Sunday, July 21, 1996
Director Danny Boyle spotlights the futility of drug abuse in his latest movie 'Trainspotting'By Michael Horowitz
Summer Bruin Senior Staff
A year and a half ago at the Sundance Film Festival, a British director named Danny Boyle showed off his successful first project, a viscous little thriller called "Shallow Grave." But he already had his sights set on his next project, a movie he touted to unbelievers as a positive heroin film.
"It won't be a depressing, grim film, 'cause we've all seen that," he said of the already underway production. "We don't need another. We know that already."
Boyle wanted to show why drug users use drugs, and more importantly, he wanted to uncover that spark of vitality that exists even in the most desperate of environments.
Now it's the summer of 1996. Boyle is sitting in the much warmer, more relaxed confines of the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills. And if things were good for him last year, they're looking even better now.
His film, "Trainspotting," based on the book of the same name by Irvine Welsh and adapted by John Hodge, has become a phenomenon in Britain. What Welsh considers a "remix" of his material has netted around £12 million the British equivalent to a $100 million blockbuster. And now the swirl of hype and controversy that rocked Europe has hit the states.
"What was genuinely subversive about the book was that here was this landscape that was normally so desperate with life sliding away, and yet (Welsh) dealt with it with such incredible humor and vitality," said Boyle. "So you finish the book and feel exhilarated, and I hope people finish the film and feel uplifted ... It's bizarre because you have to sort out why you feel like that in such a landscape and that's when people kick in and say it's irresponsible, it glorifies drugs and things like that."
The title of the film is taken from Welsh's quote about a hobby in which mostly male Brits watch trains go through stations and log their serial numbers. "Trainspotting is a futile occupation," said the novel's author, "as is drug taking."
While the book is a collection of episodes with no true central characters or plots, Boyle, producer Andrew MacDonald and writer John Hodge (the nucleus of the "Shallow Grave" team) sat down and listed the things they liked most about the novel, and worked from there. After thinking about their preferences for a while, they came up with what Boyle considers the key to the work.
"It's not a documentary about what happens to you when you take heroin," said Boyle. "What (Welsh) is trying to do is celebrate the spark of life that is at that age really, when you use heroin.
"Nobody does when you're 40, you're all finished. It's about mayhem and transgression. That's why it's celebratory, and that's why it's actually positive and optimistic. He shows how that survives, even in the most desperate circumstances."
To show these conditions, the filmmakers researched the drug and its addicts. "Trainspotting" shows the complexity of what they discovered, as the drug doesn't affect everyone in the story equally. "It doesn't kill the people it should kill, people sneak away unfairly. There's no justice."
Predictably, the film has its share of critics who deride it for glamorizing heroin use, but Boyle contends that the film is a warning, and believes the judgment wasn't his to make.
"It's designed for an audience who don't want a film to begin with a prescriptive moral agenda," he said. "Thirty years ago in Britain it was immoral for homosexuals to make love or be portrayed in any kind of way at all. Now it's changed. You have to be honest and truthful to yourself and the people you respect really. That's my credo rather than a moral agenda that can be set for you by other people."
Writer Hodge says he tried to present a clear and balanced case, but argued "I don't think anyone will come out of this film wanting to try heroin."
Boyle also feels that the people with moral agendas are overlooking other societal blights portrayed in the film, namely alcoholism.
"Ironically of course, despite all the talk of drugs and everything, the biggest danger in the film and biggest danger in Britain is alcohol.
"It's a massive problem, particularly in Scotland, where people drink themselves into complete oblivion," he said, "and before they reach that, there's always some rite of passage violence.
"You're not allowed to say that. It's like Bob Dole and tobacco, there's such financial interest involved, you're not allowed to criticize these kinds of things really. And then people say you're condoning heroin. There's such hypocrisy."
Surprisingly, financing such a controversial project was relatively easy. Channel 4 in Britain, the filmmakers' previous partner in "Shallow Grave," was, in Boyle's words, "supportive and non-interventional."
"We always thought it would be a small film and we'd have enough support in Britain after 'Shallow Grave' to pay for it. We didn't realize it was going to be like this."
Certainly the film has done better in Britain and in Europe than they expected, but the filmmakers are wary of the reception the film will find here. "Shallow Grave" did gangbusters abroad, but only made a disappointing $3 million here.
"I just drove across America from New York to L.A. to try to get to know the country a bit better because we're going to make a film here and I only knew New York and L.A., which I imagine are distorted prisms from which to look at a country. And it is amazing driving across the Midwest and meeting people who are very big-hearted, genuinely big-hearted people and quite faithful, optimistic, religious people we're very cynical about that in Britain, we imagine it as some kind of apple pie conspiracy with some hidden agenda. It was a real eye-opener to me.
"There was a feeling of people who did belong and wanted to belong to something bigger than themselves and of course the nature of this film is the opposite, it's about people who don't want to belong.
"I have to say, despite what Miramax would like me to say," said Boyle, "I can't see ('Trainspotting')'s appeal in Peoria or places like that. I walked around there and saw these guys in a shoe-shine shop and thought 'it's just never going to play here, and why should it play here?'"
The film that will play there is "Alien 4," one of the many films Boyle was offered to direct after his "Shallow Grave" outing. He chose to make "Trainspotting" instead.
"The business people here are very sharp," he said of Hollywood. "If they see you can make a half-decent film they're onto you very quickly. And that's very flattering obviously, but once we'd kind of gone through that, we decided to make our own films really.
"('Alien 4') was a great script and I was a big fan of the first two 'Alien' films, a huge fan. Tom Rothman, who runs Fox now, really wants to get different sensibilities involved in these franchises. The problem is that it's all storyboards, it's all preparation, and also post-production and computers and all this kind of stuff and I'm not very good at that.
"I like working with the actors and stuff like that," he said. "That's what attracted me to it, the chance to work with Sigourney Weaver and Winona Ryder and an alien, but once you overcome that naivete you realize that getting in on celluloid is actually a blip for the studio. That's just a distraction for 12 weeks where they spend a lot of money and then they can get it back in the computer room."
So the gang that has brought you "Shallow Grave" and "Trainspotting" is all set to bear down on "A Life Less Ordinary," an American romantic comedy starring mainstay Ewan McGregor and just-signed Cameron Diaz. With the film to be distributed and funded by Polygram and Twentieth Century Fox, Boyle is taking steps toward Hollywood, but by his rules.
"We can always make films," he smiled. "We just want to do them on a slightly smaller scale than Hollywood imagined.
"The pressure here is to spend more money. You say you want to make a film for $10 million and the next time they ring you back they say 'this $10 to $12 million dollar film' and you're like 'hang on, it's $10 million.' And the next time they ring you back it's $12 to $15. Stuff like that is very bizarre. It's a different mentality. I think they think you're not proud if you're not spending."
Boyle holds the new film will be "slightly subversive, but not unpleasantly so."
Probably less shooting up in this one, but he smirked as he considered his past record. "Again it won't play in Peoria, but maybe Cameron Diaz will get us there."
Ewan McGregor, star of last year's "Shallow Grave," plays yet another shifty character in "Trainspotting."
McGregor (left), Ewen Bremner (following) are heroin addicts in "Trainspotting."
"Trainspotting" director Danny Boyle plumbs the depths of heroin abuse.