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
Normally, I'm a very controlling director. Directors ARE controlling. It's part of the job, but there's various degrees of it and the constructs I normally work on are very controlling constructs.
You live your life and it ends quite quickly and all you can do with it is pass it on decently to someone else. Whether directly or indirectly, behave decently to other people.
It's interesting, the worse things get in cities, the tougher that cities get, the more brutal the humor is. The tougher [things] people face, the darker the sense of humor gets and I find that incredibly optimistic.
The perfect equation is form equals content. The style of the film reflects the story, and that's what you're always aiming for. You're not always necessarily successful at it, but that's the ambition that you're trying to do.
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.
You use elements of noir, but you don't want it to be too noir-ish. You don't want it to be advertised as though you're asking people to go and watch an updated noir. I don't think they'll go do that. They want to see a modern story.
When you're in zero gravity everything moves at the same speed and nothing stops it. If you throw something it travels forever but it still travels at the speed you threw it at. To make it plausible, movies have chosen to show it in slow motion.
If the American taxpayer knew how much they paid per person to put Neil Armstrong on the moon they would never have paid it. It was hidden from them deliberately because the costs were astronomical.
It just seduces you when you read a story and your brain relates to it. You recognize or connect with it. You identify with it; you're bound to.