On the Boyle
A dark tale of Scottish junkies, Trainspotting was the British movie of the mid-1990s. 21 years later, can its sequel catch the zeitgeist in the same way? Director Danny Boyle talks to
Steve Kilgallon.
hoose Life’, began the speech that would subsequently adorn thousands of student bedroom walls. The opening of a bitter monologue on life’s disappointments from a nihilistic Scottish heroin addict, it was the leitmotif of the movie Trainspotting.
It was a give-a-f... approach that hooked Trainspotting – entirely accidentally, insists its director, Danny Boyle – on to the ‘‘Cool Britannia’’ wave, and it seemed to say something about the Britain of 1996.
Choose Life was adopted for the film’s poster campaign as it gathered momentum; then for years afterwards, the speech (which itself had borrowed the tagline of a 1980s anti-drug campaign) was appropriated by all sorts of people, from advertisers to the Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, to sell his political party.
‘‘Ironic, isn’t it?’’ observes Boyle drily of that particular episode. (The author of the Trainspotting novel, Irvine Welsh, said he would have rather the mass murderers Fred and Rosemary West steal the phrase than Osborne).
Twenty-one years later, Boyle is back with a sequel, T2 Trainspotting, and an updated Choose Life speech for the next generation. He looks the sort of chap who would Choose Life, in an entirely non-ironic way. He briefly considered becoming a seminarian, after all. He’s dapper, in a combination of box-fresh black Nike Frees, midnight blue jeans and waistcoat that sounds awful on paper but which he carries off neatly. He’s affable, fielding interviews from everyone in town from comedy DJs to the evening chat shows, signing posters and hosting awards ceremonies. James Nesbitt once described him as one of the nicest men in the business.
At the end of the interview treadmill – well, before he flies off to Johannesburg to do it all again – you’d usually expect the talent to be dead-eyed and dulled, reciting rote answers. But a warning accompanies Boyle: get your best questions in first, because he gives very full answers.
He leans forward in his chair and explains why neither of his Trainspotting movies were actually making a political point at all – as Welsh has argued – but just trying to tell a story.
‘‘Significance is attached to them by observers after they come out,’’ Boyle says. ‘‘Even a fairly low-budget film will take two years from beginning it to releasing it – so you’re never going to be on the mark politically by purpose; by accident, it may be that times swim into view for you perfectly. That happened for the first film.’’
The first Trainspotting – which followed three Scottish junkies (played by Ewen McGregor, Ewan Bremner and Jonny Lee Miller) and their psychotic friend (Robert Carlyle) as they cut a heroin heist – was voted the best Scottish film of all time.
So when it came to making the second episode, Boyle was wary.
‘‘Everyone wants to feel that it has the significance of the first film again. But you can’t be misled by that. You have to make a film about characters, as truthfully as you can, otherwise it dessicates in your hand and in the end, you’re making it for the wrong reasons, to be cool, or to be involved in the political landscape.’’
Boyle says a sequel was first considered on the movie’s 10-year anniversary, but they decided the script wasn’t good enough.
‘‘That was actually really good, because it showed our quality check was still in place. The problem with sequels to commercially-successful films is that your quality threshold can be rapidly reduced by everyone who says ‘oh do it, re-cast, It’ll be fine’ and you end up with a disappointing sequel. And especially when everyone has such affection for the original, you’ve got to be careful about that.’’
So at the 20-year mark, Boyle, Welsh, and John Hodge – the screenwriter, headed to Edinburgh and spent a week talking and walking and ‘‘something emerged that was much more interesting’’. A fair diversion from the source material, Welsh’s follow-up novel Porno, what unfolds on screen is a story of the disappointment of middle-aged men who realise it’s too late to achieve their dreams.
‘‘It’s about the passage of time, really, and what you’ve done with that time, and particularly about how men behave and how poorly we deal with the passage of time. Women are much more sensible about measuring out time and its consequences, and taking account of what you’ve done with your time.’’ Of course, our quartet – one in jail, one back on heroin, one running a deserted pub and dreaming of turning it into a brothel, and the fourth – Renton (McGregor) – on the verge of unravelling entirely – have not used theirs wisely.
Boyle has said there is some hope in the film, but what is most striking is actually the loss of hope, the realisation that it’s almost too late for these men to rescue their lives. ‘‘If only [Renton, and Miller’s character Sickboy] had gone to art school, they really would have made something of themselves, they were customdesigned for art school,’’ says Boyle.
This is all reflected in the famous speech. The original railed against consumerism, conformity and reproduction. This time, McGregor’s Renton changes mid-flow from an attack on society to something much more personal. His original cocky narrative voiceover from the first film is also absent, Boyle says, ‘‘because he no longer has that air of confidence, that sneering, certain voice that doesn’t care and is cool to listen to’’.
Making a second Trainspotting without McGregor would have been unthinkable. But, famously, Boyle and McGregor didn’t speak for years after Leonardo DiCaprio was chosen over McGregor as the lead in Boyle’s dramatisation of Alex Garland’s novel The Beach.
Boyle has been telling his various interviewers they should have settled the feud the way Sickboy and Renton do in the new Trainspotting movie (viciously, with pool cues). That it wasn’t, he says, is all credit to McGregor, who engineered their reconciliation at an awards ceremony. ‘‘I really missed him, and you realise how much when you start talking,’’ says Boyle. He says McGregor helped secure funding for the new movie, and made sure he was available to shoot and so forth. ‘‘He is still a glorious actor, but he is very experienced now in filmmaking terms, and having directed his own film he understands all the complications of what goes on backstage... so he’s a great collaborator to have around.’’ Are they friends? Oh yes, he says, they were messaging each other from the Sydney premiere.
The Beach, the movie McGregor missed out on, was part of a remarkable run for Boyle which included Slumdog Millionaire, which won eight Oscars, 28 Days Later, Millions, Sunshine, and 127 Hours. But Boyle’s leap from directing theatre and TV came with the 1995 black comedy Shallow Grave, which won a Bafta for best British film and featured two future big names, McGregor and Christopher Eccleston, alongside New Zealander Kerry Fox.
It was Fox who got him the gig – Boyle had cast her in a TV series, Mr Wroe’s Virgins, having been entranced by her performance in An Angel At My Table. Casting Fox got him the job and the film funded, and it was Eccleston and McGregor who had to screen-test.
‘‘I remember one of the executive producers came around to see a rough cut and I sat behind him in the editing room. I didn’t have much confidence. I didn’t know what they were thinking. He turned around at the end and said ‘that’s good, that is’. When they don’t overdo it, don’t go ‘yeah, that’s great, that’s fantastic’ you know they really mean it and they won’t leave and immediately betray you and start getting someone else to re-cut it.’’
The other key moment on Boyle’s CV is directing the opening ceremony to the 2012 London Olympics. Boyle, who has rejected a knighthood and, politically, is clearly somewhere on the Left (I run out of time to ask him