Millions

[MacGuffin]

Trailer here.

Cast: Kolade Agboke, Alun Armstrong, Enzo Cilenti, Daisy Donovan, Alexander Nathan Etel

Director: Danny Boyle

Writer: Frank Cottrell Boyce

Plot Outline: Two young boys come across the loot from a bank robbery, but have only a week to spend it before the UK switches to the euro.

[ono]

Will this by any chance be released in ... January?

Reminds me of this.

[Kal]

The premise is good... the trailer looks a little crazy... not sure but I have enjoyed what Danny Boyle does so far

[El Duderino]

Will this by any chance be released in ... January?

Reminds me of this.

he knew what to do with a million dollars

[Just Withnail]

Very good trailer. The main kid looked interesting, looking forward to it.

[pete]

Will this by any chance be released in ... January?

Reminds me of this.

he knew what to do with a million dollars

he went out with a hot model chick.  I think that's where Ali G got the idea of losing his virginity at age 11 to a model.

[modage]

if any of you in NY or LA want to see a month early screening of Danny "they're not zombies" Boyle's new movie Millions just go to the website for passes. http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/millions/

Promotional screenings are on a first-come, first-served basis and seating is not guaranteed. No purchase necessary. Seating is limited to theater capacity. More screenings will be added throughout the spring.


Tuesday, Feb 01 7:00 PM AMC Empire 25, New York RSVP
Wednesday, Feb 02 7:00 PM AMC Burbank 16, Burbank RSVP
Thursday, Feb 17 7:30 PM AMC Santa Monica, Santa Monica RSVP
Thursday, Feb 24 7:00 PM Irvine Regal Spectrum Theatre, Irvine RSVP

[Myxo]

I'll be seeing this on 2/12 at the Portland Film Festival and will let everyone know what I thought.

[pete]

I saw it tonight.  It was great.

[modage]

Danny Boyle on Millions
Source: Edward Douglas March 7, 2005

After the success of his post-apocalyptic thriller 28 Days Later, British director Danny Boyle might have needed a chance of pace, and his latest film Millions is exactly that.

The story involves two young boys whose mother recently died. The younger one Damian has his own strange form of spirituality, having frequent conversations with saints, and when a bag of money literally falls into their laps, he believes it's from God and wants to give it to poor people. His older brother Anthony has other plans that have little to do with charity, and the person who originally lost the money just wants it back at any cost.

It's the type of warm-hearted movie that might immediately come as a surprise to the fans of Boyle's previous work, which have included movies about sadistic roommates, Scottish junkies and an autocratic society living on a beach, not to mention infected humans terrorizing Britain.

ComingSoon.net talked to Boyle about his latest movie, which offered plenty of tangents to talk about his previous work, money, tsunami relief and religion.

CS!: What made you decide to do a movie with kids after all this time?
Boyle: It's one of those business decisions you make, because everybody wants you to make a sequel to "28 Days Later" or they want you to make "Trainspotting" again. If you're lucky, you're able to make the decisions not based on that, but based on your instinct. I know a lot of other people had read the script and turned it down, so I thought they thought of me as the very last resort. I could see why people wouldn't think I was the right sort of director to approach, because I'd turn it into some slasher-revenge-horror child-murdering kind of something or other. There was such a connection with my background, because I was brought up a very devout Catholic, very strict. I was meant to go to seminary and be a priest at 14 and everything. I recognized such a lot like all the saints stuff and this imaginative kid in a world I really recognized. It also gave me a chance to make a film about the Manchester where I grew up. A lot of people see it like kitchen sink drama, like the films of the 60's, but I see it more as a place of wit and vitality and energy. I wanted the film to look like it bursts with color, so it feels like a life- affirming place, which is how I see it. I just fell in love with the script, but we changed it completely. It's one of those insane things that goes on in the film world that you fall in love with a script and then you change everything except one scene.

CS!: Some might find that Millions is very different from your other films, which seem much darker and more cynical. Do you feel this way?
Boyle: When you go into the cinema, I want that you should come out feeling more positive, that life has been affirmed, and I feel that about all the films. I think of them as very positive and full of energy. I see this as being just part of a body of films really, but I can understand why people think that it's a very different kind of film. It doesn't feel that different to me. I still feel like I'm making the same film again and again and in fact, you worry about that.

CS!: When you found Alex Etel and Lewis McGibbon, how did you know those were the two kids to play the main characters in your film?
Boyle: I think it was easier with Lewis, because as a character, he has to be able to deliver a certain amount of acting, since he has a foothold in the adult world. Anthony has an imprecise but extensive knowledge of adult vocabulary and what interests us, so he had to have a certain technical level of ability to be able to deliver it, and he's a good actor. But with his younger brother, it was more to do with a kind of spirit really, and I realized in retrospect that I didn't really want an actor to play that part. There were a couple of kids who were better actors technically than Alex, to be honest, but they weren't as interesting and they would be safety casting. Alex was bold casting because he'd never done it before, and as you've seen, he does have a unique way of saying things. There is no way you can direct him to say lines. He just says them and you're like "Wow! Where does that come from?" You can only ever talk about it in a very vague way, but I did feel it when he came in the room. I thought "I bet that's him" and it was him. Somebody said to me the other day that people like that have an old soul in them. For some reason, there's something in them that gives them that something special.


CS!: Is it easier or harder to direct kids compared to working with more experienced adult actors?
Boyle: I learned as much directing this one as I did on the first one; those are the two steepest learning curves I've had. The big thing I learned in this is you can't leave your fingerprints on them. We did some early footage, and it was horrible, overdirected and you could feel them being manipulated by an adult. You gotta absolutely back off, and that's scary because directing is about control really, and you have to abandon it a bit. What you do is you have to create an atmosphere in which they feel confident, secure and they understand what the idea is and then you let them go. If kids are good in your movie, you tend to get a lot of praise for it, but it's not really applicable because it's actually their performances. If the context is right, you're just drawn into their world really. They have a very vague, fuzzy idea of what this is, what it all means and that's what you want to see. You don't want to see an adult perspective or fingerprint on them.

CS!: What kind of modifications did you want writer Frank Cottrell Boyce to make to his script?
Boyle: It wasn't like that. We kind of kicked the film about continually amongst ourselves and if you do that in the right way, then good ideas come up and bad ideas get jettisoned. You realize there are ways you can improve things, and you build it up slowly. You kind of nurture it over a period of time, rather than see it set in stone and say "I want that changed." You have to abandon a bit of ego. Like I have to say "I'm not a writer. I don't write and I'm not very good," and he has to say "I'm not precious about what I've done" so we can both help each other.

CS!: And how did he react to making so many changes?
Boyle: I think he was a bit shocked at how much I expected him to keep working on it the whole time, because I don't think he does enough rewriting with the other directors he works with. I don't think they work him hard enough. You have to do it in a sly way, so I got him involved in the film. He plays the schoolteacher who has the argument with the kid about interpretation of character at the nativity, and I got his kids in the film as well. You kind of lure them in really, so they can't resist your requests.

CS!: Speaking of changes, there was a lot of confusion about 28 Days Later having so many different endings. When do you stop making changes?
Boyle: This is very much the rule we have, and it's one of the ways that you make a small amount of money go a long way. We tend to work the script very hard before we start shooting, so we literally make the film in the relationship with the writer, knocking it about, act out bits of it. We even film little bits. We do as much as possible, and then literally, we stop changing things as soon as we start shooting. We don't change anything then. You just shoot the script. With "28 Days Later" and the alternate endings, when we finish shooting, we might do some pick-ups where you consider changing other things. What we believe is that if you change while you're shooting, you often think it's fascinating, but it ends up being an expensive cul-de-sac, cause you get into editing and you realize it's just nonsense. When we started shooting this, I suggested to Frank Boyce that he should turn it into a novel. He wrote the book while we were shooting, and he even got a two-book publishing deal! When we finished shooting, I read the book and there were scenes in it I wish we had. So the scene where Damian meets St. Peter, that was in the book and it wasn't in the original film, so we did it as a pick-up later and put it back in the film, so there is stuff that feeds backward and forward off each other.

CS!:  Was it a challenge to make the Catholicism and the religion of the film not seem too preachy?
Boyle: The whole idea of the saints was that they had a bit of personality really, that they shouldn't be pious or sanctimonious. They're not statues, they are real to Damien, so they should have a personality that they express to him. He has a speaking relationship with them, since he is after their help to try to find if this Saint Maureen (Damien's mother) has arrived in heaven and where she is. That prevents it from becoming too Catholic or too sacred, and yet, the whole film is meant to be made with the spirit of generosity about all the characters. That was the principle we had going into it. We tried to make the humor generous, so it isn't a bitter nasty humor at all. It's a warm spirit in the humor and I think that helps. But I don't feel bitter about my Catholic upbringing. It shaped me and the kind of person I am, and when I reintroduced myself to it through the film, it all came flooding back instantly. You can't escape it.

CS!:  Does this mean you are going back to church now?
Boyle: No, I'm not actually, but Frank, the writer, is a practicing Catholic, so the idea of how we represented religion in the film was something we worked out very carefully together. That it is something to do with faith in people and that's where the goodness lies, rather than faith in icons or a particular brand of religion. We try to make the films in that spirit as well. They're not autocratic places where people are frightened to come on set. They feel that they're spiritually good places to come to work and we try to make it like that.


CS!: You have nurtured a lot of new acting talent. Ewan McGregor, Tilda Swinton, Cillian Murphy and Naomie Harris were all relative unknowns before you worked with them. Is there something about working with fledgling actors that you veer towards for any particular reason?
Boyle: With the exception of The Beach (which starred Leonardo DiCaprio), we try to work lower down on the radar in terms of visibility and then the films can kind of pop out. That has tended to help our films, when they haven't had the big light of expectation on them. It means you have to do a lot more work publicizing the film and you're also not guaranteed anything, whereas with a big star, you're guaranteed a certain amount. But it seems to have helped the stories really. It's the very challenge we've got on the next one. We're doing a sci-fi film called "Sunshine" next, and as a general rule, big stars tend not to be in sci-fi films. They tend to use ensemble casting. That's a very interesting question for us at the moment about whether we should break that rule or not or stick to it. It's project dependent, and it depends on the particular story you're doing. I certainly feel having done "The Beach," that I know I'm better at working lower down the radar, and you have to learn those lessons about what you're good at and what you're not so good at.

CS!:  Did you learn anything else from your experiences working on The Beach, that you can apply to what you're doing now?
Boyle: The biggest thing for me is that when I arrive on the set for the day's work, you have to have a plan because a lot of people need to know what is happening. For me, that is always Plan B. Plan A is to see what happens when you get in the room because I'm a big believer that actors are different every day. If they've fallen in love the night before, they're a different person then if you've made the scene a week ago. I love that feeling and that's where your best ideas come from. On a huge film, you cannot do that. There are so many people involved, and there's so much depending on decisions being made in a clear way and a chain of command. You can't get to learn everybody's names. I like a kind of family atmosphere on the set--and Leo's into that--but it was impossible with so many people. There's an army of people looking at you! You find what you're best at. There are certain directors who can take on that responsibility of a big movie and keep it fresh, spontaneous, and it feels newly minted. That's a real skill and I admire them, but I don't think I have it, to be honest. I have other skills that lead in other directions, I suppose.

CS!: Millions is a movie about the responsibilities and evils of money, yet you're making it in an industry that requires tremendous amounts of money to bring that message across. Is that a bit of a contradiction?
Boyle: It's interesting, because I have made two films about bags of money being dropped in your lap, and ironically, that's what happened to us. When we started, we didn't have any money. Nothing. The first film "Shallow Grave" is a hit and you get a bag of money! You're suddenly given money like you never had before. I've earned more money than my dad saw in his whole entire life! You have to deal with that, and how you deal with that is... yeah, so it's a very interesting crossover world that you live in. I think you just have to behave well in this world, because it's a world that can encourage people to get revenge on how they've been treated themselves in the past or behave in a vein and excessive way. I don't think people should behave like that.

CS!: But does being one of Britain's name brand directors make it easier for you to secure funding for such a different film like this?
Boyle: Yes, it's really to do with success I think, and "28 Days Later" made such a lot of money that you get credit for your next film. After they got over the disappointment of hearing that it was going to be about two boys growing up in Manchester and it was going to be heart-warming, they basically say "Okay, then". Yes, it does help obviously, because it's quite tough for people making films there at the moment. The exchange rate is terrible at the moment, so it's very expensive to make a film in Britain. If you've got any kind of foreign financing in dollars, they're worthless when you bring them to the UK.

CS!:  Compared to Shallow Grave, the way money is handled is almost radical in the fact that this boy wants to give the money to the poor. Do you feel this is realistic with the current climate of the world?
Boyle: When we made "Shallow Grave," we'd been living through all of Thatcher's left power, and her legacy was very much in place. It was like that thing in your movie, "Wall Street". "Greed is good". That individualism and that selfishness which drives capitalism and therefore benefits everyone. That was her philosophy and she imposed it on the country, and "Shallow Grave" is very much a film about that milieu. Since 1997, we've had a Labor government and--whatever the reservations about [Tony Blair's] relationship with your president are--he's tried to introduce a sense of social community responsibility again. They tried to improve education and life for everyone in a way, albeit small advances. This is using the bag of money in a different context. It is trying to make a film to see if generosity is possible in the modern world. When you look at what happened after the tsunami, you see that instinctive impulse in us all to help, but gradually, the forces of caution and cynicism are reerected, and we build all those back up again. But first, the impulse is there to help. The idea of the film is that in the 8 year old, that impulse is pure. It hasn't been stained yet by our carefulness, canniness and cynicism.


CS!:  Funny you should mention Shallow Grave, because not only is there a bag of money in this movie, but you also revisit the idea of someone peering down through a crack in the ceiling again. Was this intentional?
Boyle: The bag of the money is obviously a great starting point for any movie, because it's one of those props that you bring in and it alters everything straight away. It's classic. As far as the guy in the ceiling, I guess I just like people in the ceilings. I'd heard this story a long time ago that the British army used to raid Republican streets in Belfast. 50 troops would arrive and block either end of the street, search all the houses and then 48 soldiers would leave. And then two days later, the same 48 soldiers would raid the place, the same street, again go through all the houses, and 50 soldiers would leave. The local people couldn't understand why the houses were being raided every two days, and of course, what they were doing is they were dropping in a couple people secretly as kind of spies to live in the rooftops. These people had been spying completely incommunicado, out of contact, for two days, and ever since I've always had this thing for people up there...watching.

CS!:  Is there a chance that something like this might happen whenever the British pound is finally replaced by the Euro?
Boyle: That's the problem. When we started off making this, we thought that if we get the timing of this right, we'll be #1 in the UK because it's so topical, and it will be on all the news programs. Sadly, since we started making it, it's drifted further and further away as being possible. We're so frightened of the modern world in Britain. Every time we get a chance to turn away from it, we do. It's like pathetic! One of the ideas of the film was how important and positive it is to say goodbye to things. That Damian has to say goodbye to his mum because he won't see her again and he has to learn to put that behind him in some way. I feel that about the Euro, that we should join Europe, and get on with it guys! The Irish, French and Germans have done it, and they're still Irish, French and German. They haven't been turned into Euro puddings overnight.

Millions opens in New York and Los Angeles on Friday, March 11, and elsewhere over the course of March and April. Look for more with the film's two young actors, Alex Etel and Lewis McGibbon, and you can find out more about Boyle's upcoming projects here.

[Raikus]

I'll be seeing this on 2/12 at the Portland Film Festival and will let everyone know what I thought.

Slow typer?

[modage]

well, i saw this tonight and i thought it was really good.  the first best movie of 2005.    danny boyle seemed really nice and now my trainspotting and 28 days later dvds seem really signed.  go see this.

[kill is love]

what? am i alone here? i love the things danny boyle has done but this looks like a piece of shit......

[Pubrick]

what? am i alone here? i love the things danny boyle has done but this looks like a piece of shit......

u might be alone cos the ppl judging it so far hav actually seen it.

[matt35mm]

But I, and Withnail, think it looks good from the trailer.  I haven't seen the film but I think it looks good.

So far, you're alone.