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124 2007’s Space Odyssey: Q&A with Sunshine Director Danny Boyle Kevin Polowy/2007 From AOL/Moviefone.com, July 2007. Reprinted with permission. Director Danny Boyle seems to live for dabbling in different genres— and bending them all—each new film markedly unlike his last. He’s moved from dark dramedy to romantic comedy to horror to family with stops everywhere in between. Now the much-admired filmmaker behind Trainspotting and 28 Days Later has left Earth and all of its limitations behind for the far reaches of sci-fi with Sunshine, a clever and creepy space thriller in which a team of scientists prove humanity’s last hope as they attempt to reignite a dying sun. The film reunites Boyle with his 28 Days Later screenwriter Alex Garland and star Cillian Murphy , and also features impressive turns from Chris Evans, Rose Byrne, and Michelle Yeoh. Boyle sat down with Moviefone to talk about the challenges of sci-fi, the status of the Trainspotting sequel Porno and how he responds to fans arguing over the merits of his filmography. Q: Is there any genre that you wouldn’t work in? A: Space movies. [Laughs] Never again. It is interesting that directors usually only do one, unless they’re a franchise and they have to do Part II, Part III, whatever. They only ever do one. Except James Cameron he’s about to go back to space with Avatar. But he’s a nutter anyway so . . . The rest of us people, you ever only do one, it’s just really tough. Q: Because no one hears you scream in space? A: [Laughs] I don’t know what it is . . . Actually I do know what it is because I’ve just done it. The demands of getting to that level that’s been set by all those predecessor films is really tough, and you don’t realize how tough it is until you start trying to do that stuff: weightlessness, kevin polowy / 2007 125 the isolation, lack of anything to cut to, there is no other scene you can cut to, unless you do a disaster movie where you can keep cutting back to Earth. So that was really interesting. I mean I’d love to do a musical, that’s what I’d love to do. Because I think even probably more than space movies, that is the Holy Grail if you can make it, because to make a believable modern-day original musical would be very, very tough. Q: Are we talking about something like Hairspray or Chicago? A: Not a theater musical, because they all have an excuse for the singing . Either the scenario’s familiar or there are the songs that everybody knows already. But I mean with original music and a modern-day setting . Not set in the theater or in the past. It would be so tough. Q: It’d be a modern-day musical infused with that Danny Boyle brand of electronic music? A: Well yeah, you think, what is modern music? And it’s Rhianna, it’s not Cole Porter. It’s Rhianna or it’s Justin Timberlake or whatever. So I guess it would have to be influenced by that somehow. Q: You talk about some of the challenges to making a sci-fi movie, what are the advantages? Can you get away with more in the narrative or with the jargon? Play up the fiction part of the science fiction? A: There’s a hokey vocabulary kind of thing that you can talk about. Things depressurizing and whatnot. That’s quite interesting. I don’t know whether it gives you latitude. I mean, on the plus side you do get to create a complete world. You do get to make the rules of the world. And there’s nothing to challenge that, because you set them and you make those rules so that everything has to follow those rules. But the downside is that it’s very claustrophobic, because once you see all the s*** and the rules, once you start the journey, that’s it. You can’t then just bring something into it that isn’t part of that world. It’s very difficult to, anyway. Q: You’ve had a few actors really jumpstart their careers in your films, folks like Ewan McGregor, Cillian Murphy, and Naomie Harris. Is there anyone from Sunshine that you see following that trend? A: They’re not discoveries, really. They’re more people who...

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