In "Millions," two young brothers are dealing with the recent sudden death of their mother. The younger boy, 7 year-old Damian (Etel), is an imaginative, compassionate kid who tries to find out how his mother's doing in heaven by talking to a variety of saints. Being a spiritual kid, when a bag loaded with money falls out of the sky and into his lap, Damian believes it's a gift from heaven and sets out to help everyone in need. Meanwhile his older brother, Anthony (McGibbon), is much more practical about the unexpected windfall. Anthony wants what most kids his age desire: lots of cool gadgets and toys. Despite their very different ideas of what to do with the money, they come to the joint decision to keep their millions a secret. The two then set out on a series of adventures and ultimately learn what's truly important in life.
In this one-on-one interview with director Danny Boyle, the acclaimed director talks about tackling new genres, casting the two young leads in "Millions," the possibility of a sequel to "Trainspotting," and his upcoming science fiction movie, "Sunshine."
INTERVIEW WITH DIRECTOR DANNY BOYLE:
"Millions" has a holiday theme and it's such a feel-good movie. Why wasn’t it released around Christmas time?
I know. I think it was due to be released in the U.K. at Christmas time. It sort of got muscled [out]. It’s only a small film, you know, and it gets muscled out by all the Christmas releases and also because of the focus on the Oscars. They have to released by Christmas, by December 26th. There’s a lot of movies that come out at that time, so they moved it to in the States March and in the UK it will be June.
It’s just part of the business, really. You can’t compete, you know? We don’t have any stars in it or that sort of thing. You have to have the time and the space for a film to grow. You can only get that really away from the very, very heavy periods, I think.
This is a real departure from your past films, however you have used the divine intervention aspect before in “A Life Less Ordinary.”
Well it’s kind of… We had a tagline for the film, which they’re not going to use as a matter of fact, which was “Keep It Unreal” and I sort of kind of liked that, really. Although you’re dealing with reality in social sense, but you want to shift the film into kind of the imagination as much as possible. I don’t really want to make a documentary-type film. I much prefer to use flights of the imagination and often that can be spiritual as well. There’s a strong, obviously, bond with the spiritual side of life. I don’t mean in a religious sense, I mean in a general sense in that we all have that kind of spiritual side to ourselves in a way. And so it kind of delves into that territory as well. I mean, I was brought up a very strict Catholic and the iconography of the saints plays a big part in your life when you’re brought up like that as a Catholic. And it is for him, the little boy in the film, he has these meetings with a selection of the world’s favorite saints throughout the movie.
Why did you decide to bring the saints to life in the film?
Well, it felt like they just had to be there for him, really. Because for him, it was no big deal. He met them and he chatted with them. He’s trying to find his mom who is called Maureen so he keeps asking them if they’ve met a Saint Maureen, presumably up in heaven. And they all kind of have to think about it and they say no, they’ve never heard of her. And it was quite difficult to find the name of somebody who wasn’t a saint, you know? There’s rather a big selection of saints, believe me. Everybody is named after a saint so we ended up with Maureen. As far as we know, there isn’t a Saint Maureen (laughing).
Page 2: Danny Boyle on Casting "Millions" and Directing Kids
