Danny Boyle
For Choice Brits, Danny Boyle introduces Touching The Void.
Manchester-born director, Danny Boyle, is one of the most spirited voices in UK cinema. His huge horror hit 28 Days Later, which stormed international cinemas last year, was the sixth collaboration between him and producer Andrew Macdonald. Through Macdonald’s company, Figment, the pair made Shallow Grave, Trainspotting, A Life Less Ordinary, Alien Love Triangle and The Beach and acted as co-executive producers of Twin Town directed by Kevin Allen. Boyle has also directed two films for the BBC, Strumpet starring Christopher Eccleston, and Vacuuming Completely Nude in Paradise starring Timothy Spall.
www.artandculture.com on Danny Boyle:
“Everything in the world of Danny Boyle seems at once dark, decaying, and shining with an unfathomable luster. He often exposes his characters to inauspicious conditions, to situations admitting no happy resolution, to encounters that incite every lamentable emotion a young mind can imagine.
For some reason, though, it’s not all that bad. In fact, it’s hilarious and undeniably hip. The state of affairs may be ugly, but the sense rising out Boyle’s films is essentially affirmative. They excrete a kind of pleasure from the pores of their terminally acne-ed skin.
Boyle is best known for Trainspotting (1996), his take on Irvine Welsh’s celebrated novel of the same name. He admits that the project, which catapulted him onto the world stage, at first intimidated him: the danger of botching a book as good as Welsh’s was a substantial burden. But, with a keen sense for translating Welsh’s world into film, Boyle captures all the horror and splendor of post-Thatcher Edinburgh’s dead-end slums, and the disgruntled and drug-addled youth who inhabit them.
Boyle is fascinated by group dynamics. As Trainspotting follows the efforts of Mark Renton (Ewan McGregor) to break free of this milieu, it simultaneously develops the perverse allure of the scene he’s immersed in: this crowd may be belligerent, depressed, self-deprecating, and drug-addicted, but at least they haven’t sold out to the banality of middle-class routine, and they maintain an intense loyalty to their friends. With everything seeming hopeless and increasingly depraved, Renton runs through a series of misadventures, by turns comic and tragic, in which betrayal is the only way out. But Boyle has set everything up so that this betrayal is in fact a rather uplifting event.
Before Trainspotting, Boyle had taken up a corresponding theme - the disintegration of the group dynamic - in Shallow Grave. The unexpected death of a new housemate, and the large sum of money the others find on him, incites a fit of madness that touches everyone involved. But once again there is a sense of frolic and pleasurable frenzy in all of this - the surface of the film teems with an irrepressible ebullience. Boyle’s more recent projects show the same spirit: A Life Less Ordinary (1997) casts Ewan McGregor as a cleaning man who goes on a rampage when he’s replaced by a robot; the protagonist of The Beach (Leonardo DiCaprio) is addicted to pop music, video games, war movies, and nicotine. But none of these provides him the ultimate escape from the doldrums of modern life, which he finds (he thinks) on an island paradise off Thailand.
Black comedy is Boyle’s way out of the dark and involute world of postmodernity. You can’t help but feel, after watching his films, that it’s a pretty good solution to what would otherwise be an intolerable state of affairs. Perhaps the words of R.E.M. express better than anything his pervasive sentiment: "It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine..."
Art and Culture magazine’s recommended Danny Boyle links:
Chatting with the Big Guns: A Life Less Ordinary, Danny Boyle and his no-nonsense producer Andrew MacDonald talk about their American adventure with A Life Less Ordinary.
www.thei.aust.com
Train Conductor: Boyle talks candidly to Salon about his initial fear of not living up to Irvine Welsh's great novel Trainspotting and of not connecting with American audiences. He also explains why he still has enough integrity to snub Hollywood.
www.salon.com
Trainspotting - an engaging review of Danny Boyle’s angst-ridden
tale of a group of junkies in Edinburgh. Great behind-the-scenes commentary on the making of the film and Boyle’s personal interests in the story.
www.thei.aust.com
