Danny Boyle: Interviews

Train Conductor: The Director Who Dared to Violate the Just Say No Code

35 Train Conductor: The Director Who Dared to Violate the Just Say No Code Anne Burns/1996 From Salon.com, July 15, 1996. The Trainspotting machine, which started rolling as a cult novel in Scotland’s slums (passed hand-to-hand at outlawed raves) and gathered steam as a controversial West End play, is now in full locomotion, a wildly successful movie in Europe with raging fires of hype being stoked for its arrival on our shores. But will a movie about a bunch of toilet-diving Scottish heroin addicts play in Peoria? A few months ago, director Danny Boyle didn’t think so. “I doubt it’ll do any business in America,” he said. Was he prepared to alter that prediction now, after a staggering pre-release campaign and stories in every major magazine? “I still don’t know, to tell you the truth,” chuckles the British filmmaker . With his rumpled bohemian look, the jovial Boyle, who unleashed last year’s wonderfully wicked Shallow Grave on an unsuspecting public, looks out of place in Los Angeles, where he’s come for Trainspotting’s press screening, in advance of its July 19 opening. “I just drove across America for the first time, and there’s really a sense that people just want to belong,” Boyle says. “And of course the film is about a group of guys who don’t want to belong to anything— nothing heroic or normal or faithful, because they’ve been disillusioned so many times. So I can’t imagine that it will ever play in Peoria or Nebraska. But I don’t know! I hope it will.” Whether or not audiences will line up to see the black comedy, which was the surprise non-competition hit at Cannes in May and the second-highest grossing film in British history (after Four Weddings and a Funeral), Trainspotting is certain to provoke debate. It remains to be 36 danny boyle: inter views seen which will be louder: the clucking tongues of the Christian Coalition , outraged by Trainspotting’s drug-saturated subject matter, foul language, and generally sociopathic tendencies, or the cheers of disenfranchised youth. Critics have praised the grimly picaresque yarn. (See Charles Taylor’s review elsewhere in this issue.) The adulation is bound to trouble audience members who balk at the movie’s unsentimental, non-judgmental view of heroin addiction, a perspective summed up by lead character Mark Renton in the film’s opening sequence: “I chose not to choose life. I chose somethin’ else. And the reasons? There are no reasons. Who needs reasons when you’ve got heroin?” Boyle says he consciously avoided the role of director-as-social-worker , noting that the unbiased view is the more complicated one. “In an old-fashioned message film, Renton would be destroyed in the end, because he’s a terrible abuser, a despicable person in some ways. Instead he slides away. And yet the nicest guy in the whole film, and the last to use, is the first to die. There is no fairness, but there is plenty of mayhem .” Renton and his friends cheerfully mug tourists for drug money, shoot up, start brawls, even dive into toilets when the white treasure is accidentally dropped. Horrific as it can be, however, the film is much tamer than Irvine Welsh’s novel. “My writing acknowledges that drugs are now unremarkable,” said the reclusive, thirty-something Welsh in an interview last year. “As British society changed under the (Margaret) Thatcher eighties, drugs and drink became less recreational and more a way of life because people had fuck all else to do.” The book, more than the movie, blames Thatcher’s policies for handing Scotland a staggering unemployment rate and a corresponding increase in drug use in the mid-eighties. Skag use became so rampant that Edinburgh was known as “the AIDS capital of Europe.” The improbable bestseller became something of a badge among British acid-house ravers, a group usually more fond of tripping than picking up a book. And the play, which after numerous runs in Scotland moved to London—just a posh block from the long-running Mousetrap —startled critics with its obscene humor. “It goes beyond hedonism to embrace human tragedy, large and small,” proclaimed the Evening Standard. The Independent was less enthralled: “This is the kind of ‘escapism ’ associated with a particularly virulent boil being lanced.” The anne burns / 1996 37 play...