Known for indie dramas such as Trainspotting and 28 Days Later, director Danny Boyle takes his first crack at a real science fiction story with Sunshine starring Cillian Murphy, Rose Byrne, Cliff Curtis, Michelle Yeoh, and Chris Evans.
Sunshine is set 50 years in the future when our sun is dying along with the future of mankind. It's all up to a spaceship crew of eight men and women to take dramatic action to help revive the sun. But things begin happening beyond the crew's control and their mission becomes a battle for their own survival aboard the ship.
On Casting Sunshine: Boyle described what went into the process. “The instinct in casting it was the script doesn’t define the gender and it certainly doesn’t define their nationality or their race or anything. And it’s quite interesting. Space movies tend to be quite colorless like that. There’s just a group of people. You can kind of identify [with] any of them because they don’t have any social conventions that they’re obeying on Earth. They have nothing really to define them. But for me, I thought it should be an American-Asian mission because all the advice was that in 50 years time the only economies that will possibly be able to pay for this staggering cost of space travel would be the American economy, maybe still, but certainly the Asian economies that are emerging. And they actually said at the time probably India and Brazil as well, but we sort of ignored that really in a way because it was getting too disparate.
We made it American-Asian and then I just started to search for my favorite bunch of actors, an interesting mix of actors that I could get out there. Michelle Yeoh was the first to be cast and I remember saying to Michelle, ‘You can play any part you want.’ There were eight. She could have picked any one of the eight parts and she picked Corazon, which is actually a Mexican name. I think that was only because Alex [Garland’s] girlfriend is partly Mexican so maybe he thought we were going to cast her. We didn’t in the end, although she plays the girl right at the end with the children. So we cast Michelle and then we went on from there.
I phoned the Japanese actor [Hiroyuki Sanada] whom I loved for the Captain and a couple of actors here, Chris Evans and Troy Garity; a couple of actors from home, Cillian [Murphy] whom I knew and Benny [Wong] who I also knew a little bit. And then Rose [Byrne] from Australia and Cliff [Curtis] from New Zealand. They’re from all over the world, really.
What’s lovely about an ensemble in space is that you don’t really know who’s going to dominate in the end. You can also kill them in any order that you want (laughing). And there are some great deaths available in space because it’s so hostile. You can kind of kill people in interesting ways as well.”
The Cast Really Bonded: Boyle made sure his actors were ready to appear as though they were confined in a small space together for a considerable period of time by making them live together for two weeks before shooting began. “Because they were all coming from different places in the world, I thought we’ve got to kind of pop their bubble. All actors when they arrive, particularly on a show like this, have a kind of bubble around them. One of your jobs as a director is to pop that bubble so that they’ll be in your film, because otherwise they can look a bit sealed off somehow. I did it by getting them all to live together in student digs.
They all had separate bedrooms but they had a shared kitchen and a shared living room. They basically lived there for a few weeks and they had to cook for themselves and entertain themselves, and the group spirit was established. It’s the only way, really, that you can establish quickly the kind of group spirit that would exist amongst a bunch of people who had been living and traveling together for 16 months when the film opens. So that’s what we did.
Then we showered them with all these different experiences to give a kind of brief insight into what it is to be an astronaut. They flew a 747 on a simulator at Heathrow, which is an amazing experience because only pilots do that and are only allowed on this thing. They actually got to land, or try to land (laughing), a 747 on this simulator. They crashed it every time, just so you know. They may tell you otherwise, but I was there and each one of them crashed it.”
Boyle actually took part in some of the exercises with his cast. “Yeah, I did. I didn’t go to live with them because it wasn’t practical. But I also said it was never about me observing them in that Big Brother type way or anything like that. I had to reassure them there were no cameras hidden in the apartment that they lived in. It was more just to establish it. But I did do some of the other things. I did do weightless flying and all those kind of experiences and the simulator. I was there for that. I did some other things with them. Not all of them, but some of them.”
The Inspiration for Sunshine: “The genre is obviously very different and although I was a fan of sci-fi, I didn’t realize quite how much a fan of sci-fi I was until I looked at my track record and I realized I’d watched everything because that makes you a geek already. You’re a fan, and I didn’t quite realize it. But I loved them and the chance to make one with an original idea. This journey to the sun was fantastic.”
