Danny Boyle Interview, Sunshine (2007)

 Posted by: Sheila Roberts

MoviesOnline sat down with British director Danny Boyle to talk about his new film, "Sunshine,” a high tension sci fi-action-horror space thriller filled with eye-popping visual effects and edge-of-your-seat action. The idea for the film was born in the agile imagination of writer Alex Garland, the leading British novelist who made waves with his debut book "The Beach” and wrote the screenplay for the acclaimed sci-fi thriller "28 Days Later.” With a mix of far-reaching imagination and technical virtuosity, Boyle ventures into unexplored realms of outer space in this intense, claustrophobic adventure about a crew of scientists and astronauts who literally are humanity’s last stand for survival.

"Sunshine” is set 50 years from now and begins with a singularly compelling concept: The sun is dying and mankind is dying with it. Our last hope is the Icarus II, a spaceship with a crew of eight men and women whose mission is to deliver a payload to reignite the failing Sun and breathe new life into the star. But deep into their voyage, their mission starts to unravel after a fatal mistake is made when they attempt to respond to a distress beacon from a spaceship that disappeared seven years earlier. With no longer any radio contact with Earth, the crew is soon fighting not only for their lives, but for their sanity as their mission to save the Sun begins to disintegrate under the massive stress.

Boyle has already forged a reputation for daring eclecticism, having traversed from the irreverent and influential cult film "Trainspotting” to the family fable "Millions” to a harrowing, thought-provoking reinvention of the zombie film with "28 Days Later.” With "Sunshine,” Boyle was drawn in not only by the chance to envision a futuristic space voyage but especially to explore the crew’s psychological journey as they head out across the cosmos, towards the literal center of our lives, the Sun.

"Traveling to the Sun is a great concept visually, but also very interesting psychologically,” Boyle muses. "There is the question about what happens to your mind when you meet the creator of all things in the universe, which for some people is a spiritual, religious idea, and for other people is a purely scientific idea. We are all made up of particles of exploded star, so what would it be like to get close to the Sun, the star from which all the life in our solar system comes from? I thought it would be a huge mental challenge to try and capture that.”

Danny Boyle is a fascinating director and we really appreciated his time. Here’s more of what he had to tell us about "Sunshine” which stars Cillian Murphy, Michelle Yeoh, Chris Evans, Troy Garity, Rose Byrne, Cliff Curtis, Hiroyuki Sanada, Mark Strong, and Benedict Wong:

MoviesOnline: What inspired you to make this movie and how is it different from your previous movies?

DANNY BOYLE: The genre is obviously very different and although I was a fan of sci fi, I didn’t realize quite how much a fan of sci fi I was until I looked at my track record and I realized I’d watched everything because that makes you a geek already. You’re a fan and I didn’t quite realize it. But I loved them and the chance to make one with an original idea. This journey to the sun was fantastic.

MoviesOnline: Did you use different techniques in this one?

DANNY BOYLE: Yes, it’s very different. It’s much more classical. I tend to make high energy pictures that try and disrupt things with odd camera angles or things like that. Sci fi tends to be much more classical. This kind of sci fi is serious, classic 70’s sci fi which leads to philosophical ideas. It isn’t like a playground. It’s very serious. So you tend to shoot quite classically. The beginning of the film is much slower. This is the slowest film I’ve ever made in terms of the first half hour. It’s quite slow. You can’t speed it up. I tried. And it doesn’t work. It has to go at that pace. It’s something about the eternity of the distances that are involved. So that’s interesting. That was a big difference for me particularly with that opening area of the film. It was how elegant it has to be in order to convince you that they are weightless in space and traveling.

MoviesOnline: Are there any specific films of that era that you cited or referenced or looked at formally or was it more instinctive?

DANNY BOYLE: There are three in particular that are there everywhere you turn. Every time you think you’re being original, they’re there waiting for you. It’s obviously "2001,” the first "Alien” film, and (Andrei) Tarkovsky’s "Solyaris” for different reasons with each of them, but they’re all there. In the end, you either have to stop filming and give it up [laughs] or you have to go, "No, I acknowledge this is borrowed from ‘Alien’ and this is …” It’s actually a very limited corridor that you’re working in because basically all those films seem to break down into three ingredients which is: you have a ship, you have a crew, and you have a signal that changes everything. They do seem to all break down into that and it’s because I think until we start colonizing space, you’re always going to have this steel tube piloting out there like that.
 
Now that brings me back to what you were saying. The connection with the other films is that basically it’s a bunch of people which has been done a number of times. You have a bunch of people who are isolated together either through choice or through circumstances and how they disintegrate or how they cope with them. That’s how it connects with the other films, I think, if anything – not with all of them but with some of them. You think about "The Beach,” that’s a group of people. You think about "Shallow Grave,” it’s three people living in this flat. You think about "Train Spotting” which is kind of like a sealed group of friends destroying each other. I obviously really like films that have that kind of group dynamic in them.

MoviesOnline: As a follow up to that, can you talk about the film’s visual design and the production design and how it’s used to support the group dynamics?

DANNY BOYLE: I always try to work with a very close knit group of people which is the designer, the cameraman, costumer designer and we work very much as a team, like a little family. Obviously we’re professional but it’s not so much a professional occupation. I don’t want people to just deliver the goods. I want them to feel like they belong to the film and that we work the film out together and I treat them all as little mini-directors. I don’t expect them just to contribute a bit. I want them to say what they think about how things are going and like that. And that actually is a bit like the dynamic of the cast. I have these two things going, the cast and the crew, like that. And I expect all elements of the film to evolve from those relationships so that the design of the film comes out of that relationship and it came out of a lot of the time that myself and the designer Mark Tildesley and the cinematographer Alwin Kuchler spent together working on what we wanted the film to feel like, the research that we did.
 
We went to a nuclear submarine because that’s the closest thing there is to this kind of isolation in a modern industrial world. We couldn’t get on an oil rig interestingly because of terrorism. It’s easier to get on a nuclear submarine than it is on an oil rig unbelievably. Isn’t that amazing? We couldn’t get on an oil rig for love nor money but a nuclear sub we got on. The working relationship of all the people grew out of a lot of experiences. We wanted to create a claustrophobic but realistic environment for them to travel in. We looked at "Das Boot.” You can make it super claustrophobic which has got attractions but it’s actually ridiculous because NASA – we talked to them – they would never send a three-year mission – and this is like 18 months to get there and 18 months to get back. They would never send them in such a confined space as a submarine anymore because they’d go mad.
 
They know they would go insane so they would send them somewhere with some amount of space – not too much. So they have an oxygen garden which is beautiful and a relief from the technology that they’re working with all the time. So that’s how it evolved, but it’s still claustrophobic because they’re all trapped in the same space together. There’s no escape. That’s what claustrophobia is, isn’t it? It’s not so much what the space is because there are huge spaces involved, but the fact that there’s nowhere else to go. You can’t get away.

MoviesOnline: I read that in order to get the cast used to that, you lived together closely for two weeks before shooting began.

DANNY BOYLE: Yeah. Because they were all coming from different places in the world, I thought we’ve got to kind of pop their bubble. All actors when they arrive, particularly on a show like this, have a kind of bubble around them. One of your jobs as a director is to pop that bubble so that they’ll be in your film because otherwise they can look a bit sealed off somehow. I did it by getting them all to live together in student digs. They all had separate bedrooms but they had a shared kitchen and a shared living room. They basically lived there for a few weeks and they had to cook for themselves and entertain themselves and the group spirit was established.
 
It’s the only way really that you can establish quickly the kind of group spirit that would exist amongst a bunch of people who had been living and traveling together for 16 months when the film opens. So that’s what we did. And then we showered them with all these different experiences to give a kind of brief insight into what it is to be an astronaut. They flew a 747 on a simulator at Heathrow which is an amazing experience because only pilots do that and are only allowed on this thing. They actually got to land – or try to land [laughs] – a 747 on this simulator and they crashed it every time. Just so you know. They may tell you otherwise, but I was there and each one of them crashed it. [laughs]

MoviesOnline: Did you take part in any of the exercises?

DANNY BOYLE: Yeah, I did. I didn’t go to live with them because it wasn’t practical. But I also said it was never about me observing them in that Big Brother type way or anything like that. And I had to reassure them there were no cameras hidden in the apartment that they lived in. It was more just to establish it. But I did do some of the other things. I did do weightless flying and all those kind of experiences and the simulator. I was there for that. I did some other things with them – not all of them, but some of them.

MoviesOnline: You seem to like to make optimistic films and that struck me as not unusual but interesting because a lot of your movies could be described as man versus self. There’s an element of them raging against kind of a dude impulse of self destruction. When you think of humanity, do you think we have kind of a self-destructive impulse?

DANNY BOYLE: Yeah. I think it’s certainly there. I think that’s why the scenarios sometimes are almost apocalyptical. I love that set up. But I think you do battle against it. I wouldn’t define it as cleanly as you’ve done, but I imagine that’s certainly true to a certain extent. But I remain optimistic. I’m positive and I want that to be in all the films. The only one I think it’s not in really in a funny kind of way is "The Beach” which is a very depressing film in the end, a very negative film in many ways which surprised me why it came out like that. Because even in the bleakest scenario, I normally dig out some spirit and some hope somewhere out of there.

MoviesOnline: As part of your directorial process, do you normally have a set vision or idea of where you want to go and what you want to say in a film? How much play do you allow as you develop it?

DANNY BOYLE: Yes, but they don’t necessarily turn out like that. You try to keep them all organic things so they will change even though there’s a lot of discipline involved technically. You make the script, you shoot the script, but often they don’t quite turn out like you thought sometimes [laughs]. And I suppose in a way it’s kind of a mixture, isn’t it? I mean a director has to be a control freak to a degree but you also have to be loose as well because otherwise you’re just going to get a product that you define beforehand and there’s been no reason to have spent two years making it. So it’s kind of balancing those two instincts I suppose as much as you can.

MoviesOnline: Did you get the ending you originally set out for in "Sunshine”? Were other endings discussed?

DANNY BOYLE: No. There is a slightly different ending which is on the DVD, but it’s something that we shot after we shot our original ending. We did an experimental kind of thing with much more of a debate ending. We shot it but we never finished it really. It’s incomplete even on the DVD because it never seemed to be right from our point of view. We couldn’t feel that it was correct. It’s complicated because there is an ending on the DVD, an actual epilogue ending which we shot as a test which is in a park in London and then we sent that to Fox because we had run out of money and said, "This is the ending we want to do. Can we go where we need to go – somewhere with snow – to shoot it?” which is the sequence at the end that you see in Stockholm. It’s the same scene, but that’s not the ending I’m talking about. It’s earlier than that scene with Pinbacker.

MoviesOnline: We’ll have to wait for it then?

DANNY BOYLE: Yeah. You have to wait for it and all those extras. Yeah.

MoviesOnline: Can you talk a little about your casting process?

DANNY BOYLE: Yeah. The instinct in casting it was the script doesn’t define the gender and it certainly doesn’t define their nationality or their race or anything. And it’s quite interesting. Space movies tend to be quite colorless like that. There’s just a group of people. You can kind of identify [with] any of them because they don’t have any social conventions that they’re obeying on Earth. They have nothing really to define them. But for me, I thought it should be an American-Asian mission because all the advice was that in 50 years time the only economies that will possibly be able to pay for this staggering cost of space travel would be the American economy maybe still, but certainly the Asian economies that are emerging. And they actually said at the time probably India and Brazil as well but we sort of ignored that really in a way because it was getting too disparate.
 
So we made it American-Asian and then I just started to search for my favorite bunch of actors, an interesting mix of actors that I could get out there. Michelle Yeoh was the first to be cast and I remember saying to Michelle, "You can play any part you want.” There were eight. She could have picked any one of the eight parts and she picked Corazon which is actually a Mexican name. I think that was only because Alex’s girlfriend is partly Mexican so maybe he thought we were going to cast her. We didn’t in the end, although she plays the girl right at the end with the children. So we cast Michelle and then we went on from there and I phoned the Japanese actor (Hiroyuki Sanada) whom I loved for the Captain and a couple of actors here, Chris Evans and Troy Garity; a couple of actors from home, Cillian (Murphy) whom I knew and Benny (Benedict Wong) who I also knew a little bit and then Rose (Byrne) from Australia and Cliff (Curtis) from New Zealand. They’re from all over the world really.

What’s lovely about an ensemble in space is that you don’t really know who’s going to dominate in the end and you can also kill them in any order that you want [laughs]. And there are some great deaths available in space because it’s so hostile. You can kind of kill people in interesting ways as well. That was one of the joys of getting all these actors together and then killing them [laughs] which is what it boils down to eventually.

MoviesOnline: You stepped away from giving any real cause for why the sun was dying. You could’ve slipped in an environmental message but that would have been too easy. Did you think of any causes?

DANNY BOYLE: Yeah, no, there are. There are scenarios. They’re unlikely. The biggest one is what’s called a cue ball which are these enormous forces of matter that fly around the universe completely invisible to us. This is a real thing called a cue ball. They’re staggering forces of matter and the only thing that stops them are incredibly dense stars. They just pass through planets. When you go into all this stuff, it’s just mind boggling what you don’t understand. [laughs] They just pass through everything. If they came to Earth, they’d just pass through us. But if they hit something as dense as a star, they stick and they get caught and they start to eat the planet. They eat the star from the inside out and that could happen. If that did happen, the sun would begin to die because in fact if it dies naturally, it will heat up and everything will die because it expands like that. It becomes a white dwarf before it becomes a red dwarf. But interestingly, our star isn’t dense enough to catch a cue ball.
 
So we think this thing – and we researched it – it is so astonishingly powerful that it blows our minds. It loses 5 thousand million tons of matter, of mass, of weight every second and yet it will burn for another 4 billion years losing every second that amount of mass. I think I can’t get a hold of that. It’s just so beyond imagining the scale of something like that and yet it’s not dense enough. It’s not big enough to stop a cue ball because it’s actually a quite small star. It’s a medium to small size star compared to some of the others. You just go, "Oh my God!” And then there’s us in this little steel tube, like a cigar box, heading out there to try and have a look around. [laughs] It’s astonishing really what we’re made up of that we think we can do that. That defines us really, that we are like that, unlike the rest of the inhabitants of this planet. None of the animals are interested in making a steel box and flying off into this incredibly hostile place and having a look around, but we are. [laughs] I love that about us.

MoviesOnline: In a way it’s natural for us, don’t you think?

DANNY BOYLE: It must be. It must be that inquisitiveness. But why we developed that…where does that come from?

MoviesOnline: Survivalism?

DANNY BOYLE: They say it comes from science. I think personally it comes from art in the end because I am biased like that anyway. I think it’s that artistic impulse which is just to look beyond. Science kicks in immediately but it’s that instinct to look beyond, to imagine other things other than yourself, other experiences. That’s an artistic impulse I think. [laughs]

MoviesOnline: There are very few science fiction films that have dealt with the sun specifically. Was it your intent from the beginning of this film to focus on what they should do with that phenomenon or was your focus more on the people in the little tube and the sun came later?

DANNY BOYLE: No, it started very much with the idea of the sun is dying. The first words of the film: "Our sun is dying” is the premise. It was quite interesting, when we started three years ago, you could see everybody was heading towards global warming as a concern. Thankfully we’re going to look at that. So we thought we should look the other way. We should look at a topic where man wasn’t to blame. It was actually a question of what are you going to do about it; man, science, what can you do to save us? That’s what we wanted to address really.

MoviesOnline: Is there anything about the actual production of this film that was a departure from your usual routine?

DANNY BOYLE: I suppose the scale of it. It was just staggering. "The Beach” was a big film but it wasn’t a big film. It just was big. It shouldn’t have been but it just became big.

MoviesOnline: Was that because of Leo (DiCaprio)?

DANNY BOYLE: Yes, partly, because it’s not Leo who was fantastic, but it’s a big movie star and a big studio and it suddenly becomes a gross inflated thing. And suddenly there’s 400 people working on the film every day and you think, "I don’t need 400 people to make this film. It’s a film about a bunch of hippies in a jungle.” Maybe like 30 people I need and it just grows like that. But this was big. But we controlled it. That’s what we did. We did it differently. We kept the ceiling. I didn’t want money. I didn’t want loads of extras. I wouldn’t have gotten it anyway because we didn’t have any big stars in it. But I didn’t want money. I didn’t want a big star in it and I didn’t want a bunch of money to help make it. I wanted to try to make it with restraints, with real disciplines that we had to work around and be creative about how you got around them, and to make it feel like $150 million and not force it.

MoviesOnline: You’ve done a lot of movies in a lot of genres now, would you ever do a Western?

DANNY BOYLE: [laughs] A Western is interesting, isn’t it? It was quite interesting doing this because we shot this on an anamorphic which I’ve never used before which is the wide screen format, really wide screen. It was perfect for it. They use it on Westerns. They used that format very much on Westerns. Sergio Leoni uses it and it’s because it’s great for huge landscapes obviously, but it’s also an amazing tool for huge close-ups. In fact, if you go back and look at "Sunshine,” it’s made up of mostly those kinds of shots. It’s a great psychological weapon like that and that made me think about Westerns when we were shooting it like that. [laughs] I don’t know whether I would to be honest. I don’t know whether it’s actually… You should never say never, but I don’t think so somehow. I used to love watching them as a kid and stuff like that. They also don’t belong to me in the way they belong here. It’s a different kind of tradition in Britain really I suppose.

MoviesOnline: That brings up an interesting point. There’s a lot of talk in Europe about National Cinema versus British cinema or French cinema. I remember when "Trainspotting” came out, some people viewed it as the return of British cinema. Do you consider yourself a fundamentally British filmmaker or do you think filmmakers have an obligation to their country of origin to contribute to that specific culture or is it just the artist following his vision, whatever it may be?

DANNY BOYLE: I don’t know whether it’s an obligation. I personally prefer to work there because I sort of know it and I can answer questions about things that are important to me. I don’t have to ask other people to answer them for me -- like what kind of car do you drive? If I knew you in Britain, I’d know what sort of car you drove. Or if I was wrong, I’d know why I was wrong that you didn’t drive that kind of car, whereas here, I don’t have a clue. You just don’t have it in your culture. It’s different things for different people really in a way. I always describe the film industry in Britain as occasional which is the best way of describing it. Because occasionally we have a decent film, but we get the film industry we deserve. We don’t really go to cinema enough. We just don’t go to the cinema enough.
 
Why should we have an industry like America or France? And that’s what everybody always whinges about in Britain. Why don’t we have an industry like the Americans or the French? Because we don’t fucking go! Nobody goes to the cinema in Britain. If it’s a sunny day, the cinemas are completely empty because everybody’s at the pub drinking and in the park.[laughs] There isn’t that love, that fanaticism about film that you get here and in France and in India. You get it there as well. What we’re good at is music. If you look at Britain for the last 40 years since the Beatles, what we are good at is music. We’re such a small little island with a puny number of people. The number of bands we’ve turned out, the pop music, is just phenomenal, absolutely phenomenal, and that’s what we’re good at and that’s the industry we deserve. And you know you get what you deserve. And it is in people’s hearts in Britain. Music is there in kids. Young people with things to say do it through music, not through films.

MoviesOnline: What would you like an audience to take from this film?

DANNY BOYLE:I think it’s kind of what we’re saying really about how crazy we are because of science, because of our dedication now to science, and we are dedicated to it. We’re not going to go back and live in villages and do subsistence farming [laughs]. It doesn’t matter what disasters strike cities, we are committed to cities. They are ever growing and they’re just going to keep growing and because of that, we have put all our hopes in science really and technology, and there are good sides to that and bad sides to that. But in the end, it’s a good thing that science will do something like travel to the sun and this thing of immeasurable scale we think we can change if necessary.
 
You talk to scientists and they say, "Yeah, we’ll be able to do that one day.” And you think that is so arrogant [laughs] and yet so essential and necessary to our survival that we think we can enhance and maintain an enhanced life that’s first given us by this star. If something happens to it, we’ll solve it. I think that’s what makes us what we are really more than anything and I love that about us. So when Cillian reaches up at the end, he’s sort of reaching up on behalf of us all, but he’s also seeing something that’s way bigger than we can ever imagine, but he’s looking to try and find it so that makes it optimistic for me. That’s sort of what I get from the film. It offers hope. It’s a very exhilarating, spectacular, terrifying ride through space really on the gut level. [laughs]

MoviesOnline: I really enjoyed the movie.

DANNY BOYLE: Oh great! It was very nice to meet you. Cheers! Thanks very much.

"Sunshine” opens in theaters on July 20th This interview was conducted exclusively for MoviesOnline by Sheila Roberts. If you have any questions or comments about this interview feel free to contact us

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