Danny Boyle

[oakmanc234]

I like his work. He's had a rocky career but I'm a fan. 'Shallow Grave' was a sharp thriller but a bit too cold/nasty for my tastes, 'Trainspotting' is classic, 'A Life Less Ordinary' was a major mis-fire but fun nonetheless and I truly love 'The Beach' (yes 'The Beach'). It's plain awesome. Audiences just couldn't take how half of it was lovely/breezy/pretty and then it went all dark on them. Looking forward to '28 Days Later'. It's about time a really intense & realistic zombie flick came out ('Resident Evil' didn't satisfy me, it seemed to end just when it was getting really interesting). '28 Days Later' seems to pick up from there (a deserted city stalked by the dead).

[RegularKarate]

Loved Shallow Grave and Trainspotting was damn good too... Life Less Ordinary was forgivable, let's hope he makes up for that piece of shit "The Beach" (I didn't like it because I couldn't handle how half of it was all stupid/lame then it went all retarded on me).

[finlayr]

I'm not that huge a fan of Boyle but I met him in October at the Irish Film Centre after a preview of 28 Days and he's just about the craziest, enthusiastic muthafucka I've ever met in my life.  SUCH a nice man.  He loves David Lynch too--thought that was weird--although he didn't understand Mulholland Drive.

[Spike]

Haven't seen "Shallow Grave" yet. "Trainspotting" was amazing, from "A Life less ordinary" I just watched about 30 minutes, then it was too boring for me and I put it off. "The Beach" was quiet cool, I think. I really liked it and "28 Days Later" is a great horror-film, which is highly entertaining.

I'm not a fan of his but I liked most of his films.

[Gold Trumpet]

The Beach is bad. The material is juvenile Lord of the Flies at best and just spells out the entire drama with Dicaprio's narration through the entire film. It wasn't even a very good story before that but the narration  made the whole thing terrible. 28 Days Later was a bore and pretensious and I already fought the good fight on that film. Trainspotting......I watched but can't give much of an opinion. I kept getting so bored that i ended up leaving quite often to do other things and I stopped the movie like 3 times total. Seen nothing else by him.

~rougerum

[NEON MERCURY]

Shallow Grave 8) , , ,
Trainspotting 8) ,   ,
A Life Less Ordinary :x , , , , :silly:
The Beach
28 dats Later 8)


Boyle

[RegularKarate]

Shallow Grave 8) , , ,
Trainspotting 8) ,   ,
A Life Less Ordinary :x , , , , :silly:
The Beach
28 dats Later 8)


Boyle

Best reviews ever.

[MacGuffin]

28 Days Later Director Opens a Cold Storage
Source: The Hollywood Reporter

Danny Boyle, who directed the independent summer hit 28 Days Later, is in talks to direct Warner Bros./Imagine Entertainment's Worcester Cold Storage. There is no start date yet.

The project (aka "The Perfect Fire") is an adaptation of Sean Flynn's book "3000 Degrees: The True Story of a Deadly Fire and the Men Who Fought It." It was initially an Esquire magazine article that Flynn wrote in 2000 about a fire that claimed the lives of six Worcester, Mass., firefighters in December 1999.

Scott Silver (8 Mile) adapted the screenplay, which is being produced by Brian Grazer.

[The Silver Bullet]

01. Trainspotting A++
02. Shallow Grave A++
03. The Beach B
04. A Life Less Ordinary C+

The thing with The Beach is that it still has its moments [it opens perfectly, for example], but it also happens to stray much too far from the original text, which is perfect as is, and didn't need any changes [at least, not the changes Boyle made...].

[Alethia]

01. Trainspotting A++
02. Shallow Grave A++
03. The Beach B
04. A Life Less Ordinary C+

The thing with The Beach is that it still has its moments [it opens perfectly, for example], but it also happens to stray much too far from the original text, which is perfect as is, and didn't need any changes [at least, not the changes Boyle made...].

the beach got pretty messy as it went on.....

[The Silver Bullet]

The film or the book?

[Alethia]

film.  i've never read the book.

[The Silver Bullet]

Well, I agree, it gets messy. But as I said:

...it also happens to stray much too far from the original text, which is perfect as is, and didn't need any changes.

[MacGuffin]

In Danny Boyle's films to date -- Shallow Grave, Trainspotting, A Life Less Ordinary and The Beach -- humans have proven themselves to be jealous, vengeful and severely flawed creatures, so what does he decide to do in his latest horrorshow? Kill them all off and start over. At the outset of 28 Days Later, a rogue band of animal activists liberate a laboratory filled with infected monkeys, unleashing an epidemic of "Rage" upon the population. 28 days later, a man awakens naked and alone in a deserted London. Well, as he'll soon find out, "alone" isn't technically the right term.

28 Days Later owes a great deal to such apocalyptic nightmares as Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys and George Romero's Dawn of the Dead, although Boyle claims he looked to other films for ideas. "It's funny, actually, because I tried to stay away from the zombie films because the writer of the piece was such a fan of them." Indeed, Boyle's zombies are lightning fast predators, less like the lumbering corpses of genre classics than adrenalized humans stripped to their animal core. So where did Boyle's ideas come from? Read on to see the five films the director credits with influencing his style.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Apocalypse Now
(1979; dir: Francis Ford Coppola, starring: Martin Sheen, Marlon Brando)
Apocalypse Now, which is probably my favorite film of all time, is probably an appropriate one to start with. Deeply imperfect, vain though it is, it's still a true masterpiece because it combines all the best of American cinema and European cinema. The thing about apocalypse films of any kind is that they're impossible to end, and we found that on 28 Days Later as well. In our case, the challenge was wrapping up the story, but I think on Apocalypse Now, Coppola just couldn't stop shooting. After The Lord of the Rings, Peter Jackson said that when you do something that manic, you have to be dragged away from it in the end. On those large-scale projects, you never finish. Somebody has to take the responsibility to drag you away from it. But that wasn't our problem. Our problem was how do you end it when you've killed 58 million people? Where do you go after that?

Alien
(1979; dir: Ridley Scott, starring: Tom Skerritt, Sigourney Weaver)
The original Alien is an absolute masterclass in terror and dread. That film was a big influence on me for 28 Days Later. For every filmmaker since that's dealing with fear and dread in any way, you look to that film and what it does. It's quite interesting the way Ridley Scott takes that classic ingredient of a small group of people [hiding from an enemy they can't see] and makes it feel like a massive film. The wonderful thing about dread is that the fear of what's around the corner is very particular for each individual character. You hope you connect with something that people fear, which helps you extrapolate the film into a bigger context and makes it more than just a fighting film in the end.

Amélie
(2001; dir: Jean-Pierre Jeunet, starring: Audrey Tautou, Mathiue Kassovitz)
The next one is Amélie just because I'm making a film at the moment called Millions that's influenced to an extent by Amélie, just in its generosity. It's a little bit in the style, but the comparison has more to do with the tone, except it's not about love. It's sort of about money in a way. [According to Variety, Millions tells the story of "two boys in Liverpool who stumble across the haul from a bank robbery and can't decide how to spend it."] I loved watching Amélie because it felt so generous about people. The director had come off a big American film -- Alien 4, as it happens -- and he wanted to make a [lighter] film. It's interesting that when you come off those big commercial features, you want to make something a bit generous, I think. Don't know why. I came off The Beach, and I made 28 Days Later, which is a really gruesome film, but I also wanted to make a very generous, warm film as well.  

Atlantic City
(1980; dir: Louis Malle, starring: Burt Lancaster, Susan Sarandon)
Atlantic City is a wonderful example of a European director moving to America and making a wonderful, moving film with American actors. It's about this old gambler, Burt Lancaster, and his relationship with Susan Sarandon. It's a very beautiful film, filmed at the time they were demolishing a lot of the old Atlantic City and building the new casinos. Plus, it has one of the sexiest scenes ever in cinema. It opens with Susan Sarandon squeezing lemon juice all over her body. She's naked, and she's caressing her body with lemon juice, observed by this old man across the street, and it's the weirdest moment until you find out later that she works in a fish restaurant.

Au Revoir les Enfants
(1987, dir: Louis Malle, starring: Gaspard Manesse, Raphael Fejto)
My final choice is an incredible French film directed by the same man about a bunch of children in wartime France. It's about the Holocaust, but it's told through a classroom, and it's the most moving, tender, beautiful, sad film about the Holocaust. Nobody dies in it, nothing like that happens. It's all very tiny, but it's the most amazing film. The public probably would not pick up on this, but as a director watching it, you notice that there are maybe a hundred kids in it, and every single kid is in the film. Normally, when you watch films set in schools, the foreground characters are in the film, and the background are just sort of there for the day. You can see that they're not concentrating, they're not mentally in the film, but in Au Revoir les Enfants, they're all there. You can see that in their performances. And it is the most unbombastic film about the Holocaust that you could possibly imagine, and yet it is also the most effective one as well. It only deals with the subject in a particular way, but it's the most wonderful film.

[godardian]

Not surprising that all of these are much more recent than the other directors' picks, and seem to have been chosen mostly for the modernity and impressiveness of their styles. Boyle's work is markedly more spotty and shallow than the other directors who participated.