• Title: "A Conversation with Director Danny Boyle"
• Date: 3 September 2007
• Reporter: Daniel Fienberg
• Source: Filter-Mag.com
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Danny Boyle’s filmography over the past 15 years reads like an eager coed checking off items for a scavenger hunt. He’s done a Hitchcockian thriller (Shallow Grave), a drug-fueled rock and roll drama (Trainspotting), a loopy screwball comedy (A Life Less Ordinary), a Leonardo DiCaprio studio vehicle (The Beach), a zombie film (28 Days Later) and a fantastical family film (Millions). Alternating between towering success and head-scratching failure, Boyle has maintained enough running themes within his hyperkinetic oeuvre to keep critics buzzing—a running trend of ordinary people in extreme circumstances, most superficially—without ever repeating himself or making a dull movie.
Three years after his last picture, Boyle returns this summer with Sunshine, perhaps his most ambitious project to date. A team of astronauts has been dispatched deep into space, strapped to a nuclear warhead with enough payload to restart the cooling sun. Lest you think Sunshine sounds a bit like The Core in orbit, this isn’t a job that could be handled by a mere Hilary Swank. No, Boyle has rounded up a bizarre cast that includes stars from the United States (Chris Evans, Troy Garity), Ireland (Cillian Murphy), New Zealand (Cliff Curtis), Japan (Hiroyuki Sanada) and Malaysia-via-England-via-Hong Kong (Michelle Yeoh). This isn’t a Solaris-style, “Space is a good place to contemplate my dead wife and the meaninglessness of my life” sort of sci-fi dirge—Boyle blends taut claustrophobic tension with a third-act detour into time-and-space-bending horror. But it also isn’t an Event Horizon-style, “Oooh, computer effects are wicked cool,” brain-dead paean to the pixel. Amidst the exploding spacecraft, increasingly psychotic astronauts and some of the most stunning space photography ever created for the big screen, Sunshine is a parable for science’s capacity to triumph over spirituality and salvage the future of humanity.
Or at least that’s what Boyle says…
It took a while, but you finally have a release date smack, in the middle of a summer where every movie out is a sequel. What have your own experiences taught you about the audience’s desire for original products?
[Laughs] Oooh. I was quite idealistic about it. I assumed, as you sort of have to as a filmmaker, that audiences are interested in what you’re interested in. Especially if films are going to cost a bit of money to make, you’ve got to have some kind of assumption that people are going to go out and watch them, if you want to keep working. I’ve been around the world with Sunshine—because it’s only in America that it hasn’t been released—and the truth is that although there was a very, very positive reaction to it, particularly among journalists where I got some of the best responses I’ve ever had, I have to be honest and say that what they really wanted to talk about was 28 Days Later. I’ve thought about this a lot. A journalist or critic feels in a much more assertive or comfortable position if there’s been one before they can compare it to, because they’re more familiar with it and they feel more at home with it, rather than something coming at them new. Unfortunately, I have to be sanguine and say, that pretty much appears to apply to the public at the moment as well. But I think we all have to take responsibility for that in a way. Over a long period of time, we clearly haven’t presented them with enough to make them insatiable for new films. They’re insatiable for sequels, I’m afraid.
You’ve put out a string of very original movies and some have struck chords with viewers while others just haven’t. Have you given up on guessing which movies will hit?
No, there’s always a secret, unacknowledged part of you that thinks you’re an expert on this stuff—which you’re not, of course. But there must be some part of you that thinks, “Oh, this one they’ll love.” I think people can make private movies for very little money and not care what people think, but I do care what people think. The films cost a bit of money and therefore you have to care what people think. I’ve always been a reflective person and I still remain committed to doing original and surprising stuff.
When filmmakers make sci-fi films, they often tend to cover it up and say that it’s some other genre, it just happens to be in space, but this feels like pure science fiction.
Me and [writer Alex Garland], we’re both big fans of it. He’s more into fantasy sci-fi, like Star Wars and stuff like that. I’m a hardcore realistic sci-fan fan; the more real it is, the more I love it. I don’t mean documentary-real, like Apollo 13. I mean hardcore like, “It’s tough, it’s hostile and you’re human,” and you put those things together.
When you’d look at other sci-fi films, would it be more for inspiration or more to see what you didn’t want to repeat?
They sort of go hand in hand. You’re looking at them for inspiration, but you are checking that you’re not stealing too much, automatically, because you are stealing. I don’t think you can do one without it. It’s such a straightjacket. It’s not like doing a thriller or any other genre. It’s very weird and very prescriptive.We’d have these meetings—endless meetings, very technical, where you’d talk about issues like the space helmet or the space suit or exteriors of the ship or the star field—and you can feel the other directors in the room with you, who’d been there 25 years earlier having the exact same conversation, like an angel had passed across your shoulder. It’s so odd. What you try to do is find a balance between departing from and adhering to the rules they helped establish. Some of them are bollocks and some of them are true. Some of them are realistic and some of them are nonsense that we take to be true, but which have just been established by films. You have to find a balance between the rules you must obey or inhabit and where you can break out and do your own thing—like the space helment, where we tried to do our own thing.
I hear there was a South Park influence?
Ha! Yes, there was Kenny. It was very serious to begin with. We thought that if the characters flew, they had to be protected from the sunlight. It’s very dangerous. Space films are nonsense, because you can’t see into the helmet in reality—light must not be allowed to penetrate it—but in movies you need to know if it’s John Hurt in that one or Sigourney Weaver in that one, so they put lights inside them or make them transparent. We thought, “No! This is a film about light and we must obey that all their preparation is to protect them from light.” So we came up with this funnel shape with a medieval slit that you couldn’t possibly look inside. Then we looked at it and said, “It’s Kenny!”
The film is building to this massive hero prop, the sun, an inanimate character that we’ve been taught since childhood not to stare directly at. Did that give you more freedom in visualizing your version of the sun?
Funny you say that. The film used to begin with a voiceover talking about how your mother told you never to look at the sun, but as soon as you’ve been told that, all you want to do is look. We wanted to try to make it a personality in the film, really—something that has a huge psychological dimension for any human being, which is manifested in a way easily through the God idea and the fact that you can’t help but be almost religious in the way you think of it. It also just puts us in our place; as soon as you start to look at it, the need for modesty is apparent. That’s a wonderful thing, because you have this overwhelmingly ambitious mission and yet, we are nothing. To imagine that we could control it, that we could affect it, is both our saving grace and our eventual damnation. The film’s really about science and light and how we’ve put all of our eggs in the science basket as a people, haven’t we? Unless you’re a member of the Taliban, basically we all believe in science now. The idea that science can go there and can affect it, can change nature, is the most extraordinary question that we can ask ourselves. Ironically, it’s about saving ourselves in the film; we have affected nature and we’re beginning to pay the price, but science will get us out of that corner if you are a scientist, which I am—not a professional scientist, but a believer, a moral scientist.
There have been a run of dystopic movies in recent years about humans bringing about the end of the world, but in this case, it’s an entirely outside force, no fault of our own. Is that an optimistic or pessimistic approach?
Optimistic, for sure. We do believe that science can save us. We’ve decided to not follow spiritualism but the scientists, really. I think that’s a good thing for all of us and I think there are huge problems that it creates, which we’re experiencing and we’re aware of experiencing. But it’s audacious and breathtaking when you think of the things that science can achieve, that we can achieve, that separate us from all other living things that we know so far, that attempt to change our environment—that we can ruin it, which we’re aware of—but that we can also save it. I’m an absolute optimist about that, that we will save ourselves and that it will be science that will save us—it won’t be mysticism.
The mission’s crew includes Japanese, Irish, Chinese, Australian and American actors, yet its diversity is never commented on. What was your strategy?
I read this really interesting book, Moondust by Andrew Smith, and he talked to quite a few of the remaining astronauts who have been to the moon and he discussed how it was recently revealed how much it cost to put those men on the moon. He said that if the American taxpayer had known, they would have shot it down straightaway. It was hidden from them very deliberately, because it was outrageous. So you’ve got to think about 50 years hence, which is when we set our film—who’s going to pay for this? You think well, okay, maybe still America, but the Asian economies, certainly, and probably India as well, though we didn’t send an Indian up there. So we wanted a mixed crew of Asian economies and the American economies. You have to cut the Americans in not just because of the last 40 or 50 years in space, but also just because of cinematic realities in terms of the film playing around the world.
What was the impact of having all of these different languages being spoken and all of these different styles?
It’s quite rare to be able to do that in a film. There were a lot of films made here in the ’80s, because of the European Union; they tried to do some movies mixing a few Polish actors, a few Austrians, a few Brits, a few French. It doesn’t work. They just got Euro-puddings. It was something I wanted to do and space gives you the chance, because nationality’s not an issue in the film and it shouldn’t be in space; fortunately, apart from Reagan’s moments in space, it’s remained on behalf of all mankind. That’s one of the things we haven’t managed to fuck up politically yet. It became a buzz for me as director to combine them all together. What unites actors is acting—that curious, “Oh God, who’d ever want to live with an actor?” But actors’ behaviors are universal. They just get on straightaway. They’re all paranoid about what they’re going to do next. They’re all paranoid about what they did last and how much they should trust you.
So does this mean that you’ve got your sci-fi movie out of your system?
The truth is you only ever do one of these movies. Probably with the notable and understandable exception of James Cameron, no director goes back into space. You just do one and that’s enough for a lifetime. It is extraordinarily demanding. There’s no slack. There’s nothing you can take for granted, there’s no margin of error at all… The gaze of the audience is pitiless in a space movie. I don’t know why, but it is. You’ve got to get it right, like they expect it to be; otherwise, you’re dead.
The Son Also Rises: Troy Garity Controls Our Destiny
Probably best known as the fruit of Jane Fonda’s loins, Troy Garity is a Golden Globe-nominated actor in his own right. But this summer he’s being sent on a mission to restart the sun in Sunshine, so we caught up with humanity’s last hope.
Danny gave me a long explanation of the film being about the triumph of science over spirituality. What does the movie mean to you?
In essence, it’s eight astronauts strapped to a bomb and flying it into the sun. That circumstance alone provides enough drama. One of the great things about Sunshine is that it’s open to a lot of interpretation and it’s the type of film people leave thinking about and discussing, which asks a lot of questions. The philosophical skeleton of the film is science versus nature, and can we as a people control our destiny? I don’t think anything can defeat the laws of nature. I think you can understand them and I think you can manipulate them, but laws and rules exist for a reason. The laws and rules of nature are our master.
How would you personally react to going on a potential suicide mission with the fate of all of humanity on your shoulders?
I would probably react just as my character reacted. It’s really interesting to think about: Our death gives our life value, but oftentimes we don’t spend a lot of time thinking about that death. When your death certificate is handed to you prematurely, your perspective on everything changes. Your value system changes and creates that fight-or-flight nature. That was an interesting element to the film, seeing how each character changed and adapted to facing death.
Did you get a lot of Barbarella-based questions and comments?
Not really, but there was a lot of debate before the filming began about whether sex and love scenes belong in the sci-fi genre. And apparently sex in space does pretty well.
