20 YEARS LATER ...
Director Danny Boyle grows up, along with his “Trainspotting” characters, in “T2”
How do you follow up on the hit movie “Trainspotting”? For director Danny Boyle and screenwriter John Hodge, you wait 20 years, and weave your own experiences into the lives of Renton, Sick Boy, Spud and Begbie.
Ambition is not a problem for Danny Boyle. Humility might be. The Oscar-winning director of “Slumdog Millionaire” and “28 Days Later” is known for his lyrical and invigorating films, starting with his darkly comic 1994 debut “Shallow Grave” and continuing with 1996’s “Trainspotting,” the U.K. crossover hit that endeared a young Ewan McGregor to audiences around the world.
But when it came to following up “Trainspotting” with a sequel — adapted from the source material by Scottish novelist Irvine Welsh — Boyle and “Trainspotting” screenwriter John Hodge learned a hard lesson.
“We tried to adapt it 10 years ago after Irvine published his ‘Porno’ book (the literary sequel to ‘Trainspotting’) and we didn’t do it, because it wasn’t good enough,” said Boyle, 60. “There weren’t enough reasons to return to the characters. I didn’t think any of us realized at the time the real reason it wasn’t good is because we didn’t put any of ourselves into. We weren’t honest enough about what had gone on with us.”
Like the book from which it is adapted, “T2 Trainspotting” revisits Renton, Sick Boy, Spud and Begbie following the events of the original film, which ended (no spoilers here) badly for most of them. The former heroin addicts and thieves are now scattered around Europe, searching for purpose in a society that has moved on without them, until circumstances conspire to push them back together again.
“Trainspotting” was a stylistic barnburner for Boyle, fueled by expertly curated music (Iggy Pop, Underworld, Lou Reed) and driven by precision visual storytelling. However, it provided nothing but charred wreckage for Boyle and Hodge in attempting to duplicate — or even build upon — its critical and commercial
success. The film, which was produced for $2 million, made a worldwide gross of more than $70 million, according to Variety.
Moreover, it flash-froze a certain mid-’90s aesthetic of wistful, wounded sarcasm amid economic decay and desperation, which made hardscrabble Edinburgh look surprisingly like anywhere the film happened to be screening. With its sharp critiques of consumer culture and an impeccable self-awareness, revisiting it could only ever come off as stale, Boyle feared.
“It’s a balance,” he said of the original’s alchemical blend of mood and subject matter. “You had to have a respect for the first one and yet you didn’t have to be cowed by it, because obviously the reality is that if you consider doing something like this and going back to these characters, you know you are diving into people’s affection for them. You have to have good reason and that.”
Boyle and Hodge’s solution for the “Trainspotting” sequel was to put some distance between the two projects, including not even calling it a “Trainspotting” sequel. The studio was furious with their “perverse” joke, but Boyle felt strongly enough that the project should grow into its own identity — and not one dictated by fans or financiers.
“The two films have to have a conversation with each other,” he said. “I love the fact that there are odd moments (in ‘T2’) where you’re in the same location but it’s (filmed in) a different city, or you hear a music memory but it’s quietly different. Only very occasionally do you pull the silken thread directly between the two films and intercut them. I’d never had that experience before, nor had I introduced a film which people already have an ownership of and on opinion about.”
“T2,” which opens March 23 at the Esquire Theatre in Denver, does not require knowledge of the original but certainly benefits from it. Its flurry of kinetic camera work, tastefully clever special effects and tongue-twisting dialogue always work in service of the narrative, which reunites the older and wiser (but not too wise) characters for another improbable, tense scheme that sorts their fates like marshmallows in a blender.
In addition to embracing themes of aging, gentrification and even immigration, the film strikingly critiques masculinity in a way that few directors would even attempt, let alone pull off, in commercial American cinema.
In “T2,” for example, Viagra is as much of a player as heroin was in the first film, both as physical commodity and dramatic metaphor.
“I watched it with the editor after about four weeks of making it and I was absolutely shocked at how virtually every scene is about masculinity — deeply disappointing masculinity,” Boyle said. “Like how badly men age, with kids running around looking for fathers who are not there. I was shocked.”
That’s to be expected given the mostly male cast, including returning principals McGregor, Jonny Lee Miller, Ewen Bremner and a once-again-brilliant Robert Carlyle. And since the solution to the “sequel problem” was to make “T2” into a personal film, plenty of Boyle and Hodge ended up on screen. Even if it’s not always obvious.
“It’s saturated with stuff about us, which of course the actors then took and found a way to express through their own matrix of experience,” Boyle said. “Which is weird to say about a sequel, because the first one isn’t really that personal. But in the beginning (of ‘T2’), when (McGregor’s character) Renton misses his mother’s funeral, that’s me and my mum. I missed my mum’s death because I was working. It’s unforgivable in a sense.”
It’s not all pain, of course. “T2” contains some wickedly funny and hilariously harsh scenes that compete with or, at times, outdo the original’s audacious, buttonpushing sensibilities. But the film stands confidently on it own, even as it cleverly integrates crucial reference points to the original “Trainspotting.”
“We’re very proud of this film, John and I, because you do feel time looping weirdly on itself,” Boyle said. “It sounds terribly pretentious to talk about, but I believe it’s not a straight line, and maybe that’s just a consolation prize that you have for yourself to immunize yourself from reality. But to be able to loop back to the beginning of the original novel with this one, and find some hope for the most hopeless characters, that’s a kind of healing.”