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Danny Boyle Talks about Sunshine
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109 Danny Boyle Talks about Sunshine Ambrose Heron/2007 From FILMdetail.com, April 5, 2007. Reprinted with permission. Transcribed by Brent Dunham. FD: Danny Boyle joins us. His new film is Sunshine, it’s out this week. Just for people who haven’t seen it yet, just give us the basic premise of Sunshine. DB: So, in fifty years time, the Sun is dying and Earth is kind of frozen in a solar winter and there’s this spaceship called Icarus II and it’s got eight astronauts strapped to the back on an enormous bomb, a bomb the size of Manhattan Island. And they’re attempting to pilot this bomb into the Sun and explode it there and, thereby, save our dying star. In order to get them to the surface of the Sun, they’re hidden behind this enormous golden shield which has used all the world’s resources of gold. Everyone’s handed in their “bling” and it’s all been melted down and it’s an enormous enterprise. It’s what happens to these eight astronauts as they draw closer and closer to the source of all life in our solar system. FD: It’d be fair to say that this is more Solaris than Star Trek, wouldn’t it? DB: It certainly is. We always thought of it as more NASA than Star Wars. That was always the benchmark for it and it is a very intense experience, watching the film, which it should be really because you’re actually pulling up close and personal to the Sun, our nearest star. FD: When you make a film like this, I guess you got to bring up a bunch of scientists and say, “Look, we’ve got to get this, this and this right.” Tell us a bit about the whole scientific research you did for the film in order to make it convincing. DB: You do a lot of research with NASA and you base it on—they’re working like twenty, thirty years ahead about what they’re going to be 110 danny boyle: inter views doing. It’s quite close to where we set the film, in a way, about what’s going to be possible and what they’ll do. For instance, to create oxygen on the journey, they have a fern garden and we have this enormous oxygen garden where all these plants are generating oxygen for the crew to use. So, it’s real interesting, all that, and we got a science advisor , this professor, this physicist, Brian Cox, whose claim to fame, apart from being an extraordinarily brilliant man, is that he was one of the backing musicians in D’Ream and that was how he paid for his Ph.D. research. He was playing by night as a rock star and in the day doing the Einstein numbers. FD: That is extraordinary. DB: I know. It’s a great story. FD: If he was also the actor, Brian Cox, I’d be really impressed. DB: Sadly, he hasn’t quite done the acting number yet. But he did say to me the other day, “Oh, I could have played a part in the film, couldn’t I?” So he’s getting the bug for it. And he gave us a lot of advice about what is possible and what is impossible and you need something like that so when you want to leave it behind, you can leave it behind. Because the science is important to it, but it’s the drama that’s most important , the excitement of the film, the drive and energy, the journey. But he tells you when you need to leave the science behind. FD: One thing that I was questioning in the film, because it’s all done quite convincingly, would it be feasible to get a spaceship anywhere near the Sun? Would the Sun be so powerful it would just melt everything ? DB: Well, interestingly enough, the surface of the Sun is only 15,000 degrees Centigrade, which is an incredible temperature, but we do have a lot of satellites that go quite close to it. And that machinery, those instruments tend to operate in the same temperature range that humans operate. So, you could make a case for it being possible. Obviously, what happens at the end of this film is that Cillian Murphy, the scientist , puts his hand up and literally touches the Sun, which, obviously, people shouldn’t...