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
Movies about space raise those questions of what we're doing here, and that inevitably introduces a spiritual dimension.
It's easy to like the most popular films, but I have a great fondness for 'A Life Less Ordinary'.
I grew up in a city, I'm a city person - I go on holiday and I'm bored.
Some of us are interested in directors, but really the vast majority of us are interested in actors. 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.
It's a nice way to put the focus back on this simple act... if someone creates you.
I'd love to do a modern-day musical that's full of original music. To get your contemporaries to sing and dance without looking foolish and for it to be transformational and magical and all those things a musical is supposed to be.
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.
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.
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.