Danny Boyle
Danny Boyle
Daniel "Danny" Francis Boyle is an English film director, producer, screenwriter and theatre director, known for his work on films including Shallow Grave, Trainspotting, The Beach, 28 Days Later, Slumdog Millionaire, Sunshine, 127 Hours, and Steve Jobs. Boyle's 2008 film Slumdog Millionaire was nominated for ten Academy Awards and won eight, including the Academy Award for Best Director. Boyle was presented with the Extraordinary Contribution to Filmmaking Award at the 2008 Austin Film Festival, where he also introduced that year's...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionDirector
Date of Birth20 October 1956
If I was American, I think I'd live in New York, because I like that East Coast mentality. There's nothing wrong with Hollywood. If you want to be a big time filmmaker, you should go to Hollywood.
There are three huge, titanic, space movies which if you ever make a film [about space] you cannot avoid. You may want to avoid them but you cannot. I've never known a genre like it where you are dictated to by these films, 2001, Alien, and Tarkovsky's Solaris.
I've always wanted to do a space movie.
Come a crisis, we want other people.
I don't want to make pompous, serious films.
I don't want to make pompous, serious films; I like films that have a kind of vivacity about them.
We want to see drama told in a cathartic way, with power, with emotion where you empathize and then you're frightened. All those feelings charge up in you and you feel for the story.
I want people to leave the cinema feeling that something's been confirmed for them about life.
Even though one of them is about an Edinburgh junkie and one's a little boy of eight in Manchester, you want them to always portray their world in such a vivid way that the audience can disappear inside the story.
sort of to reintroduce life into the country, ... So that's the premise of it. It's got a good idea in it. I like that.
You experience the films through the actors, so they're all locked into your imagination in some kind of layer of fantasy or hatred or wherever they settle into your imagination.
You can have great sequences with music, but if you don't have the acting you're bored after 15 minutes. Or not bored, but you're like, 'So what?'
You know what actors are like; they moisturize every night. They're frozen in time.
Movies about space raise those questions of what we're doing here, and that inevitably introduces a spiritual dimension.