Balancing style and substance
Director Boyle sheds light on his inspirations
" 'Sunshine' is part of a very particular genre," director Danny Boyle says during a recent publicity stop at the Ritz-Carlton to promote his new sci-fi odyssey. "It's not just fantasy, where anything goes -- it's got a very rigorous realism attached to it."
Rigorous, but visually distinctive as well. There's a sequence 20 minutes or so into the movie where it all starts to hit the fan for a group of mid-21st-century astronauts dispatched to try to jump-start our suddenly sputtering sun. Or, more accurately, it all starts to hit their umbrella-shaped, nuke-toting spaceship. An ill-timed bit of human error causes several panels in the ship's massive solar shield to fail, forcing crew members Cillian Murphy (Boyle's "28 Days Later") and Hiroyuki Sanada outside on a hellishly hot repair run in fast-disappearing "shade." It's obvious one of them is going to meet his end as the inconceivably bright rays finally crest over the shield's rim.
This being a Danny Boyle film, the two are outfitted in eye-candy-colored golden spacesuits, and a driving contemporary beat swells and accelerates as the fateful moment approaches. But this being Boyle's work, there's also no moronic summer movie cry of "yee-ha!" from the doomed man. Instead, the moment plays like the ultimate communion with nature. Ditto for a couple of scenes in which ship psychiatrist Cliff Curtis loses himself in all-enveloping observation-window glimpses of the sun, a transcendent stellar riff on those iconic Maxell "blown away" ads. There's nothing as inscrutably mind-bending as "2001" here, but nothing that's "Armageddon" obtuse, either.
Boyle has made a career of this sort of balance between style and substance. From the rollercoaster drug trips of "Trainspotting" to the adrenal zombie chills of "28 Days Later," he's smartly energized a variety of genres that he saw could do with their own jump-starts. If anything, Boyle reined in his usual hyperrealistic flair on "Sunshine," partly because of the unfamiliar complexities of dealing with hundreds of digital effects shots. (The $45 million film's release date was pushed back twice, with physical effects also presenting some hurdles.) But the director's approach was also in keeping with the films that inspired and intimidated him: "2001," "Alien," and Andrei Tarkovsky's moodily ethereal "Solaris."
"I felt a loyalty to hard-core sci-fi," says Boyle, 50, who was born in Manchester, England, to Irish parents. He comes across remarkably, well, sunny for someone spending the month shuttling among the US publicity circuit, his London home base, and casting sessions in India for his next project, about a young contestant on the Hindi version of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire."
"Having said that," he adds, "the scientists that we talked to for the film were all atheists, but they all remain open to the idea that there's a consciousness out there that's not like our own. The story isn't about looking for God, necessarily. But when Cillian puts his hand up to the sun, he does see something beyond the narrow, rational physics of the sun as an equation."
Heady stuff -- and stuff that would mess with anyone's head, an inevitability that "Sunshine" recognizes more than most films of its kind. When Murphy and crewmate Chris Evans scuffle in one early scene, Evans is called in for a mandatory psych exam by Curtis, then gets a mental-health timeout in a holographic "Earth room." "Cosmonauts just get a book with pictures of Earth in it," laughs Boyle, whose frequent producer, Andrew Macdonald, logged research time at Russia's Star City for the project. "But NASA was very clear with us that even if they could solve artificial gravity tomorrow, so that our bodies wouldn't just waste away without it in long-term space travel, they'd still have this huge problem: people retaining their sanity."
Not that these were the sort of musings that led off Boyle and Macdonald's pitch for lining up US distribution with Fox Searchlight. "There's what you sell to an audience, but what drives you on [creatively] is the deeper ideas you can explore in these films," says Macdonald. " '28 Days' is another good example. Fox sold it as a zombie movie, but to Danny, it was looking at a modern issue of rage. We're always trying to bundle up ideas into a genre. That's probably why you've seen Danny do so many types."
Indeed, while Boyle has proven capable of working masterfully in a number of genres, he's slave to none. Here, he reflects on his eclectic filmography, and what he was after in his hits and misses:
"Shallow Grave" (1994): Boyle's first film was a thriller casting Ewan McGregor, Kerry Fox, and Christopher Eccleston as yuppie Edinburgh flatmates who go from being pals to lethally paranoid when they stumble onto their new roomie's corpse and a suitcase full of drug money.
"Normally when you get a chance to make a movie, you think in terms of landscapes, scale. We went the other way: Take three people in a flat, and make that your landscape. And although it's got a very savage, cynical British humor to it, stylistically it's very Coen Brothers."
"Trainspotting" (1996): McGregor, Jonny Lee Miller, Ewen Bremner, and a gonzo Robert Carlyle star in Boyle's career-making adaptation of the heroin-culture novel by Irvine Welsh (whose sequel, "Porno," Boyle has publicly toyed with filming, as well).
"Drug films up to that point were unwatchable, really. I remember reading the book and thinking, 'There's something about this that's just so extraordinary, we've got to [capture] it.' It's not trying to say that drugs are exhilarating, and that's all. But we tried to tell the whole story, rather than just give a partial view. It's more an ecstasy movie, to be honest, because ecstasy is about action and rhythm."
"A Life Less Ordinary" (1997): Desperate working stiff McGregor finds a willing kidnap victim in Cameron Diaz. Boyle's stab at screwball comedy found critics and audiences considerably less willing to play along.
"I thought Cameron and Ewan did good work, because it's actually quite hard to do that kind of arch, rapid-fire '30s dialogue. But we took a turn where we decided the violence would be too inappropriate to the tone, and actually I think it would have suited it. Again, it was very influenced by the Coen Brothers."
"The Beach" (2000): Leonardo DiCaprio cooled his residual "Titanic" heat as a backpacker in Thailand who finds -- and loses -- paradise in an off-the-grid island enclave.
"When you have a huge movie star and studio involved, although you've got everything you want, you can't keep control of it. And I thought the idea of this paradise community was fantastic, but then I got there and realized, 'What am I making a movie about all these hippies for? [laughs] I don't like hippies!' "
"28 Days Later" (2003): Boyle scored his biggest hit to date tackling a horror staple that he admits had never done much for him.
"I wanted the film to be more emotional than zombie movies tended to be. The main characters aren't just up there to be slaughtered -- they begin to build relationships automatically, and that is a sign of hope, even in all the carnage."
"Millions" (2005): Boyle gives the dubious-windfall device of "Shallow Grave" an extreme makeover as charming magical realism. Young Alex Etel has lost his mum, but not his hero-worship of the saints, so when train-robbery loot miraculously drops in his lap, he's got some uniquely benevolent ideas about how to spend it.
"People say it's a religious film, but it's not. It's just that when you're 8, you don't have access to the White Stripes yet. Your parents make sure you have access to St. Patrick, so those are his imaginative references. I thought of it as a Christmas movie, but [the distributor] was frightened of the American holiday movies coming that year, so they moved it -- for 'Christmas With the Kranks.' C'est la vie." 