Danny Boyle – Straight From the Archives
By Brendan MacDevette
IFQ sits down with Danny Boyle, as he discusses his latest film Millions.
Boyle is the mastermind behind indie hits Trainspotting, A Life Less Ordinary, Shallow Grave and 28 Days Later. Boyle discusses characterization and independent film.
IFQ: Millions is quite a change for you, going from Trainspotting and 28 Days Later to a story not only about children, but told with a great deal of innocence?
Danny Boyle: I know it looks like it is a drastic change, but it doesn’t feel like it. When we were making it, it didn’t feel all that different. The worry I have is that I’ll make the same film again and again. And that fear becomes real from the inside of the process. From the outside, I can appreciate that it looks like a very different film compared to my past films. I got the script and I just responded to it. A business decision would be, “Hey we made that movie, let’s make another one because it was successful” or “Hey we made that movie, let’s make something different.” The decision was simply I’m going to make that movie because there is something about it that I can relate to myself and makes me want to do it. It makes you want to spend a couple of years making it and publicizing it and makes you stand up for it, even if it gets slaughtered by critics, which they can do and you’ll still be proud of it. You are disappointed if it’s slaughtered, but you are still proud of it. I don’t think you can do that necessarily which you’ve made for more of a business decision, and then they have to work. Then, you are living in expectation and not just hope. I always think that it is better to live in hope than expectation.
This film is made with an attempt to make money, but I have no idea if it will make money or not. It is not important in a way. I want it to be seen by as many people as possible because I am very proud of it. I admire people who can make the big movies, with all the big expectations on them. I love watching them; when they are good, they are really good. There is nothing better than a big movie. But I’m pretty sure, I’m not the right director for them. I like making up my mind on the day, making crazy decisions and you can’t do that on big movies, there are too many people involved, there’s too much money involved. I always say it’s like an oil tanker, they are full of riches, but turning them around takes a whole afternoon to shift direction. I can’t work like that; I have to be able to work like (snaps fingers).
IFQ: Did the religious elements of the film draw heavily from your Catholic upbringing?
DB I made it because it felt like my background; I grew up a very devout, strict Catholic and was going to be a priest until I was about fourteen. All the iconography of the saints in Millions is very familiar to me. The writer, Frank Cottrell Boyce is a Catholic and remains a practicing Catholic. We spent a year writing the film together and even though it is a modern film, the ideas are very much rooted in our backgrounds. Certainly, the spiritual message of the film, if there is one, is based on something that we both share and believe. It is not a strictly religious sensibility, it has more to do with having faith in people and that goodness can come out of that. There is a sense of theatre in Catholicism. The drama and extreme stories that surround the religion and there are incredible Gothic tales about a lot of saints. They are quite violent, very dramatic and captivating, and that is the whole point of them, just like the movies, to captivate. That is the whole idea to catch you in the headlights and captivate you.
IFQ: You have Saint Claire smoking a joint in the film, how did you want to portray the saints?
DB We wanted the saints to have personality; we didn’t want them to be pious or sacred or sanctimonious. We wanted them to be real people because they were and to the boy they are real people. They fizz with personality. Like Saint Peter, who is probably #2 in the world, we cast him with a Newcastle accent, which is a tone in the Northeast of England. That says something very emphatic about him, casting him as Newcastle. It is a very blue collar, working class town with a very defiant character. I don’t know what the equivalent in America would be.
IFQ: Your first film Shallow Grave and now your latest Millions, although completely different films, both concern finding a bag of money. What is it about that situation that appeals to you and the responsibility that it commands?
DB It’s a great trick, in any movie, because a bag of money changes everything. It is like throwing a grenade into a room. It is a great starting point for a film. Shallow Grave came out of the milieu of the time. Margaret Thatcher was out of power, but her legacy was still there. So, it was very much like the film Wall Street and Gordon Gekko’s “Greed is Good” speech. Shallow Grave was very much informed by that cynical self-interest. Things have changed in Britain. Since 1997, we have had a labor government who has reintroduced the idea of community responsibility and that we have to build a social state, not just a place for individuals to flourish. They have poured money into schools and public transport. So the milieu today is very different and I wouldn’t make Shallow Grave now because it wouldn’t be appropriate. It wouldn’t have that sense of modernity that I want all of my films to have. Millions shows that an act of generosity is possible in the modern age. I don’t think you could have made this film at the time of Shallow Grave and feel they both very much belong to their time. Even though it is only ten years between them, which is nothing in terms of society, but they do feel like different societies.
IFQ: Do you think that the gesture the family makes at the end of the film to the African Village (£1000) is a large enough gesture compared to the shopping spree (over £200,000) they enjoy?
DB I do think so because you can’t be too idealistic about it. Damian doesn’t get to spend all the money he would like to because it gets spent by other people and some of it gets burnt. He burns it because he is in despair that he’ll never really get to spend it on what he wants. The bit of money that is left over at the end, he does get to win a small but important victory and put the money where he thinks it should go in Africa helping people get some water. Damian doesn’t even think in terms of responsibility, the naiveté of his worldview that there is this money and it doesn’t seem to make anyone very happy and just complicates things. On the other hand, there are these people in Africa who need the money.
IFQ: I’m interested in the responsibility of the father (James Nesbitt) who clearly chooses greed over the safety of his family; can you talk about that character’s responsibility?
DB That is what money does to people. Unfortunately, it changes them. When he first finds it, he says to the boys, we are going to hand it in. Then, he changes his mind and says he’ll keep it and use it. There is that horrible scene, where he takes the money and shakes it out on the table. There is one moment where he snaps at the boys and says shut up and go to bed and then he goes upstairs where he has that horrible scene with his son where he says, “We’re on our own, there is no God, there is nothing, it is bleak and we’ll just look after ourselves, shall we.” And the little boy doesn’t believe him; he fights for the way he sees it himself.
IFQ: So adult greed has not changed since Shallow Grave. They were vicious and mean spirited in that movie.
DB They were. I think money does that to us. Listen, one of the reasons we are so interested in bags of money is when we did Shallow Grave, we didn’t have any money at all. In fact, we had to sell parts of the set, the furniture and stuff, to buy film to shoot the next part of the film. Since then, we’ve had money; we’ve had a bag of money thrown in our laps. When you have a successful film, they give you money.
IFQ: How do you feel about making a movie that says money is no good being distributed by a multi-billion dollar corporation (Fox)?
DB (Laughs) This is funny because this building (NewsCorp building in midtown Manhattan) is so corporate and when I talked to them on the phone, I always pictured them being in some shambolic office in Manhattan. The entertainment industry is full of those contradictions. It has more to do with how you behave as an individual. I can’t think to challenge the corporate nature of Fox. I wouldn’t want anyone else distributing the film because they are brilliant at nurturing small films, like they did with Sideways, Garden State and Napoleon Dynamite.
IFQ: What do you think will happen with the spirituality of the Damian character? As he gets older, will he become like his father?
DB No, I don’t think so. The idea is the older boy Anthony is his father. His father says, “Where did I get you?” like he is surprised, but actually they are the same thing. They are the same guy, in a way. I had the little boy Damian very much in my mind that he would become an artist. A writer, painter or what I don’t know, but his imagination is fervent and when he finds iconography outside of religion to feed it, he will develop it in different ways.
IFQ: Meeting the child actors, you can tell Alex (Damian) still has that innocence, while Lewis (Anthony) is thirteen and a little older and more cynical and you can tell there was some competition going on between them for attention.
DB We treated them on set as complete equals down the line. But I explained to them when this process of publicizing the film started that chances are that only one of them would end up on the poster. That was a shock to their system and you could see them growing up in that moment. Marketing is really tough and I’m not in charge of it and I don’t want to be in charge of marketing because I’m not very good at it. I try to always take pictures with the three of us, but they are always learning life lessons. You can’t overprotect them because you have introduced them to this world and they have to make up their own minds about it.
IFQ: Is there a huge shift from the on set atmosphere when you are directing a big star like Leonardo DiCaprio to working with unknowns?
DB While filming The Beach, we were shooting a scene at night in Phuket in Thailand. It was a street scene and there were crowds on the street. I walked down the street with Leo and I don’t know what it’s like being him, but I got a little sense of it and it was incredible. You had thousands of people lining the street and I was walking back with the actors to the start of the shot and every single person was looking at him. I kept looking at them and not a single person’s eyes looks at me. I was standing right beside him; all the eyes were just boring into him.
With the kids on the set for Millions, I kind of like being immature on the set and having kids on set is a good excuse. The crew thinks, oh he’s behaving that way as part of the process for the kids, but I actually quite like behaving like that. You learn a lot, directing with kids. It is not true that adage; you should never work with kids or animals. It’s true that you should never work with animals. I’ve worked with animals and you should never work with animals, especially cats. But with kids, you learn a lot, you’ve got to keep your fingerprints off them, that’s the key thing. You learn that very quickly because your instinct is that you think you are going to have to do all the work and guide them. You have to back off and let them play the scenes themselves. I would ruin it if I interfered too much.
IFQ: So, you are doing Sunshine next?
DB Yes, which is a bit of a bigger budget. It’s science fiction. It has a bigger budget than Millions and 28 Days Later, but it’s not huge. Sci-fi does cost more because you have to build everything. It is about a journey to the Sun. There is a mission from Earth to the Sun and they are taking a bomb to the Sun to re-ignite a section of the sun that is failing. The bomb is huge; it’s the size of Kansas. The real mystery of the story is that there was a mission seven years before and it’s been lost. At the end of the movie, they do get to meet the source of all life in the universe. So, that’s got to be worth ten dollars, isn’t it?