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: THE NOSTALGIA FILE :: WEB EXCLUSIVE :: 2800 DAYS LATER Director Danny Boyle goes from Shallow Grave to child’s play in the blink of a decade With his latest film, Millions, director Danny Boyle faces his harshest critics: Its two young actors. “I give it one star,” says 10-year-old Alex Etel, impishly. One star? For your debut film? You, whose mug is on the poster? “Well, it is very unsettling,” elaborates 13-year-old Lewis McGibbon. And, indeed, it is. Less aggressively maybe than Shallow Grave, Boyle’s first feature, which raised hackles in 1995, or the next year’s heroin-streaked Trainspotting, a one-two punch that put Boyle and his star, Ewan McGregor, on the international movie map. [Not to mention 2003’s viral horror hit 28 Days Later, Boyle’s most successful picture, made like his first two on home ground in the UK.] While every cloud in the more kid-friendly Millions has a silver lining, there are a lot of clouds: The death of a parent, the menacing specter of a thief in hot pursuit of ill-gotten gains that have fallen into the boys’ hands, and the hectoring asides of Catholic saints who as it happens haunt the imagination of the director. “It’s not The Incredibles,” McGibbon adds. “Which is brilliant,” says Etel, whose personal favorite film is 2 Fast 2 Furious. “And it’s not like Without A Paddle, which is even more brilliant,” says McGibbon, who with Magic Marker has drawn a quite-good caricature of its bespectacled auteur on a glass wall within a Fox Building conference room in New York, where Boyle and the boys met with press last month. [The cartoon Boyle utters the word “Action” from a balloon near his lips.] If Boyle’s ears are burning, somewhere else in the building, he’s not letting on. Comfortably clad in a lime-green sweater, the director has the laid-back look and attitude of a college professor who bases his grades on creative thinking. Trying to give Millions a different look from made-in-Manchester films that emphasize its “very bleak, rainy, industrial side,” Boyle and screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce (24 Hour Party People) hit upon giving it a Christmas setting but shooting it in the bright sun of summer. “Which I know the kids thought was absolutely stupid, making them wear these big wooly coats all day long,” he laughs. The good-natured grief the boys are giving the director when he’s not around (he was “rubbish” as a soccer player during breaks between filming, though he’s told other reporters the exact opposite, they insist) shows how his experiments to differentiate his movies can backfire in practice on a set, but the net result is a distinctive body of work. There is no template for a Danny Boyle picture, and no recurrent theme among his six feature films to date. “Millions is an attempt to make a film about an act of generosity. There was an impulse of generosity immediately after the tsunami,” which, he says, sadly, took the life of a set dresser who worked on his film The Beach, shot on Thailand’s Phi Phi Island. “As it fades everybody puts up their little barriers of cynicism again, but it was there. The movie tries to see if that moment is possible. Ultimately Damian (Etel’s character) wins a small but important victory for that impulse.” His movies are guided, however, by a rule of thumb, summed up by the title of his last, little-seen film with McGregor, 1997’s A Life Less Ordinary. “My films often deal with ordinary people, but they’re not ordinary pictures of life. I always make them vivid. Making a film gives you a kind of freedom, to express the wildness of your dreams.” He and Boyce had strict Catholic upbringings in Manchester. “Frank remains a Catholic, and has seven children to prove it,” says Boyle, who has a more modest brood of three, all teenagers. “We were surrounded by the iconography of the church and the saints from childhood. Though I am an ex-Catholic today, I still carry a lot of guilt around, and I try to make sure my kids don’t have that. Millions reflects more of my own childhood than it does theirs. My kids have seen all my films, which people find a bit alarming,” given their unrestrained content. “I think when you see forbidden things depicted, it’s a release in a way.” Boyle plans to revisit the “forbidden things” of Trainspotting, his signature film, in a sequel loosely based on author Irvine Welch’s followup novel Porno. But audiences shouldn’t plan to roll up their sleeves for another fix till at least another decade. “What we’ll try to do is look at those same people, played by the same actors, when they hit middle age,” Boyle explains. “What have those hedonists, those guys who abused themselves in their 20s when they thought they were indestructible, made of their lives now that they’re in their 40s? I expect the actors will bring their own experience to it. But we have to wait till they look middle-aged. Actors seem to have this time when they’re just suspended, age-wise, for a long period. Ewan, for example, looks basically the same today.” While Boyle was making Millions, McGregor has been making, well…millions. Coincidentally, another division of Fox releases the actor’s latest film, Robots, today, and he has a slew of other credits on the horizon, from Star Wars: Episode III—Revenge of the Sith to Michael Bay’s latest skull-cracker, The Island. Scuttlebutt has it that the two haven’t spoken since the powers-that-be chose Leonardo DiCaprio over McGregor to star in The Beach, a washout with critics and audiences in 2000. “I haven’t spoken to him in a while, but I have bumped into him a few times in London,” Boyle says. “We worked really closely on our films, but I’m not really close friends with any actors. Directing is really social and when you’re surrounded by people all the time for the six months it takes to make a film I like to get away from them.” Where he goes, typically, is into the planning stage of his next film. He and writer Alex Garland (who wrote the novel The Beach, and the 28 Days Later screenplay) are heating up a small-scale outer space adventure about an expedition to the sun. Boyle, who is watching every sci-fi he can to prepare for Sunshine, hopes to shoot the movie in his preferred location, England. “I like America but I prefer to have a more temporary presence here,” he says, admitting that taking the helm of a big studio movie “I’m not sure is one of my strengths.” He adds, “I love coming here, though, because of how much people love movies, and not necessarily mine, either. You don’t get that in Britain and I think that’s part of why we don’t really produce many interesting films. It’s not in our blood; it’s not an obsession. People you meet here, from doormen to taxi drivers, are so much more interested in cinema, and they know more about my older films than I can remember anymore.” If and when the Trainspotting sequel comes together, Boyle, who got his start in film in his mid-30s after a career in theater and television, will be closing in on 60. Should he survive Michael Bay, McGregor will be in his mid-40s. At this juncture, the two stars of Millions, who will be in their early 20s, will not be available for supporting roles, however. Now that they’ve tasted the good life of Manhattan—or, at least, all the mini-burgers, chicken wings, and mozzarella sticks they could handle for their catered lunch—they’re moving on. “It was a good movie to make,” Etel fesses up. “But Danny’s a small director. Not like Spielberg. Now that would be fun.” Boyle’s films made a star out of Ewan McGregor. Could they imagine the same thing happening to them? “If he got his start with Danny, just like us, then maybe it already has,” muses McGibbon, with a sly smile.