Danny Boyle: Interviews

Lean, Mean, and Cruel

3 Lean, Mean, and Cruel Ronan Bennett/1995 From Sight and Sound 5, no. 1 (1995). Copyright British Film Institute. Reprinted with permission. Danny Boyle doesn’t like talking about “ideas” in his new film, Shallow Grave. He doesn’t like talking about ideas in film in general because, he says, it’s pompous, self-conscious, and patronizing to the audience. It’s an interesting position, coming from a man whose early career as a director was in theatre, first with the radical Joint Stock Company, then with the Royal Court—the playwrights he has worked with include Edward Bond and Howard Barker. Most recently, Boyle has been working in television, in shows as various as Inspector Morse and the serial Mr. Wroe’s Virgins. As a writer, I’m the opposite to this. I tend to start, whether it’s a novel or a screenplay, with the idea I want to explore rather than the plot. In A Man You Don’t Meet Every Day (directed by Angela Pope and screened on Channel 4 in November 1994), I wanted to look at the notion of Ireland-meets-England through the encounter between a working -class Irishman, Jim, and a middle-class Englishwoman, Charlotte. With Love Lies Bleeding (shown on BBC2 in September 1993), I was trying to tackle political violence in Ireland and suggest that, rather than being the mindless orgy of self-destruction commonly portrayed, it had specific goals: to bring the British government to the negotiating table. Starting out with such ideas does not mean you finish with them. Deficiencies in talent and technique can take their toll. In the writing itself, things change: what appeared possible or interesting at the beginning may seem, after the first few scenes, ludicrous or redundant. The demands of narrative impose other limitations: I have always been aware of the need to keep an audience with you as you try to plant the 4 danny boyle: inter views idea of the piece, and I have never been shy of using thrills and spills to achieve this. Ideas in film are, I believe, much more fragile, more vulnerable to eclipse, than those in novels or theatre. Given the economy of film, it is never possible to answer questions, only to raise them. If you’re not careful, the thrills can obscure the point you’re trying to make; the spills can swamp the idea (a criticism I would make of my own work). There are obvious dangers in talking this way about one’s work, as Boyle points out. You can find yourself making claims about what you’ve done which are simply not true; you can end up believing your own propaganda. In the search to dignify your work with some kind of intellectual respectability, you can easily start to feel superior about the “lowlier” aspirations of film-making—such as entertaining the audience . It is primarily as entertainment that Boyle wants Shallow Grave to be seen. It is a low-budget British film—exciting, fast, witty, and, in a most unBritish way, unabashed about exhibiting style. It comes over as confident and deliberately provocative. The direction is energetic, moving the narrative along with speed and economy. The design, particularly the use of strong colors, lends the film a cartoonish feel heightened both by the burlesque violence—intended, as in cartoons, to be comic rather than shocking—and by the improbable behavior of the main characters. The story concerns three affluent late twenty-somethings (played by Kerry Fox, Christopher Eccleston, and Ewan McGregor) living in a smart New Town flat in Edinburgh, who take in a lodger (Keith Allen) who soon afterwards dies in his bedroom of a drug overdose. The trio discover a suitcase full of money among the dead man’s belongings. They decide to keep it and dispose of the body secretly. Then their troubles begin. As with Blood Simple and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, the audience watches illicit riches corrode the bonds of friendship and morality holding the three together. For me, the film never escapes predictability, though Boyle says audiences so far have not guessed the ending. But the real problem I found was the freezing and cruel emptiness at the film’s heart. The absence of any character to sympathize or engage with made it hard to find an emotional response as the unpleasant, greedy trio destroyed themselves and each other. [18.116.90.141] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 03:23 GMT...