With “Millions,” did you just feel like you were at a point in your career where you wanted to do something dramatically different?
Yes, it’s nice to be able to. When you’ve got a success - we were very lucky “28 Days Later” was a big success - you’ve got a chance where you can immediately cash in on that and make something similar, and it makes the marketing job easy. That’s what the business side of it would like you to do. Or, you can take a chance and get a bit of money and say, “No, we want to do something different with it. We want to do this kind of film.”
What I love about it is that it has a great source of energy, a surprise, because people don’t expect what they’re going to get. I think that’s the worst thing when you go in the cinema and you sort of know what’s coming and that’s what you get. I find that always a little deflationary. Whereas I remember that when you don’t quite know what’s going to come, it’s fantastic. I remember going to see “The Matrix” and I didn’t know very much about it and it’s just like, “Wow!” And that sense of surprise you have, that you’re seeing something that you’re never sure where it’s going to go, I love that. I think that’s a great energy source in cinema.
Were you thrown a lot of scripts after “28 Days Later” that were pretty much the same type of thing?
Yeah. There’s nothing wrong with that really, that’s just the business side of the business. It makes sense. “Let’s get him to do this horror film but let’s get a big actor in it this time, as well.” From a financial point of view, that makes a lot of sense. But it wasn’t really what I wanted to do. I love starting fresh each time with something in a different genre. We’re about to start a new film, a science fiction film which I’ve never done before, called “Sunshine.” And again that means all the movies you have to go and look at as research are all different. And it’s quite scary but that’s a good place to be, when you’re really kept on your toes. You can’t take anything for granted.
A science fiction film? Is that a genre that’s interested you for a while?
Oh, I love science fiction movies personally. I love watching them but I’ve never made one. And it’s quite interesting, as soon as you start to try and make one, all the things you have to learn to do it, you know, because the depiction of something that we cannot experience or visualize or see, because there’s only a handful of people who’ve ever been up there. That’s really interesting, how that’s done in the movies. You have to look at the great classics, “2001” and “Star Wars” and all the old movies, and the way they create space in space movies using old-fashioned cinema techniques is amazing. Of course, it’s being challenged at the moment by CG. Computer generated imagery is able to do some of that work, but the jury is still out on whether it’s actually better or not as a way of doing it.
What’s your opinion?
I don’t think it is yet, actually. I’m sure it probably will be one day but I think it’s a bit weightless. And I think it’s because the way they used to make space movies, they would use models – miniature models. And those things, although they’re small, they’re made of molecules. They actually have a physical reality. And so it’s possible to give them characteristics of space and weight. Whereas CG is entirely fictional, if you like. It’s just zeroes and ones in a computer and so it’s quite difficult for them to give it the weight. I mean, some of it works brilliantly of course. But when you look at a “Star Wars” movie, the old ones are, for me, visually just extraordinary. Whereas the new computer generated ones are not as visually fascinating.
So your sci-fi movie won’t be CG heavy?
(Laughing) Well, there will be some CG in it. It’s something that we can’t do with models but I hope the bias will be towards kind of a more physical world, yeah.
You said you want to take projects on that you haven’t done before, does that mean we’ll never see the sequel to “Trainspotting ?”
No, you will hopefully. But it’s long-term on that. It’s not like it’s a cash-in sequel. It’s something that I want to do when the actors who played those characters, when they reach middle-age, really. When they are kind of in their 40s. We want to get them back together again and do a film about those same characters and what their lives are like now when they’re kind of in middle-age, and all the things that that means to people. It’s a lovely way of looking at life through a bunch of hedonists who wasted their lives, you know, and what that would be like when middle-age is hurtling towards them. So that’s the principle, really.
Page 5: Danny Boyle on "Trainspotting" Actors and the Budget for "Sunshine"
