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 Danny Boyle
Interview By: Michael Dance Most film critics will tell you that director Danny Boyle has a distinctive style, but they'd be hard-pressed to pin down exactly what that is. All of his films have been radically different. After breaking out with a harrowing ode to drug addicts in 1996's Trainspotting, he's made a romantic comedy (A Life Less Ordinary), a critically-acclaimed kids movie (Millions), a sci-fi space movie (Sunshine) and even a zombie movie (28 Days Later). The link? Energy. There's a palpable enthusiasm, an eagerness to entertain, in each of those films. Not surprisingly, that energy extends to Boyle himself, a fifty-two-year-old England native who's both excitable and exceedingly polite. "It doesn't work like you think it works," Boyle says when asked how he chooses projects. "And I'd never want it to work like that. I remember an interview with Martin Scorsese where he said it's so difficult to make a decision about what to do next. I don't think it is at all. You just get a feeling when you get the script, like in the first pages." Boyle is talking to me and two colleagues as part of the press tour for his new movie, Slumdog Millionaire. Unsurprisingly, the film is like nothing he's ever done: it tells the story of a teenager from the slums of India who goes on the Indian version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire, does well, and is promptly arrested for cheating. He then tells his remarkable life story to the police in order to explain how he knew all the answers. "With Slumdog Millionaire, my agent only said it was a movie about Who Wants to be a Millionaire, and I thought, doesn't sound great," Boyle says. "I only read it because I knew the screenwriter, Simon Beaufoy, who wrote The Full Monty. And about 15 or 20 pages in you know that you're going to be able to make an amazing film out of it. I was one page into this and I was certain I would make it. It's like with Trainspotting. I read the first line of that book -- "The sweat wis lashing oafay Sick Boy; he wis trembling" -- and I thought, I have to make this movie." Beyond instincts, though, Boyle does have a specific reasoning why he chooses such different material. "Technically, you should get better with each film, but you really only do that in a technical sense. I think you're only as good as your first film. Look at the Coen brothers. Their movies are amazing, but in my opinion nothing will ever beat Blood Simple. So with that logic the best thing to do is try something you've never done." At heart, the story in Slumdog Millionaire is a love story with a traditional (and undoubtedly crowd-pleasing) structure to it. It's the film's on-location shooting of the Indian slums that gives it its visceral immediacy -- which, ... |
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