Boyle’s next stop: ‘T2 Trainspotting’
Director Danny Boyle used to go and stay from time to time with his father in his native Manchester, England. He would stay in his childhood bedroom, which looked the same as it did the day he moved out as a youth, right down to the Led Zeppelin posters on the wall. The room remained that way until Boyle, 60, was in his 50s.
So it’s unsurprising then that in “T2 Trainspotting” — Boyle’s sequel to “Trainspotting,” the 1996 film that arrived on screen with the force of a tsunami — there is a scene of Mark Renton (Ewan McGregor), now 46 years old, in his own childhood bedroom replete with his teenage record collection and choo-choo train wallpaper, dancing with abandon to a song that makes a reprise from that first film, Iggy Pop’s “Lust for Life.”
“I was very proud of that,” Boyle said during a recent visit to San Francisco. “I said to Ewan after we did it, ‘Listen, if I get knocked down by a bus and that’s the last thing I ever shoot, I’ll be very proud.’ ”
“Trainspotting,” an adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s novel that spun a tale of Edinburgh junkies and their friends, made Boyle’s reputation as well as that of screenwriter John Hodge and the film’s stars: McGregor, Jonny Lee Miller, Robert Carlyle and Ewen Bremner. In 2002, Welsh published a sequel, “Porno,” describing the characters’ misadventures 10 years on. That might have been the “Trainspotting” film sequel as well. Boyle and Hodge worked to develop the book into a film, but the efforts stopped at the script stage.
“Nothing wrong with it — it was perfectly all right on its own merits — but as something to follow after the first one, it was very poor,” Boyle says. “We abandoned it and didn’t go back to it for a few years until we decided to make it a more personal film.”
The key to the new story is time itself. Twenty years have gone by since Mark Renton abandoned his friends. The decades since have been kind to none of them. Renton is clearly disappointed in a life that hasn’t worked out. Sick Boy (Miller), now using
his given name, Simon, is a not terribly successful con artist. Spud (Bremner) still struggles with addiction. Anger junkie Begbie (Carlyle) has spent most of his life in prison. When Renton returns from Amsterdam after all these years, it brings back memories even as his arrival and new schemes serve to underline just how wrong their lives have gone.
“If you just carried on like it was the first film, it would have been terrible,” Boyle says. “People might have enjoyed it in a kind of superficial way, but it’s not very honest. Whereas the honesty of this is that they’re in terrible trouble. And the reason they’re in terrible trouble is that they are very bad at aging. Men are.
“Men hang on, in a terrible way, to the past. So inappropriate. It’s embarrassing. You can see it with Sick Boy. He’s dyeing his hair. He’s 46 and his hair is going. It’s gone.”
For “T2’s” cast, stepping back into their old roles, meant surrendering all vanity. Clips from “Trainspotting” are woven into the new film, so the actors appear next to their youthful selves. And Boyle warned them going in that there would be no Hollywood makeup available to them on his set. They would appear as their middle-aged selves. Bremner’s bald spot, Miller’s receding hairline and Carlyle’s weight gain would all be on display.
“The one I love is Renton in a mirrored room when he’s in a big closeup and you see his crow’s feet,” Boyle says. “When you look at him in the original film, he’s just like an eggshell. There you go. That’s us. To be able to put actors literally side by side with their 20year-old selves, shaking hands with themselves 20 years ago, is an incredibly powerful tool.”