Danny Boyle: Interviews

Back from the Beach

66 Back from the Beach Rupert Smith/2001 From The Guardian, August 10, 2001. Reprinted with permission. His return to the BBC, where he cut his teeth on eight single films and the series Mr. Wroe’s Virgins, is being presented as a blueprint for the future of TV drama. It’s also the first time in more than seven years that Boyle has worked without writer John Hodge and producer Andrew Macdonald, the team behind all his films from Shallow Grave (1994) onwards. In order to add to the sense of occasion, both the new films will be premiered at the Edinburgh International Film Festival later this month. Boyle-watchers need hardly be told that this marks the start of a new chapter in his career. He’s no longer the Young Turk of Trainspotting , and it seems he’s also over his Hollywood phase after the bruising experience of making The Beach with Leonardo DiCaprio. To nobody’s surprise, relations between Boyle and Fox Studios were never cozy; now he seems to have said goodbye to America. He even turned down the chance to direct Alien 4. The contrast between big bucks movies and shoestring BBC drama could not be more marked—and that, says Boyle, was the attraction. “The entire budget for these two films would barely have covered the catering on The Beach. I had a desire to do something that would open out the way I work, that would be more spontaneous. The great thing about working cheaply and quickly is that you don’t spend time agonizing over every decision.” You also get creative freedom—nobody at the BBC was going to interfere with any of Boyle’s decisions. And if Boyle felt the need to reassert his maverick status, this was surely it. In the event, Boyle harked back to a creative source that predates even Shallow Grave, returning ruper t smith / 2001 67 to his theatrical roots and paying homage to the city he still regards as home—Manchester. The two films in question, Strumpet and Vacuuming Completely Nude in Paradise, arise from an old alliance: when Boyle was directing at London ’s Royal Court Theatre in the 1980s, a young playwright called Jim Cartwright kept sending in sketches of a play that would eventually become Road. Boyle, impressed by an original voice, intended to direct the finished product, but decamped to BBC Belfast before Cartwright delivered the script. “I’ve always been a great supporter of Jim’s work,” says Boyle, “because he’s not like anyone else. So when I got sent the screenplay of Vacuuming, I jumped at the chance to work with him.” The screenplay came out of Cartwright’s Destiny Films, a joint venture with producer Martin Carr, who had been flogging other Cartwright projects around the TV circuit without much success, despite the fact that the film of his play The Rise and Fall of Little Voice had established Cartwright as a viable screenwriter. With Boyle on board, however, a BBC deal was not far behind. Vacuuming is a bitter account of the death of a salesman, the ranting Tommy Rag (Timothy Spall), “a collision between Bernard Manning and William Shakespeare,” according to Boyle. It’s a typical Cartwright take on doomed lives in Manchester estates, greed and innocence, and dreams of leaving: “Jim is in many ways a voice from the 1980s—and I think Vacuuming is his last squeezing out of that world of exploitation and self-obsession.” As writer and director got to work on Vacuuming, Boyle mentioned a long-nursed ambition to make a film about the Manchester music scene. Cartwright just happened to have the very screenplay up his sleeve. Strumpet had already been commissioned and dropped by the BBC; Boyle, however, saw in Cartwright’s poetic tale the perfect vehicle for his message: “It’s a film about the creative instinct. Music and street poetry evolve in a spontaneous, unplanned way—and that’s how Strumpet grew. It feels improvised, but in fact it’s tightly scripted.” Strumpet tells the story of Strayman (Christopher Eccleston, who starred in Boyle’s Shallow Grave), a dog-loving nutter and pub poet, and Strumpet (newcomer Jenna G), an enfant sauvage with a guitar and a penchant for nudity. Their spontaneous jams in Strayman’s flat are overheard by aspiring svengali Knockoff (Stephen Walters), who propels them to London, a record deal, and a Top of the Pops appearance. [3.138.113.188] Project...