Shooting up a Trainspotting sequel, older and wiser
As with any long-delayed family reunion, nobody was expecting the sequel to Trainspotting to be a piece of cake, or even a gob of heroin.
Least of all director Danny Boyle and star Ewan McGregor, whose friendship came apart over the casting for Boyle’s 2000 terror-in-paradise film The Beach, in which Leonardo DiCaprio got the lead gig McGregor felt Boyle had promised him.
McGregor and Boyle didn’t speak for most of the two decades since Trainspotting, a bleak satire about Edinburgh heroin addicts that became Britain’s smack-infused answer to the 1990s indie-film revolution spearheaded by the likes of America’s Quentin Tarantino and Steven Soderbergh. But now the sequel, T2 Trainspotting, is almost upon us, opening March 17 in Toronto theatres, with a few screenings starting Thursday night.
“Ewan and I fell out over The Beach, and it was my fault, and we reconciled about three or four years ago,” Boyle, 60, says from an Australia, one stop on a worldwide promotional tour.
“So by the time we were working on this seriously, when this script arrived two years ago, we were on good terms and I knew he’d do it. It was wonderful to work with him again. I’ve missed him, really.”
But getting McGregor, 45, to reprise his Mark Renton character — now older but not wiser, and in even bigger trouble than before — was just one of many hurdles to overcome on the sequel path.
Boyle also had to round up other key members of the Trainspotting cast: flash Sick Boy (Jonny Lee Miller), psycho Begbie (Robert Carlyle) and sad Spud (Ewen Bremner). He also found room in the film for a cameo by Renton’s ex-girlfriend Diane (Kelly Macdonald), while greatly expanding the female quotient with wily new character Veronika (Anjela Nedyalkova).
Then there was the small matter of the script, which returning screenwriter John Hodge adapted from two novels by Scottish author Irvine Welsh, the original Trainspotting and its followup, Porno.
The story had to be something the Manchester-born filmmaker really wanted to do, because his career has been noteworthy for its never-lookback variety of stories and genres. In the 23 years since his feature debut with the black comedy Shallow Grave, which also starred McGregor, he’s successfully tackled horror ( 28 Days Later), science fiction ( Sunshine), family comedy ( Millions), Bollywood-style romance (Oscar winner Slumdog Millionaire) and real-life survival drama ( 127 Hours), among other pursuits.
There were multiple attempts at a T2 script until Boyle got one he was satisfied with.
“We did do quite a few. We had a couple of false starts 10 years ago, which were terrible. They were complete traditional sequels: different plot, same characters. Kind of the same thing again with a different engine, or with different mechanics.
“There was no greater sense of the characters coming together again, other than obviously the trigger to Renton returning. I remember thinking they’re not good enough, and we’ll never make this. The actors will never agree to do it; I’m not even going to send it to them.”
He finally got a script that he and the actors liked, and shooting commenced. But when he was editing the film in post-production, he noticed something he hadn’t before: how much the children in the middle-aged lives of Renton, Spud, Sick Boy and Begbie were affecting the tone of the film. All these guys are now struggling to “Choose Life” not just for themselves, but also for the children they’ve fathered, and not in ideal circumstances.
Boyle also realized that T2 had to be much less of a drug-infused movie that Trainspotting was — although there are a lot of hilarious callbacks to the original — and to concentrate more of the boys-to-men struggle of the protagonists.
“What we decided in the end, in editing, is that it was really about what had happened to these men over time. We thought the film was about time (the 20 years past), and then we realized it was about masculine behaviour over time. It’s about what happens to men as they age very badly.”
But all of the actors playing them have aged delightfully. T2 may have been a difficult family reunion to pull off, but it’s turned out to be a happy one.
“They’ve changed, though, all of them. Including Ewan, because he’s directed a movie now ( American Pastoral), and Bobby has also directed a movie ( Barney Thomson) ... they now know so much about filmmaking, whereas I remember, the first time, how little they knew about filmmaking, just as I did my first time.”
Is it too soon to talk about making a T3?
“It would be for me,” Boyle says. “This one made me respect the amount of time that passed between the one and the other.
“Bobby, however, would love to do something. There’s a novel by Irvine that’s just been published recently, a very good one called The Blade Artist, which is about Begbie as a character: a very changed Begbie, or an apparently changed Begbie. Bobby’s very keen to do that. I don’t know whether you could call that T3, but it might be something ‘in the universe of,’ which seems so inevitable these days. But it would very odd to think of Trainspotting as a franchise!” Peter Howell is the Star’s movie critic. His column usually runs Fridays.