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
I've just been to the Taj Mahal which I'd never been to and I'm not a very romantic kind of guy but it is the most romantic thing I've ever seen.
If you take a loud pride in anything, people will rightly shoot you down.
One of Dickens' biggest influences was the growth of London as a Victorian city, and the extremes being created as it expanded.
I have this theory that your first film is always your best film in some way. I always try to get back to that moment when you're not relying on things you've done before.
Actors are steeped in a world of agents and where the next job is coming from and what are their expenses and what is the hotel like. You want to take them out of that world and dump them into another world, so that when you meet them on the screen they don't seem like the guy who was in two others movies that year.
Brian Cox is the nicest guy, but he's so arrogant.
The great thing with film is that it doesn't have an ego. It's just a film. Everybody that makes them has an ego, and the problem with awards and stuff like that is that it always affects the egos, and everyone gets stained by it in some way. And that can be fine and very innocent, but it can be horrible as well.
For us, destiny always feels... if you obey, it's almost a passive thing.
I tend to score with songs from Western pop music.
I was brought up a very strict Catholic and I don't practice anymore or anything.
Directing is a mixture of compromise and perfectionism. When you lose the judgment of which is more important at any particular moment, you're time is over. They find you out and send you packing.
Both of my sisters have been teachers and they used to say you get asked between 300 and 600 questions every day which you have to answer. That's exactly what directing is. And the vast majority of those questions are not very interesting really, but they need somebody to make a decision - a good one or a bad one - and they follow it.
The problem with being British... I don't know if it's me being British or being raised a strict Catholic, but you never really enjoy success.
Always changing genres, making very different films is a good idea. It's a way of making yourself feel vulnerable again, getting back to that innocence. As is working within a circumspect budget.