‘What if I'm not Scottish enough any more?’
Rencontre avec Ewan McGregor.
En 1996, Trainspotting, réalisé par Danny Boyle, sort au cinéma. Cette adaptation d'un roman publié par Irvine Welsh en 1993 met en scène une bande de jeunes héroïnomanes à Edimbourg et remporte un succès phénoménal. Vingt-et-un ans plus tard, sous la direction du même réalisateur, Ewan McGregor reprend dans T2 Trainspotting le rôle qui l’a fait connaître. Un succès assuré ?
Recently, I was in a cinema when the trailer for T2, the new Trainspotting film, was played. The whole room erupted into cheers. Perhaps your excitement is not as delirious, but I have a feeling that your anticipation levels are linked to how you spent your 1990s. Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting novel adaptation, the 1996 original, remains the quintessential mid-90s movie. Like Oasis and Blur, like Kate Moss and Firestarter, it was of its time and captured that time’s cynical yet optimistic, hedonistic heart.
2. Though the story was about heroin addicts, the feel of the film recalled different drugs: uppers, hallucinogens, ecstasy. There were real-unreal trippy sequences about losing pills in a toilet or going cold turkey; uplifting, rushy ones about clubbing and having sex. Plus fantastic music: Iggy Pop, Primal Scream, Leftfield. Trainspotting wasn’t shallow, but it didn’t dwell; it was always moving, like a long, clever pop video.
3. The characters were people you felt you already knew. There was Begbie, played by Robert Carlyle, the booze-fuelled, unpredictable psycho, a small-town Scottish version of Joe Pesci in Goodfellas. Spud (Ewen Bremner): hapless, surreal, a lovable, smackhead loser. Sexy Sick Boy (Jonny Lee Miller), out for whatever he could get, mostly women and drugs. And Renton, played by Ewan McGregor, the heroined-up antihero, who kept kicking drugs and then going back, and doing the same to his mates, until he finally robbed them all (except Spud) and ran away.
4. What’s remarkable about Trainspotting is that even if you haven’t watched the film in years (I hadn’t), you’ll remember each character’s defining scene. Renton had many. His rant about Scotland in the beautiful Highlands: “I don’t hate the English. They’re just wankers. We, on the other hand, are colonised by wankers.” Laughing over the bonnet of a car that nearly knocks him down. Emerging from The Worst Toilet In Scotland, precious pills in his hands: “Ya dancers!” And, of course, his voiceover: “Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career…”
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5. Trainspotting was one of the highest-grossing British films of the decade. It made everyone involved a star, but McGregor became the biggest. He and director Danny Boyle had already made one film together, 1995’s Shallow Grave, and they made one more afterwards, A Life Less Ordinary. But when Boyle and his team cast Leonardo DiCaprio for their next film, The Beach in 2000, McGregor was very hurt. He never worked with Boyle again. Instead, he went mega, playing the young Obi-Wan Kenobi in the Star Wars prequel trilogy, singing with Nicole Kidman in Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge and securing his reputation as a Hollywood star. 6. Twenty years on, McGregor lives in LA. Though he is 45, he looks young and retains an up-for-it, let’s-enjoy-life, un-adult charm. His grin eats shit. Many stars bring an attitude. McGregor brings the fun.
7. I’ve not seen the new film, and when we meet McGregor has been shown only a rough cut. But the themes appear to be nostalgia and friendship. Not only does the new film reunite the characters, it reassembles the real-life protagonists: the same actors, director, producer, writer. It’s like a band reunion after years of sniping, with all the wariness and sentimentality that such an occasion can bring.
8. “I felt like Renton, going back,” McGregor says. “I had these feelings like, ‘Shit! I haven’t lived in Scotland since I was 17!’ I moved to London to go to drama school, and I go home every year, because my parents are there, and my brother and his family, and I love it, but I haven’t lived there, and… Of all the characters I’ve played who’ve been Scots, Renton is the most Scottish of them all. And I suddenly thought, ‘Fuck! What if I can’t do it? What if I’m not Scottish enough any more?’”
9. In the film, Renton returns to Leith, Edinburgh, after living in Amsterdam for years. He’s been hiding from his past and his old friends for two decades, and now he has to face them. In this and other ways, it parallels real life. Before the film, McGregor hadn’t seen Robert Carlyle, “not since the premiere for Trainspotting, and I don’t remember the premiere for Trainspotting, so I don’t know if I saw him there or not”. He has worked with Bremner a few times (Black Hawk Down, Jack The Giant Slayer), and he had a production company in the early 2000s in which Jonny Lee Miller was also involved. But Boyle, his producer Andrew Macdonald and writer John Hodge, McGregor avoided for years. “How many? Ten, maybe more? A long while.”
10. Though he denied it publicly, he was too upset to make contact. At one point, there was an encounter in the Union club in London’s Soho. McGregor was having lunch with a young director. They happened to be sitting at the same table where Boyle told McGregor he wasn’t needed for The Beach. “And Danny walks in,” he says. “And I went white. I got up and went over and he said, ‘Oh God, you’re not sitting at that table, are you?’ It was exactly like bumping into an ex. Because it was really a bit like that, a love affair. He’d been my first director, and my favourite director and I… I was in love with him, like, I really liked him.”
11. McGregor was asked to present Boyle with a Bafta for Slumdog Millionaire. He ignored the script he was given – “Some garbage: these jokey things you’re meant to say” – and instead spoke from the heart. “About how much I’d loved working with him, and how happy I was always to look over and see him on the set, and how I trusted him and how he got me to do my best work. And then I said, ‘After I stopped working with him, he went on to make…’ and I listed all his movies. I’d learned them in chronological order.” Since then, things have been OK, and a few years on, having resisted for ages, McGregor felt open to making T2 Trainspotting.
WHAT IF?
12. After our interview, I email Irvine Welsh to ask him about T2 Trainspotting. He replies that the original film was about close friendships and how they help you find your identity, but “ultimately crush your individuality, to the point where you have to break free”. T2 Trainspotting is the consequence. It’s about how that individuality destroys people and community, “making us all narcissistic to the point of being mentally ill, and [then] makes us seek out those old relationships and reinvest in them”. It’s a film that “looks back to lost youth and the wasted optimism of the 90s.” And then wonders: oh God – what happened?