Danny Boyle: Interviews

Smack My Beach Up

60 Smack My Beach Up Tom Charity/2000 From Time Out London, January 26–February 2, 2000, issue 1536. Reprinted with permission. Trainspotting director Danny Boyle and his team seemed the obvious choice to turn Alex Garland’s much-loved backpacker novel The Beach into Leonardo DiCaprio’s first major post-Titanic film. Then news of tweaked scripts and despoiled beaches filtered back from the set in Thailand . . . Is the finished product paradise or purgatory? I suppose there are rugged individualists out there who somehow missed Trainspotting and never got around to reading The Beach. In which case, perhaps they never sussed that the nineties were all about the ruthless pursuit of self-gratification, and repentance in leisure-time. Trainspotting the novel came out of revulsion at Thatcher, but the 1996 film was a different beast: a hipper, ironic movie for the E-generation, a euphoric adventure in mind(-more-or-)less escapism, strung out on the sheer recklessness of its own high wire act. Published the very same year, Alex Garland’s novel The Beach was a cult which spread with viral rapidity to the point where you couldn’t take a tube journey without encountering the paperback en route. The tale of a backpacker in Thailand, Richard, who gets his hands on a map to paradise—a secret, unspoiled beach—and discovers a community there, The Beach rewrote Treasure Island for eco-tourists who couldn’t be bothered to travel beyond zones one to five, who’d studied Lord of the Flies at school and watched Apocalypse Now at least once too often. (There were a lot of us: it’s sold five million copies worldwide.) Among other things, The Beach is about a generation so saturated with alternative , mediated realities, it just doesn’t feel real anymore—hence the need to escape to Africa and the Far East, to find a deeper, truer You in the anonymous freedom of travel. tom charity / 2000 61 Fitting, then, that the team who fell flat on their faces with their own dream project, A Life Less Ordinary, should pick up on the book’s movie potential: all their work is so preoccupied with the pursuit of false dreams, the rejection of, precisely, “ordinary life.” Despite the Life Less . . . debacle, the trio’s credibility remained high enough to secure the services of the most sought-after star in the world right now, one Leonardo DiCaprio, whose rumored $20 million salary doubled the budget and magnetized the world’s media: hence all those unwanted— and, they claim, unwarranted—stories about the environmental disruption the film caused to its principle location, a beach within a Thai National Park. There have been other negative vibes, too: the film’s original Boxing Day release date slid back to February . . . a teaser trailer showcased before the premiere of Phantom Menace was booed . . . and young DiCaprio’s hellraising tabloid alter-ego got up everybody’s nose. Who was this irritating slip of a boy to come in and displace our very own Ewan McGregor? And didn’t Titanic suck?!? Luckily, most of the worries prove groundless. Danny Boyle’s The Beach is vivid, adventurous, and barbed storytelling, sticking closely to the structure of the novel but offering subtle reshadings here and there (most radically at the climax). That said, the picture’s seductive surface doesn’t hide any great depths: it feels like a gloss on serious themes, a kind of teen Heart of Darkness. With Tilda Swinton as Sal, Virginie Ledoyen and Guillaume Canet as Francoise and Etienne, and Robert Carlyle as Daffy, it’s strongly cast but thinly characterized. It should be a hit, though, not least because here, for the first time, Leo is all grown up—a gleaming, fresh-faced young adult. That DiCaprio should have followed Titanic with his self-referential cameo in Celebrity and then this very-far-from-immaculate hero does him considerable credit. To discuss these and related matters, we invited director Danny Boyle, producer Andrew Macdonald, screenwriter John Hodge, and novelist Alex Garland to sit down and chat . . . Q: One thing bearing against this movie is that everyone has read the book, and we all know the film is never as good as the book! Alex Garland: That’s so true! But that’s mainly in Britain. In the rest of Europe, and certainly in America, it’s sold much less, and it’s more of a cult thing. Here it started like that, then went very overground...