living his life, you know, music.

Some people think I'm bonkers But I just think I'm free

Man, I'm just living my life There's nothing crazy 'bout me...

At the beginning of talking about the Olympics thing, he said,

we can't possibly compete with Beijing,

you have to change the game.

And you can only... If you're changing the game,

people have to know you've changed the game.

So we kind of went through like, what haven't,

what have we got that they didn't have?

I can remember this, the very first day, he had such a clear idea.

We had humour, and emotion, and eccentricity, and unpredictability.

LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE

And these are all the opposite of what they had in Beijing.

Please welcome Mike Oldfield

and the staff of the United Kingdom National Health Service.

And our very special guests this evening,

patients and staff of Great Ormond Street Hospital.

The great thing was the celebration of the National Health Service.

Both my parents worked in the National Health Service

and you see that and you just think, home run for the team.

When you get that kind of job where you're asked to look at ourselves,

there are certain institutions that reflect that.

And they weren't institutions that people thought we might concentrate on.

They are things like national broadcasting,

which we weren't able to feature as much as we would have liked,

because the BBC were covering it so it would have looked terrible.

But the NHS is another one.

The NHS got in there because you wanted to make it emotional.

And actually, in modern Britain, you are born and you die in the NHS.

They are two massive emotions, birth and death.

And it's the NHS is the way

this country embraces you at those critical moments.

The people who played the volunteers' roles in that

were people from the National Health Service

and they were working shift work,

under incredible strain from their managers,

pissed off about the amount of time they were taking off

to be at the Olympics and do these kinds of things.

That makes you go, "Yeah, I'm worried about how hard I'm working.

"These people are working much, much harder."

It's kind of mutually inspiring,

so we kind of built that atmosphere, really.

To be honest, they had that anyway.

You would have had to be a bit of a...

You would have had to be a bit of a twat, really, to negate it.

MUSIC: "In Dulci Jubilo" by Mike Oldfield

With live performance, when things go wrong,

when things are edgy,

when you're not quite sure how it's going to go,

their energy comes across and translates and draws people in.

Danny understands that.

MUSIC: "Firestarter" by The Prodigy

He constantly kept everyone in this state of nearly there,

nearly at the top of the hill.

It took a lot of courage to do that, you know? An event of that scale.

It's nerve-racking stuff, you know.

MUSIC: "Heaven" by Emeli Sande

And it was just absolutely amazing. Amazing!

I barely saw Danny on the night.

Danny was in the control room, like this.

And afterwards people thought there was going to be an amazing party,

and definitely my wife and daughter were like,

there's going to be an amazing party.

But of course, they'd been up for four nights.

We were all battered, you know?

I'm not quite sure what planet I was on.

There's this sense on the day of, there's nothing you can do now.

I was nervous, I was edgy. I'm not sure what Danny's frame of mind was.

He seemed to be...so calm.

All the time. In the face of

a tsunami of detail and issues.

One of the biggest surprises on the night was the Queen's

pre-recorded cameo alongside 007.

Good evening, Mr Bond.

Good evening, Your Majesty.

But Danny recently declined a knighthood

for his Olympic extravaganza.

Why did you turn down the honour they offered you?

Again, it was... It was...

I'm not... I didn't wish to get anything out of it.

I was very proud to do it as part of a huge group of people, really,

and I don't really see why...

I didn't really want to be singled out from that, other than that.

It's kind of preserved, in a way that it should be. And that's it, really.

And it's a lovely thing.

I get embarrassed when people say "Mr Boyle", so you feel like...

Sir Danny would have been funny, though.

More and more people say "Mr Boyle" and it's like, that's enough to deal with, to be honest.

I'm just not that kind of person, really.

The inspiration for his Olympic vision

and the honours-list sidestep can be traced back to his childhood.

Born in 1956 in Radcliffe, Lancashire,

he grew up in a working-class Irish Catholic family

that was staunchly left wing.

Actually, going right back to your earliest years,

it seems to me that your upbringing gave you a sense of responsibility.

You had certain political awarenesses

that you got from your parents.

Yeah, I think your values, some of your values, you inherit

from your parents and your family.

I was very much influenced by my mum who wanted me to...

would have loved me to be a priest.

She had such a respect for the priesthood.

I was prepared to go to a seminary.

A priest, actually, at the grammar school I was at, talked me out of it.

He said, "I think you're probably not cut out for that. You should wait and see."

Then this other teacher called Mr Unsworth,

who was an English teacher, kind of came much more into the foreground,

as far as I could see, almost simultaneously.

It developed this interest in literature and then drama.

We'd do plays at school and I began to relish that,

and that's when you've found it.

He said, "I think you should try and do this at college.

"You should have a go." Cos I didn't know what to do.

Coming from my background, it was, like, you'd use your school,

a good education, which is what I got, to get a decent job,

like a teacher or something like that.

After university, Danny moved to London,

where he first made his name in the theatre.

When I left college, I got a job as an assistant stage manager,

which is just sweeping up, making tea for the theatre company,

the Joint Stock Theatre Company,

which was run by two amazing directors,

Max Stafford-Clark and Bill Gaskill.

Danny had great integrity.

And he had a political conviction that absolutely shone.

So that I knew he was an outstanding young man

before I knew that he was a talented director.

And in fact, the theatre is full of talented and ambitious people,

of whom Danny was one,

but his own convictions and belief were what made him stand out.

Max eventually took over the Royal Court Theatre,

and he took me there as an assistant director -

still making the tea, really,

but basically learning a kind of sensibility, a way of directing.

Which you have to...

Eventually you have to find your own way of doing it,

your own voice, but initially you copy your masters, really.

Because at least they have a system, or what looks like a system.

I think the Royal Court gave him a lot in terms both of confidence

and of finding his voice.

I think that was something he was always determined to do.

And asking the right questions always leads to the right answers.

I eventually directed on both the stages there -

the Theatre Upstairs, which is a small studio space,

and the main stage, which is a wonderful, intimate 400-seat theatre,

a beautiful space to direct in.

I think Danny probably was hideously ambitious,

but...he fulfilled...

I mean, he never took on anything that he couldn't do,

so I learned quite quickly that if Danny wanted to do something,

it wasn't a bad idea to let him do it.

I wanted to, I'll be honest, I wanted to take over the theatre.

It's a sign of appalling ambition, Macbeth-type ambition straightaway.

But Max wouldn't give up the day job, so I left

and I went to something that I'd always wanted to do,

which is to work on television.

And I went to the BBC in Northern Ireland, actually,

and I got a job there as a producer.

And my first role as a producer was to hire myself as a director,

so again, that's appalling ambition there, straightaway.

And I would produce and direct these one-hour films

for the BBC in Northern Ireland.

And the one exception to that was, we did this Alan Clarke film

called Elephant, which is something, a scenario that we,

it's not really a script, it's a scenario we worked up together.

And then Alan came,

he was a director who as you know I admired enormously

and learned a lot from, and he came over

and directed this extraordinary piece.

Which has had a resonance on, amazingly.

Alan's left us, sadly,

but the film has influenced many, many other filmmakers.

You still hear people talking about it.

Partly based on real events that took place during the Troubles,

Elephant presented an unflinching look

at sectarian murder in Northern Ireland.

GUNSHOT

GUNSHOTS

With almost no dialogue, no narrative or music,

it was a deeply disturbing and highly original film

that proved controversial when first broadcast in 1989.

All we saw were the assassins and the victims.

So many of these tragic murders have occurred,

men have been shot in front of their wives and children.

Shopkeepers have been shot in a shop full of customers.

If you're going to do this, show it as it is,

not some stylised version of it.

GUNSHOTS

We wanted to try and achieve some kind of stylisation

in the piece to prevent it being a documentary.

Consequently, people, in order to try and capture this idea

that these men never seem to be caught running away,

you never hear that in the way that you do for instance in a bank robbery

in England, there's always witnesses, you never get that impression.

And we wanted to create that through a stylisation, really.

DOG BARKS

But other viewers did appreciate what the film was trying to achieve.

I'd like to congratulate you.

Actually, both you and Mr Clarke,

on what I thought was a really brilliant programme.

What most people don't understand is it's the sheer repetition

that made it so important and made you think.

ECHOING GUNSHOT

I was stunned by it.

I thought it was a very humane contribution that managed,

of course, without...in a very difficult political context,

to cross the divide very evenly.

I thought it was a stunning piece of work.

And very bold decision-making that led to it.

Danny's own television breakthrough

came via a very different subject matter, when he directed

an acclaimed period drama set in 19th-century Lancashire,

Mr Wroe's Virgins.

Look, brothers and sisters in Christ.

Look at the world around you!

Our young mothers are wage slaves in the mills,

while their suckling babes are left drugged and fasting

from dawn until noon time.

The series told the story of a charismatic preacher

who recruits seven chaste women to service his household.

When we were filming Mr Wroe's Virgins,

Danny seemed completely in control.

Just totally un-hesitant in what he was looking for

and what he was wanting to get, and how to get it.

-WOMAN WAILS

-I can't see anything.

Oh, yes, here it is.

Here's the little rascal.

I mean, Danny is totally obsessed with what makes people tick,

in an almost perverse way.

Who is the careless seamstress, hmm?

And ruthless in that too, I think.

And manipulative too.

I mean, that's what good directors are.

Your needle.

Mr Wroe's Virgins galvanised Danny's growing reputation

and he now looked to pursue ambitions beyond TV and theatre.

I was looking to try and get a film made.

I couldn't. I developed a number of scripts with people.

Amy Jenkins, who eventually wrote This Life, we developed a script

about the Ecstasy generation, but nobody was interested then

because it was only just beginning.

Eventually, I got sent this script which was doing the rounds

and they were looking for a director.

These couple of young guys, a producer and a writer,

John Hodge and his producer, Andrew MacDonald.

They were interviewing directors. I read the script

and it was quite clearly way out there, beyond anything else I'd read.

He was desperate to make a feature film,

absolutely desperate to make a feature film.

Had probably been passed over on some other interviews,

or whatever, had missed out.

And he embraced John's writing, that was the key thing, to us.

Embraced the writing and embraced the opportunity.

And then, you know,

started immediately making everything better.

He had an ambition for Shallow Grave which was very appealing.

Ambition both in terms of how it would be done

and how good a film it could be.

I went in for the interview and I met them

and I was very honest, as I've always tried to be.

I said it was a remarkable script, brilliantly written.

And I said I thought the ending needed work.

And the other thing I said was that I thought most of it was stolen from the Coen Brothers.

John was like...

John appreciated that honesty

cos it was influenced by the Coen Brothers, by Blood Simple,

but it was his own beast as well.

So that was all great. But...

You have to remember, I had nothing to compare it with

in terms of working with any other director, so I didn't think

there was anything, you know, exceptional going on here.

But when I look back, I can see we were very lucky.

We met someone who brought an enormous amount to the film.

-A saw of some kind.

-For sawing through the bone.

This newly forged trio began work on Shallow Grave,

a noir-ish thriller shot through with violence, attitude

and a very dark humour.

-The room's nice too, don't you think?

-Yes.

-Spacious, bright,

well-appointed, all that sort of stuff. All that sort of crap.

Well, yes.

Yes. So, tell me, Cameron. Just tell me cos I'd like to know.

What on earth could make you think

we'd want to share a flat like this with someone like you?

I mean, he writes in a way... There's no description.

There's just dialogue. You can do what you want with the scenario.

That's up to you.

I'd like to ask you about your hobbies.

-Why do you want a room here?

-Do you smoke?

I mean, my view would be, it's not so much

that I just create the dialogue, I just think it's...

the way that he approaches...

just pushing everything as far as it'll go.

Just getting the most out of every aspect of the production.

When did anyone last say to you these exact words?

Danny cast Ewan McGregor in his first major film role,

starring alongside Christopher Eccleston and Kerry Fox

as yuppie flatmates on a downward spiral.

The four of us, me and Ewan and Chris and Danny,

lived in a flat together for a week.

And we rehearsed in the flat. We did things together.

We ate, we went to movies, we tried to form a friendship, you know?

The three of them were wonderful together. Again, three great parts,

locked inside their own world, the bubble,

and how they were going to manipulate each other.

It's a sick idea, Alex. It's sick.

Yeah, but don't tell me you're not tempted!

I particularly enjoyed the scene

where Ewan and Chris are walking around the DIY store.

David!

I've always wondered what these were for.

Now.

Oh...this is what we need.

'I could remember where I was in B&Q when I was thinking about it,'

and just the way he did it, the way they did it was just great.

A spade! We need a spade! David, I wish you'd concentrate.

We need a spade if we're going to dig a pit.

The editor was in London, he'd go and see stuff.

I remember him coming back after one weekend and saying,

it's too boring, it's too boring.

And we need to cut, we need to get more energy into it.

So he did that sort of montage of all the tools being prepared.

'I remember thinking, that's absolutely brilliant. That's what this film needs.'

It's that classic thing where you have something good

and the director made it even better.

I remember thinking, oh, God, this script is so violent

and just terrible...

I mean, not terrible as in terrible, just unbelievably...

vicious.

SAWING

Finished!

Aye, but not quite.

Is that going to be deep enough?

-Don't worry about that.

-Is this necessary?

-Yes!

Now come on, all or nothing.

'There's a tendency in film scripts

'to smooth all the unpleasantness off people, all the rough edges.'

We didn't want to turn them into...

saccharine kind of sentimental movie characters.

You know, at the budget we were making the film for,

we didn't need to do that.

It wasn't a Tom Hanks movie.

Although he would have been quite good, I'm sure.

Even without Tom Hanks, it was an arresting debut

that proved British cinema

could once again be populist, anarchic and violent.

SHE GRUNTS

But most importantly, it secured Danny and his team backing

for a second outing, Trainspotting.

MUSIC: "Lust For Life" by Iggy Pop

'Choose life. Choose a job.

'Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television...'

An intoxicating adaptation of Irvine Welsh's novel,

Trainspotting vividly brought to life

the story of a ragtag group of Scottish heroin addicts...

and became a defining cultural moment for an entire generation.

Why was it, do you think, that Trainspotting had such an impact

and that people still now look back at that

as the touchstone film of that period?

A lot of it, obviously, all of it, you can blame Irvine Welsh's book.

It's a wonderful book, still.

It is Joycean, I think, in its thrall and its ambition.

I think John knew straightaway... "I can't adapt that.

"I'll just be inspired by it."

The fact is, when you've got a book

which doesn't burden you with a narrative,

and which is kind of full of great moments

and great scenes and great characters and great dialogue,

in a way you can't really lose.

That film was a joy, everything about it, to make.

Whereas Shallow Grave had been pretty tough.

But then we were experts, weren't we?

It was the commitment to the book, I think, inspired everyone.

Ewan, like, shaved his head. At the time, he's a young actor,

he's got this beautiful hair. That's his selling card.

Period drama, he could slip in and out of. He could look the business.

He shaved it, he lost all this weight so he looked like a ghost.

It's shite being Scottish! We're the lowest of the low.

I think the costumes are timeless.

You look at it now and they look cool. They still look fine.

They don't look idiotic like normally you do

when you look back on a film 15 years later.

Franco!

One of the things that Danny loves,

and incredibly suited that film perhaps more than any other,

is he loves what he calls "acting on the front foot".

So you know, you get a lot of that, I guess,

I don't know the exact term, but sort of method,

where it's all sort of mumbling.

He likes it to be delivered.

He likes it to be delivered more like the theatre,

I guess that was his training ground.

So that, what he calls it is "blazing".

That's one of his great expressions.

BOTH: What are you two talking about?

-BOTH:

-Football! What are you talking about?

BOTH: Shopping!

You talk about the novel as being important,

but there are three sequences, visual sequences,

in that film that have entered the lexicon of modern film.

There's the opening of him running down the street to the sound of Lust For Life.

There's the scene of him going down the toilet in which you went

as far as you could before going into an ethereal dream.

And then, of course, there's the overdose sequence,

which has become the thing that everyone remembers.

Talk me through that sequence.

I think the idea of him sinking into the floor comes from the book.

That was how he described the feeling of it

and we thought, why can't we do that?

MUSIC: "Perfect Day" by Lou Reed

The book isn't really about nature as realism.

It's actually about the nature of your imagination, of your mind,

what happens to you and obviously, the drugs and how they affect that.

You want to try and represent that and surprise people.

The other thing was that the drug of choice at the time was Ecstasy

which was a very, very different sensibility to heroin.

Although these guys are heroin addicts,

the film has a sensibility that's a bit more adrenaline-based,

a bit more Ecstasy-based, if you like, rave-based.

A little dab of speed. It's just the ticket, man.

Naw! I went to Craigie, Craignewton.

I just put down Royal Edinburgh College to help get the job.

Too much discrimination in this town, man.

There's also the completely counterintuitive use of Born Slippy

at the end in a sequence in which somebody is creeping

out of the flat and then this "dum-dum-dum".

Once you've read the book, you kind of felt this passage of time.

It was described through the music they were listening to,

and you could feel it through Iggy Pop and then The Clash.

So we felt like we could take a lead from the book

and if you listen to the music, it basically just updates

to present day and the present-day song was Born Slippy.

MUSIC: "Born Slippy" by Underworld

We heard Danny Boyle, who made Shallow Grave,

wants to use a couple of pieces in Trainspotting.

And he showed us 12 or 15 minutes,

and it was, you can have anything you want!

You know, anything at all. Do you want something else?

Do you want us to send you the archive that nobody's heard?

What do you want?

He always said, you know, we want to make the film to a rhythm,

and the rhythm for him was Underworld.

MUSIC: "Born Slippy" by Underworld

I felt that he was driven partly by a sort of urge to explore

kind of what happened when punk sort of faded away,

and there seemed to have been sort of nothing for a while,

and then house music came in and Ecstasy culture

and that sort of was a revival of youthful spirit.

And I think that's partly the path he was following in Trainspotting.

You were once criticised early on as making films that looked like

a collection of three-minute pop videos put together.

-Your reply was, "Yeah. And?"

-Yeah. Because I love that.

I think that was really attractive.

I think also, at the time, when that criticism was made,

MTV was just starting, and I think people,

and it's in this country particularly,

we're kind of hostile to things like that sometimes

cos it feels like it's Americanising or degrading the art or something.

But I always found it enormously attractive.

'The truth is that I'm a bad person. But that's going to change.

'I'm going to change.'

Trainspotting was part of an explosion

in British creative confidence,

with Danny hailed as the new king of cinematic cool.

Doors to big Hollywood stars and money men would now open,

but it was always going to prove a hard act to follow.

After the euphoric success of those two,

and I don't mean to criticise, but you have Life Less Ordinary,

which didn't work quite as well as it should have done,

and then The Beach,

which you yourself have said was a difficult experience.

What do you think it was about Life Less Ordinary that was problematic?

I know exactly what was problematic. It was our arrogance, really. Um...

John had written a script and it was set in France and Scotland

and we just decided in our arrogance, "We'll just move that to America.

"That'll be fine. We'll just do that because it'll be...

"Then it can be a big hit in America."

Rolling. Action!

A Life Less Ordinary saw McGregor appear this time

as a hapless kidnapper who falls for his own hostage,

a wealthy ball-breaker played by Cameron Diaz.

I'm the victim and you are the kidnapper, apparently.

-Meaning exactly what?

-Kidnap For Beginners, chapter one.

Have you even asked for a ransom yet?

I think the script was also much more violent.

And we reduced that again. And it's the way it creeps...

It kind of softens you. Success...

You think we can just do that, soften that a bit more,

we'll have even more success.

And we can bring that sensibility to so many more people.

And in fact, the sensibility is what you're sacrificing

to get it to those people.

The issue with the film was the understanding of America,

the understanding of these characters there.

And the script probably was never, you know, never quite licked.

It was a bit of culture shock, and I think particularly for Danny

it was a bit harder to get all these people to do what he wanted,

which only got worse in years to come.

But you have to try and keep going, move on.

You can't make the same film over and over again.

I think it was that, after Trainspotting, we kind of...

we just wanted to do something different.

You know.

It wasn't what everyone wanted to see.

And you can see that over and over again in other people's work,

or in music or anything - it happens all the time.

They just become mesmerised.

You know...

I don't think we would have had any joy

attempting a third kind of gritty, exuberant British movie.

Although we would probably have had an easier ride,

but I don't think it would have been any happier experience for us.

MUSIC: "Beyond The Sea" by Bobby Darin

I remember seeing it and thinking, it just looks compromised.

And that wasn't something that was true

of Shallow Grave or Trainspotting. They were not compromised.

I know, and it's something you have to confront

in your film-making career, if you have a career, if it's ongoing.

The thing I did love about it is that if you have a big flop,

which Life Less Ordinary was, there's always a country where it's a success

and I'm delighted to say it was number one in Belgium for three weeks, so there you go.

-The all-important Belgian market.

-So it's a Belgian sensibility.

Despite this abortive adventure, Danny's stock still remained high,

and when the chance arose to cast the megastar of Titanic

in The Beach, it proved impossible to resist.

Leonardo DiCaprio was in, Ewan McGregor out,

a decision that sparked a long-term rift.

We hadn't learnt from Life Less Ordinary, sufficiently anyway,

and we still thought the way to make the films was to actually

get the ingredients that would allow you more resources.

So we took the script to Leonardo DiCaprio

and we had hinted to Ewan that it would be his part

and I think we dealt with that very badly.

I'm not proud of that at all.

DiCaprio's involvement ensured a 50-million budget,

dwarfing Danny's normal resources.

I shall provide! Yeah!

But it wasn't an environment in which he thrived.

From the studio's point of view, they've got the star of Titanic.

But Leonardo DiCaprio wanted to effectively kill Jack Dawson,

and move himself on, you know, from that whole persona,

into a kind of grown-up, edgy filmmaker, and who better to do it

than the man who made the grown-up, edgy film, Trainspotting?

Great, so that works.

But that's not really the vision the studio have got

for their young, most well-known star on the planet.

So there is an immediate kind of tension there.

And the rest of us got kind of buffeted by that.

I remember Leonardo DiCaprio said, "If you want to do more, Danny,

"I'll ring up the studio and we can do more."

Because Danny can always do more.

Can always work ten more hours, can always do another week.

And I think even by the end of that, there was no more he wanted to do.

We were going to go to Thailand

and we were basically going to take Pinewood to Thailand.

We were going to take a huge crew to Thailand.

And we weren't... We didn't think we were being totally colonial,

because we thought, while we're there, we'll teach the Thai people how to make Pinewood films.

We'll have Thai crews shadowing our Pinewood crew.

That's nuts. I mean, you can do that if you want,

but it is a dying idea, that, as a way of making a film.

And we came out of it with a film which is serviceable,

but not inspired, really.

And the benefit of it for me was that you began to,

I really began to learn.

It made 150 or 160 million, it made money

and that kind of stuff.

So it wasn't like Life Less Ordinary,

never made any money and was critically killed.

This one at least, you know, now we're real Hollywood makers.

We made money out of a slightly disappointing film.

The Beach had proved a bruising experience,

and Danny headed home to rediscover his creative mojo.

After that, I made a couple of very small television films

with a different set-up,

and they were more like what you'd call

guerrilla film-making, I suppose.

And I learned that was what I really enjoyed.

The oil tanker riches,

which directors like Chris Nolan, Ridley Scott,

use to extraordinary effect, was not what I was best at inhabiting.

-So we made a couple of small films.

-Vacuuming.

Vacuuming, Completely Nude in Paradise, and Strumpet,

which had an amazing performance by Chris Eccleston

doing a John Cooper Clarke poem

which is one of my favourite bits of filming ever.

Out.

I tell you what I'll do, Tie A Yellow Ribbon!

One from Cooper Clarke, the people's poet, though he don't know it.

I feel him sitting beside me on the amp

The rat-tat-tat-tatting word bullet champ.

Evidently Chickentown.

CHEERING

We made it with Anthony Dod Mantle,

who was known as one of the Dogme cameramen.

It fucking gets you fucking down

Evidently Chickentown!

CHEERING

I was beginning to develop a popular trend

for moving quite fast with small, unusual cameras,

which has seemed to stay with me a bit. And we got together

and we did a couple of dramas in the North of England,

with Danny directing.

And I saw him in a hilarious situation on Strumpet,

in this rough housing suburb, one miserable night in Manchester.

Come on! Come on!

We had to get Chris Eccleston to loosen up about performing,

singing on top of this pile of mud in front of all these people who

were hanging out over the battlements of these housing estates.

Danny got up there, he started doing this...

I didn't know him very well.

# Never has sex on her mobile phone

# Mam's not there anyway

# She's on Prozac

# She's got UK Gold and she's not coming back! #

There is no limit to where he'll go to get people to feel brave

and expose what he wants them to expose.

This new filming style was used to terrifying effect

in Danny's pulsating horror film, 28 Days Later.

SCREAMING

SMASHING

Starring Cillian Murphy, it was a welcome return

to pioneering big-screen form for the director.

When you're doing films with Danny, from project to project,

as far as I'm concerned, there will be a word.

And in the case of 28 Days Later, it was "rage".

I don't know how many times he just shouted, "Rage!"

"They're coming!" And he'd bloody deafen me with his shout.

He'd be right near the camera, I'd have forgotten him for a minute,

just tucking into the camera, and then he'd start going, "Rage!"

and the whole bloody floor would shake.

And we made that for, again, a limited amount of money,

but limitless ambition, and that's the equation, if you can do it.

And you are surprisingly resourceful when you do that.

And it seems to me that kind of reinvigorated your film-making,

after what I imagine must have been a depressing experience,

-with The Beach, it was like you'd found your feet again.

-Yeah,

it was a very exciting way to work.

Unpredictable and...

rough at times.

But you felt like you were making the film day by day.

It was our first bigger film. It was sort of vanguard British indie,

but we were told off by the, you know, the British MI5

for sort of littering the streets in the morning,

which wasn't really decorum.

Danny and I were walking around like schoolboys picking up bog roll

and saying sorry to armed guards.

We came up with this sequence at the beginning,

which was like just a small bit of the script

but expanded into ten minutes of the opening of the film,

which is, he wanders round London on his own.

Which we thought, that's beyond the resources of that kind of film.

The extraordinary thing about that opening

is you think, "They must have stopped the traffic for a day."

Unless you've got mega bucks, you can't really stop the traffic

on Westminster Bridge.

The police will let you ask motorists not to cross

for a couple of minutes, and that's it.

So we'd surround the bridge with cameras,

which you just switch on and leave running,

and he walks across it once, which takes him two minutes.

-Hello?

-Then you let the traffic go.

But you've got this series of angles which make you feel like it's...

What's the rush? There's no rush about anything. It's like,

this is going to take for ever, isn't it? Because there's nobody here...

Hello!

And we cut that sequence together

and you just knew this was going to be good.

Doing that sequence was one of the best film-making experiences of my life, you know?

You get up at three in the morning or whatever,

go and film a sequence just as the sun hit the street,

and you were finished by eight,

and you felt you'd achieved something incredible.

And I think the first hour,

or 45 minutes, is about as good as it gets from Danny's work.

You could just tell, it's funny. Sometimes you make a film

and it's like...there's nothing you can do, you're just labouring away.

And other times, it's kind of, sort of effortless, really.

There are also, in your back catalogue,

the films which I really love,

but didn't find the audience that perhaps they deserved to.

One of them is Millions. You were raised as a Catholic.

I know you're not religious now.

But that is clearly playing itself out to some extent in that film.

Yes, I think it is. Millions is written by Frank Cottrell Boyce

and so it's weird to call it a personal film.

But actually, we worked so closely together on it and it was very...

Yeah, very precious,

because it was very much about our relationships with

our mothers and also about the role that imagination plays in a kid

who's not very good with money.

And his older brother, it's classic,

his older brother is a money fiend even though he's only ten years old.

-Where did you get that?

-You can see it too, then?

Like, sometimes you see things, don't you?

And other people can't see them.

What?

I think every single director in the country had turned that down

by the time it got to Danny. It never went,

no-one ever thought of giving it to Danny

because Danny was famous for films about zombies and heroin addicts.

Because it seemed so unlike him,

the minute that he sort of jumped on that film,

and was very committed to it,

I knew that it meant something, that it was releasing a part of him

that wasn't normally in his film work.

-His fingerprints are all over that film.

-Hammer it.

Get great sound on that.

And the kid's imagination is full of religious iconography.

He's visited by visions of saints.

Yeah, which is all his life's full of at that time cos his mum

used to make sure he went to church and all that kind of stuff.

St Peter, died AD64.

All right, don't remind us.

The money. It's robbed.

I know.

Patron saint of keys, locks and general security, man!

Including up there.

His mind will fill with different imagery as he gets older.

He's a fledgling artist, if you like.

He's someone who's going to express himself

-visually or literarily, however.

-Is he you?

I rather romantically think of myself as that kid. Yeah.

And he's gorgeous as well, which I never was.

So it's like typical kind of director casting.

Go on, go! Go! Go on, go! Go!

Danny's spiritual preoccupations at this time carried over

into Sunshine, an ambitious foray into science fiction.

I remember him saying that the difficult thing with this movie

is you have to create everything. There's nothing for free.

And I thought that was really interesting,

because if you are on a beach, as difficult as it might be

with some other things, at least you can get a sunset.

Nothing like that in a space movie. Everything has to be created.

And they obviously are famously tricky and drive people a bit crazy.

And I think it was a very, very demanding thing.

COMPUTER: Boosters will automatically fire after four-minute delay.

Entering coronal hole in south polar cap.

Magnetic field structure open. Temperature 37,000.

What's Sunshine about...really?

It's the search for what we are - where do we come from?

The end of the film is completely surreal because Cillian's character,

Capa, virtually touches the surface of the sun.

He's able to see something there that we're all searching for, in a way.

It's got a spirituality to it, which just hovers in there really.

Are you an atheist or an agnostic?

I think I'm probably a very, very flexible, malleable atheist really.

Sweeping the religious hangovers of his youth to one side,

Danny now turned to a story that in his hands would

transform into a kaleidoscopic cinematic masterpiece.

All the lessons that you'd learned during your career seemed to come together in Slumdog.

Working with children, which obviously you'd done to some extent with Millions,

recognising a script, the importance of music

and, of course, Anthony Dod Mantle's cameras

getting us right at the beginning of the film, right in those streets.

You'd never seen something as street-level as that before.

THEY SHOUT AND LAUGH

We took a crew of about ten of us who made the film there,

cos it's made by an Indian crew and that was a huge lesson

in being able to capture some of it faithfully.

And because we didn't take a huge crew,

we were able to get closer to it.

I knew, from the first meeting I had with Danny,

I was going to be losing a lot of weight

and it was about developing technology that moved.

It's about being down there with them

and seeing what's been thrown back at you as a child.

All life is there really, just that it's acute... It's so acute.

And you've just got to spend a lot of time in what they call the slums.

And people begin to realise that you're not just some arsehole,

that you're genuinely interested in the way that life is lived there

and you're going to try and reflect that.

Hey!

Danny wasn't overawed by the initial shot,

which is quite massive in India.

He was just... He was mesmerised by it and we just enjoyed it together.

Kids love him.

There was a language barrier - imagine -

a massive language barrier for a lot of the kids in India.

But he got there. Because he's what he is, it's what he radiates.

The other thing that surprises me is the poster campaign which said "the feel-good film of the..."

and I thought, "Did you see the same film as me?"

I love Slumdog Millionaire, but "feel-good" wasn't the word

that immediately leapt into my mind because you do...

It's not a romanticised version of those streets.

Yeah, bits of the film are pretty tough.

You have to leave the marketing to someone else.

You say what you think and we said what you think and what we thought.

Cos I remember the poster that Pathe produced was this white poster

with "feel-good film!" And Dev was kind of going, "Yeah!"

A huge smile on his face. I said to them,

"Listen, I tried to get Dev to smile in the film once and he wouldn't!"

"Anyway, white is the colour of death in India."

They said, "It doesn't matter.

"This is about bus-stops in Leeds on a January night."

The film had a brutal yet touching love story at its heart, something Danny had avoided

since the problems of A Life Less Ordinary over a decade before.

What's your favourite scene in Slumdog Millionaire?

There's a wonderful sequence at the end where he...

he crosses the railway station.

And it's inter-cut with memories, really.

And you feel this romantic build,

where you're completing the journey of a lifetime.

That was pretty special, really.

I remember outrageously selling the film

as a mixture of Trainspotting and Amelie.

And then you arrive at the end and it is a fairy story.

And it is Amelie, in a way. And it is about love, really.

Kiss me.

The film was a massive hit and despite some unjust criticism of how the younger actors

had been looked after, it trounced all-comers at the 2009 Oscars,

winning eight gongs, including Best Director.

But Danny seemed most excited when he brought the award back to Lancashire.

This is amazing, innit?

You expect it at the red carpet in LA, but not outside Radcliffe Close.

It's so wonderful to see the Oscar.

It was quite an emotional moment because it is such an iconic statue.

Almost like something that's unobtainable to a family like us.

Having expertly captured the daily struggle for survival

in Mumbai's heaving slums,

Danny's next challenge was to bring the same dramatic intensity to

the tale of a man trapped all alone in a claustrophobic Utah canyon.

Argh!

127 Hours was based on the real life story of Aron Ralston,

who had to perform frankly hideous self-surgery to survive.

At the time, your contention,

and indeed your main character's contention was,

"It's what anybody would have done."

It isn't. Had that been me, I would have just stayed there.

I don't think you can say that.

You'd think that now, but I think you would have a go.

Urgh!

And you wouldn't die there, Mark.

You'd go, "No! I'll do something about this!" In the end. We would.

People fainted and everything like that, but I think people,

the surge that you feel when he sees that Dutch family in the distance...

Help!

..makes you believe that, in the end, we'll always keep trying.

No matter what your circumstances,

you will always keep that belief that you can get there in some way.

I need help!

You decide your own fate. Don't give up. You decide it.

Danny's defining directing gift is energy.

Energy on the set and putting energy onto the film.

You know, he's constantly rocking, he's walking, he's pacing,

he eats standing up, like everything about it is just energy.

He works his ass off. He's like a brickie, you know?

A good brickie. He works very, very hard.

We do go that extra mile for Danny, for in Danny we trust.

Er, and he's just brave and bold.

He's got some kind of access to the nerve system of this country.

Which makes him really unusual as an artist.

It doesn't surprise me that he fulfilled that ambition

which he undoubtedly had and talent which he undoubtedly had

and has really made something of it.

Something extraordinary of it.

Now in his mid-50s, Danny shows no signs of letting up,

and, after last summer, he's been repeatedly linked to the 007 hot-seat.

The word that's been bandied around recently with you is Bond.

Well, I've done the Bond film! Done that!

-So, that's it.

-Yeah, it was good.

-That's it.

It was a really short engagement and it was released to great applause.

That's grand.

-You wouldn't do a Bond feature?

-Again, I think that's the oil tanker.

I think the way that those kind of films are huge

and they need a particular kind of captain and I just know

from my own experience that I'm not that guy, really.

I'm much better... What I've always wanted to do was to try

and actually make it look like 100 million, but it doesn't cost that.

And I find that really, actually liberating.

-Danny, thank you very much.

-Cheers, Mark. Very good.

Very good, man. No notes! And you got the chronology almost exactly correct!

# Danny Boy, oh, Danny Boy The pipes are calling

# From glen to glen and even down the mountain side

# Oh, Danny Boy!

# The summer's gone and all the roses are fading

# 'Tis you, 'tis you must go and I must bide

# But come ye back when the summer's in the meadow

# Or when the valley's hushed and white with snow

# Yes, I'll be here in sunshine or in the shadow

# Oh, Danny Boy, Oh, Danny Boy... #