Danny Boyle talks at Goldsmiths (From News Shopper)

Danny Boyle talks at Goldsmiths

10:50am Wednesday 5th March 2008 in News By Kerry Ann Eustice

TWO of the most iconic scenes in British cinema - a breathtakingly-deserted Westminster Bridge at rush hour in 28 Days Later and drug addict Renton (Ewan McGregor) emerging from the most squalid toilet in Scotland in Trainspotting - can be traced to one director, Danny Boyle.

Fresh from filming his latest project Scumdog Millionaire in India, the acclaimed Brit talent made a special appearance at Goldsmiths, University of London last week to speak at the Olive Till Memorial Event.

Invited by Stuart Till, son of Olive, chair of the UK Film Council and the man who gave Boyle's first film Shallow Grave the go-ahead for distribution, Boyle talked about his influences, his experience and gave advice to the assembled Screen School students.

As a huge fan of all the director's work, Leisure went along to ask Danny if there will be a 28 Months Later, find out his plans for Trainspotting follow up, Porno, and hear about the highs and lows of his career.

You're famed for genre-hopping and each film being dramatically different from the last. You've also said as you get more successful it becomes harder to control what you're doing. How do you balance you ideas with the constraints and expectations of the industry

Basically, you just follow your heart really in whatever you choose to do. There's a lot of positioning goes on. You mention the quote about getting successful. Especially when you have a success, all the agents in America are trying to get you to do stuff.

There's sort of things you should do. A franchise movie, especially these days, at the moment, because they've become a de rigueur for a director to be part of the franchise and make a franchise your own and all that sort of stuff.

You can do those things and there's nothing wrong with doing those things but I've always responded to scripts or ideas and just followed those regardless of if they make sense or what kind of scale they are at the time.

And then you can never blame anyone if it turns out crap, which sometimes they do, and when they don't really work you can never really blame anyone because you can't then say I should change agents' I shouldn't have done that'.

You take responsibility for it yourself really.

And it's fantastic to do different things because a lot of the job is very boring, in a way. I'm sure it looks very glamorous from a distance but a lot of it is very, very boring.

95 per cent of directing is organising people, just like any administrative, managerial job really. Getting good people in, keeping them happy, making sure they're in on time, all those kinds of things.

It can get very boring, so if you're making the same film again and again it would be compounded, that feeling. And you always try and search for something different.

I always search for something that's going to be a challenge and make it really difficult for you.

So you try and make a film with kids, which is a challenge and I've just made a film in India with an all Indian cast which didn't speak much English and that's a huge challenge. Those are the sort of challenges that you set yourself.

I'm trying to make an animated film and stuff like that. It's all about trying to do stuff like that really and not worry about how it looks in retrospect. If it looks a bit of a mess, then it looks a little bit if a mess.

They turn out the same anyway. That's one of the worst things is that you're making the film and you think that's the same fucking film I've just made'. They feel like it sometimes. You think that's the same scene, how did that get there?'

This is a quote from Xan Brooks' review of The Beach in Sight and Sound. "DiCaprio spreads his towel all over The Beach. It's a classic example of Hollywood muscle run riot". What is your response to that?

One of the things you have to learn as a director, no matter what happens to you in the annals of Sight and Sound, whatever you're called by an organ like that. 98 per cent of the people who go to the cinema go to watch actors. The tiny proportion might be interested in the director or who wrote it, even less so who wrote it. Or who did the music.

And you have to accept that. And you have to learn it as a director as well because you have to service that contract, which is you have to make an emotional contact with the audience which can be a good one, a bad one.

It doesn't have to be wholesome, it doesn't have to be likeable characters it can be dislikeable characters, whatever. But that is the contract really for what people go to the cinema for, and it's always been that way.

That's why there is a star system, for all its bad things and good things about it. You have to work with that sometimes. As it happens, I'm not that good at really, really big films. I know what I'm better at which is squeezing as much juice out of as little as possible.

When you do a big film, you tend to get everything; all the money, all the power everything you want.

So it's not like Sight and Sound imagined, that Leonardo DiCaprio comes in and takes over the film. He's not like that, he's an amazing bloke, who'd do everything for you, fantastically supportive of any director he works with but that's not the story they want to read.

They want to read it wasn't a very good film because Leonardo DiCaprio ruined it.

It doesn't work like that really, I didn't find.

It's just what suits me is to do smaller-scale films and try and make an event of them. And you sort of realise that after a while, what you're better at.

It's very embarrassing coming here and hearing things said about you. I believe that we're inherently modest which is not a great quality to qualify yourself for Hollywood.

You have to really go there and brazen yourself, brazen it out. It's all about confidence and surface, to work in the industry there.

I'm more for working in this industry. And our industry tends to be based in west London. And I've never been a big fan of out there really. I find south London, here, and east London, where I've always lived, that there's some industry there.

I've always been very proud of 28 Days Later which we made entirely in east London and there needs to be more breakout of that kind of industry. Rather than it just being James Bond movies that are made at Pinewood.

I think that will be something that will happen more and more and it will bring better people into the industry.

Because the industry is quite small, I'm sure it looks very intimidating and awesome to you looking at it from a distance. But a lot of them aren't that special, the people. They're not, they're regular people.

There are few very different people and there needs to be a lot, lot more. There are no women in the industry, absolutely zero virtually. And you think that's insane, these are stories being told about human life, 50 per cent of which at least are women so there should be more women.

You've said becoming associated with a franchise is not the route for you. How do the 28 Months Later rumours figure in this?

(Laughs) I've got an idea, and it's not a sequel as such. I don't think it will happen. But I've got an idea, yeah