Sunshine on Danny Boyle

Briilliiaanntt! Danny Boyle in full flow bears more than a passing resemblance to the Fast Show’s boundlessly enthusiastic teenager, Brilliant Kid.

Today the director of Trainspotting is mostly raving about the sun, Kenny from South Park, student digs, acrobatic planes, CGI hamsters, cordless kettles, Dr Brian Cox, D:Ream, the God particle and Hugh Grant. Grant apart, these things all play a role in Sunshine, Boyle’s new film and his first foray into science fiction.
“I am a sci-fi fan,” says Boyle, whose boyish lust for life knocks a decade off his 50 years. “I’m not a Star Wars geek. I like the hardcore stuff, the Nasa stuff. But I hadn’t thought, ‘Oh I must do a sci-fi film.’”
Then he read the script for Sunshine by Alex Garland, his collaborator on 28 Days Later and The Beach. “I thought it was brilliant. What a great starting point: eight astronauts strapped to the back of this massive bomb, behind a shield, flying towards the sun. Fantastic. I’d go and watch that.”
Set half a century in the future, Sunshine, which cost BD 15m to make, is not as much of a boys-only affair as it first appears. The hero of this claustrophobic thriller is the slight Irish actor Cillian Murphy, all hooded eyes and sloping shoulders. The sun is dying, the earth in permanent winter and Murphy is the physicist in an eight-strong Asian-American team of astronauts 16 months into a mission to reignite the sun with a nuclear bomb the size of Manhattan.
Boyle reckons Sunshine is the first sci-fi film with the sun as its star, probably because until now we haven’t had the computer-generated wizardry to represent its molten fury in flaming close-up. In keeping with his genre-hopping reputation, Sunshine appears a world away from Trainspotting. But it does share one small motif: the CGI sun is “very, very trippy”, according to Boyle. “That was one of the briefs to the CGI people - it should feel like hallucinations towards the end.”
Three years in the making, the director began by putting his international cast - including the Australian Rose Byrne, American Chris Evans and more established Asian talents Michelle Yeoh and Hiroyuki Sanada - in a student dorm in Mile End, east London. “They’ve got some very nice student digs there but it ain’t the Dorchester (hotel). Actors want to impress at the beginning,” Boyle chuckles, “so you take advantage of that by suddenly saying, ‘Right, you’re here for two weeks.’
What you’re doing is creating a siege mentality. It’s just like football managers. You’re making them feel like it’s eight of them, alone, against the world. At the start of the film, the characters have been together for 16 months and you’ve got to make some gesture towards that.”
The film’s premise may strain credibility, but Boyle devoted his energies to making his actors convincing as astronauts in the claustrophobic corridors of a space ship. He took them scubadiving, introduced them to the work of Richard Seymour, a futurologist who invented the cordless kettle, and put them in a 747 flight simulator.
Then Boyle dragged them into an acrobatic plane. “They put a glove on the dashboard and there’s a moment of zero-G where the glove just floats off. It’s fantastic. It’s so they could experience things that they hadn’t in their last film. You don’t want them bringing that film with them. You want to pop the actor’s bubble and let them be part of this film.”
Finally, he brought in Dr Brian Cox from Cern, the particle physics laboratory in Geneva, as their scientific adviser. “He somehow makes it accessible and puts it in human terms,” says Boyle. “When you begin to learn about the science, it makes your mind swell.”
Scientists may scoff at Sunshine’s most bonkers bits and may also feel that Murphy is too young (he’s 30) and good-looking to save the world. Boyle will have none of it. Take Cox, he says. He is a proper scientist “who is very handsome and used to be in D:Ream. He’s one of the backing musicians on Things Can Only Get Better. And he looks like Cillian.”
Boyle gave Murphy his big break on 28 Days Later, his 2002 zombie movie. “He’s a reluctant hero, that’s what’s good about him. He’s next door actually.”
Murphy is being interviewed in the adjoining hotel room. Boyle adopts a conspiratorial whisper. “He’s quite modest as a person, and he has to be pushed into the centre of the film a bit. He kind of turns away from the camera. I saw him doing that in the Ken Loach film [The Wind that Shakes the Barley] as well. He has to be eased in there and that’s really appealing. It stops it being too obviously heroic.”
Boyle shrugs off his reputation for uncovering young actors. Shallow Grave saw Ewan McGregor, Christopher Eccleston and Peter Mullan enter the mainstream, while Trainspotting made names of a generation of actors from Robert Carlyle to Kelly Macdonald. Does that make him a great talent spotter?
“Huh huh huh. It makes me out to be Simon Cowell. I trained in the theatre. A lot of film directors are quite scared of actors. They are a bit of a nightmare sometimes, but I like them. It looks like cunning, but you try to get extra things from them all the time, by stealth, by making them feel confident, so they trust you and you can push a bit.”
As well as deploying natural cunning to create a cast of characters under siege, Boyle ramped up the claustrophobia in Sunshine by refusing to cut back to shots of our planet as “earth jeopardy” films usually do. Most of the action is within the space ship, Icarus II, and he increased the sense of confinement by resisting the urge to frequently show off its magnificent outside (“It’s good, isn’t it?” he says proudly of the twirling, enormous CGI ship, before explaining that the designers who built it are known in the trade as “hamsters”). Adding to the sensory deprivation are shots of Murphy from inside the helmet of his gold space suit. “We came up with this idea of a Kenny funnel shape for the helmet. South Park was one of the drawings we used as a reference point,” he laughs.
Sunshine may mirror the apocalyptic tone of current debates over climate change but Garland, says Boyle, deliberately chose an alternative future: the earth getting colder and science as a saviour. Boyle, however, agrees his film is about the hubris of science. He tried to imbue his actors with the “uncompromising, cold eye” of scientists. He lowers his voice again.
“Brian Cox is the nicest guy, but he’s so arrogant. I used to tell the actors to watch the way he’ll just go ‘no’. He works at Cern, where they are looking for this particle they nickname the God particle. There is a tiny, tiny chance that when they collide these protons they’ll create a black hole into which we’ll all disappear. I said, ‘You’re still going ahead with it?’ He said, ‘Don’t worry about it, you won’t know anything about it [if it happens].’ Everything will be gone!
“We had this argument in the bar last night. He said it’s absolutely critical we use nuclear power and Cillian said, ‘What about the Irish sea? It’s so polluted and there’s all these leukaemia clusters.’ And Cox went, ‘If we use nuclear power we can give light and food to a million people in Africa and you’re worried about a few hundred people in Ireland?’” In keeping with his habit of hopping between completely contrasting projects, Boyle’s next scheduled film is Slum Dog Millionaire, based on a true story about a boy who wins the Indian version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire but faces the widespread suspicion that he cheated. Boyle has just come back from a scouting trip to Mumbai, where it sounds like the pace of life would suit his kinetic film-making.
Before the sun burns out, Boyle, slightly surprisingly, says he’d like to work with Hugh Grant. He also hopes to team up with McGregor again. The pair fell out badly when the director refused to cast his usual leading man in The Beach. They have only spoken a couple of times since and, momentarily, Boyle’s enthusiasm dims. “I don’t really hang out with actors. You can’t really be top friends with actors as a director because you are often judging them about something they want to do and you won’t give them.”
Although some years back McGregor publicly dismissed talk of a sequel to Trainspotting in the form of Irvine Welsh’s novel Porno, Boyle still holds out hope. “I’m sure we will get back together again, I hope we can, because we had a really good run. He’s one of those guys who can do it, who has got that magic thing that people love. You don’t come across it very often.”
The script for Porno “starts with this amazing premise. Begbie is in jail for 17 years for manslaughter.” Boyle sounds perky again. “He gets this guy to stab him so he can go into hospital and break out and this guy stabs him in the wrong place, in the kidney.”
He doubles up, chuckling. “You can feel the characters straightaway. We just need the [Trainspotting] actors to feel a bit older. They look like they’re in a spa every weekend rather than a bar. But when age hits them we’ll be there, waiting.”