Director Danny Boyle was subjected to questions from the audience at the recent Raindance East Festival. Paul Nash went along to hear him talk about his earlier films, 28 Days Later and his latest release, Millions
Danny Boyle (28 Days Later, Trainspotting , the up-coming Millions) could have chosen to screen any of his own films to start his Director in Residence Q&A at the recent Raindance East Festival and have been sure of a warm reception. But he did not take the easy route; he picked Elem Klimov's Idi i smotri (Come and See). Danny jokingly admitted "enjoy the film" might not have been the most fitting introduction to possibly one of the most harrowing war films ever made.
Why Come and See ?
I hadn't made any films by that time, I'd worked in the theatre, and when you're working in film or in television you learn very, very quickly that 75% of what you experience is sound. It's amazing that everyone bows down to the camera department on set and sound people are usually treated as pariahs. I just remember thinking about it at the time and every time I've worked on a film since then I've remembered this film, not in detail, but just to think about the sound.
They use the limitations of sound. On the Hollywood side of movies sound technology has developed enormously, surround sound, and we're all trying to import it into our homes, and Hollywood is feeding that. But what this kind of film does is the opposite of that really, it uses the absolute centre, what it does is take out everything apart from someone's footsteps through water. You can hear the dialogue, but all the stuff around it appears to be filtered out. We appear to have very little access to sound in a way. I think it probably comes out of editing really, that the Russians pioneered, with modern aesthetics, and you see it in visual terms at the collage towards the end. I'm sure it came out of that, the ability to layer and chop things in, really before it became acceptable to edit [sound] like that.
Is there a connection to Come and See and his own films?
None whatsoever really. You try to make films as to your personal experiences, rather than jump into someone else's. But that's me. The new film Millions really is much more tied up in consumer culture - that we live in a somewhat comfortable consumer culture, and we try to use that to depict the stories that we've got. In most films you have to accept that we live in that culture, we have abandoned ideology really; all the ideologies have been left behind except one. Shopping.
You have to be honest, we live in, what I regard as, quite a shallow age. Whereas this guy [Elem Klimov] said if he'd really shown how it was nobody would have been able to watch, including him. You can't fake those experiences; you have to be honest about your own. I grew up in a good working class family, and you try to show that, to be honest to that, say in the way the family in Millions is [depicted].
What were the influences for 28 Days Later ?
The screenplay is written by Alex Garland, a mad zombie fan, he's a Romero devotee. So we used to battle really, I respect them, but I'm not big zombie fan. Alex would kind of pull it that way - towards film references, and I would try to pull it the other way, towards modern apocalypse. [with] modern references like Yugoslavia , Rwanda . We did have ambitions for the film to be like that. It did begin, initially, as a film about basically road rage. But remember when we started to make it those were our kind of references, there was a brief period [of media focus on] "social rage", I don't know if you remember "supermarket trolley rage", "parking rage". We though we'll make a film about that. We were shooting the beginning of the film and 9/11 happened - and its certainly one of the reasons the film was a big hit in America , because by the time the film came out the were ready, they wanted to see films that in some way touched on that.
How was shooting 28 Days Later on DV?
It was wonderful really. I'd finished The Beach, and came back and got in touch with Anthony Dod Mantle, probably best known as the Dogme cameraman. And he worked a lot on MiniDV, we did a couple of very small films for television in Manchester , trying it out. Then we set up 28 Days Later, it seemed the perfect vehicle to use MiniDV, it felt like a documentary feel, or a pseudo feel that these cameras would survive a apocalypse. It also allowed use to make a more expensive film more cheaply, it allowed us to do the sequences at the beginning in a deserted London . It blew up very well [on 35mm]. Its getting even better, we used the Canon XL1, which is semi-professional camera. The new Panasonic is much better and there's a Sony HD camera about the same price that records on MiniDV. It does mean that what you blow up - more and more quality is kept. If any of you guys are thinking of writing a comedy, they're perfect for comedy, where quality isn't the issue; it's the cue, the wit, the bite of the writing and the performance.
Which of your films are your favourites?
The ones you're really fond of are the one's nobody else likes - A Life Less Ordinary - because the others tend to drift away, and you end up knowing less about them then other people, people come up to you and say about Trainspotting . [and] I can't remember exactly what they're saying, what they're on about, I can't remember the film as well.
I'm proud of the two kids in Millions , really proud of them, because we tried to make it a good experience for them. They knew nothing about the world we were introducing them into, and I wanted to be something they could always look back on with affection. I'm really proud that they paid off.
Paul Nash
A full version of this article appears in the Summer 2005 edition of Close-Up Film magazine
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