Danny Boyle: Interviews

Interview: Danny Boyle

116 Interview: Danny Boyle Faisal Latif/2007 From Puremovies.co.uk, 2007. Reprinted with permission. Danny Boyle has nailed nearly every genre in cinema and now, after turning down the opportunity to direct the fourth installment of Alien, he has opted to try his hand at science fiction. The cult director has already had an astonishing career, winning twenty-four awards along the way for films such as Shallow Grave, Trainspotting, and 28 Days Later. On a chilly Monday afternoon in London, Danny Boyle took time out of his busy schedule to talk to Pure Movies about sci-fi, romance, and his new film, Sunshine. Q: So, Danny, was it your idea to make a science fiction movie or were you drawn into it by Alex Garland? Danny Boyle: It was actually Alex’s script that drew me into it, because he had this fantastic idea about eight astronauts strapped to the back of a bomb, and of course it was attached to an amazing notion about the sun. There’s never been a film about the sun before, so it was an incredible experience to work on something like this, and you could actually feel your brain swelling with the enormity of such a premise. It was good to be able to feed that back to the actors to make their performances more efficient. Q: It must have been hard to fill the footsteps of classic sci-fi films . . . DB: We tried to follow the pattern of great sci-fi movies like Alien and 2001: A Space Odyssey by filming in a narrow corridor. This was a weird sci-fi in its own right, but it boils down to basically a ship, a crew, and a signal. It was bizarre to work in such classic circumstances, but it was like creating an original movie at the same time because a film based around the sun has never been made before. Q: Were you not linked to the fourth Alien movie at one point? faisal latif / 2007 117 DB: I actually backed out of that because I was intimidated by the special effects, but doing a sci-fi was on the radar. And while I was making Sunshine, I’m sure it’s true for a lot of directors, I realized I was a big fan of this genre. I always go to the premieres of sci-fi movies such as Contact and Alien: Resurrection, and I don’t do that with other films so it was nice to be a part of this sort of film. Q: How was the film received in America? DB: It’s funny because there’s a part in the film where there’s a little hope that shines through, and then we dash that almost immediately after introducing it, and that killed the Americans! They will do anything for hope, even if it means sacrificing all levels of plausibility, and they didn’t like what we did there at all. Q: Did making Sunshine perfect in terms of special effects prove expensive ? DB: It was filmed in the U.K. and was therefore cheaper than other films, but $45 million is a decent budget and we did manage to stick to it. We had more freedom because we didn’t do it at Pinewood Studios; we decided to do it at the same place as 28 Days Later, and therefore really made our money go further. The place we filmed it at was a lot smaller, but we got used to that, making it as real as possible for the actors as it would be inside the spacecraft. Q: Is it true that you also made the actors stay in student accommodation in London for two weeks so that they could get the feel for what it would be like to be together for as long as their characters have in Sunshine? DB: Yes, they had quite an experience with that, sharing toilets and sharing a kitchen. Apparently, they decided to cook fish one night and the dig smelled like that for two weeks. Q: How did you create the CG? DB: We used a company, MPC, who did the Harry Potter and Narnia films, and obviously their work is quite technical in terms of what they have to do when they create a dragon’s tail, or a snake. This was a chance for them to do something totally artistic and a little different by creating a solar system that the audience...