Sunshine [A New Film By Danny Boyle]

[MacGuffin]

[Pubrick]

[MacGuffin]

Extended Trailer here.

[Pubrick]

maybe i should have watched this when it was released here several months ago.

[cron]

my exact same thoughts.

[cine]

sure, me too. 

[MacGuffin]

Danny Boyle feels the heat with 'Sunshine'
The director ('Trainspotting,' '28 Days Later') has turned in a kind-of '2001' for 2007. But it wasn't easy.
Source: Los Angeles Times

London — IN "Trainspotting," Danny Boyle turned junkies into charismatic antiheroes. With "28 Days Later," the British director transformed typically lumbering zombies into sprinting killers. In his new movie, "Sunshine," Boyle faced perhaps his greatest challenge yet: making weightless astronauts actually look ... weightless.

Just a few days into production on the science-fiction film at London's Three Mills Studios, Boyle was growing more exasperated by the minute. His film's astronauts, sent 50 years into the future to reignite the dying sun, were supposed to be carefully maneuvering outside their spacecraft. But the crane on which the actors' stunt doubles stood was jerking around like a '57 Chevy.

Still, it was an improvement over Boyle's first pass at a zero gravity a few days earlier. "That would have looked better if I had just carried the person in my arms," Boyle said of the subsequently discarded footage.

As his effects team labored to reset the crane, the Shakespearean theater director turned independent film darling tried to console his actors, who had been pacing around the London soundstage all morning. "My apologies," Boyle said to his film's costars, Cillian Murphy ("Batman Begins") and Hiroyuki Sanada ("The Last Samurai"). "I guarantee you we will do your scenes first thing tomorrow."

In the scheme of "Sunshine's" difficult production, that one-day delay would prove minor. From that frustrating morning in September 2005, Boyle would spend more than another full year working on "Sunshine," with Fox Searchlight having to reschedule the film's release not once but twice.

While he could not have imagined on that September day two years ago how challenging the film's special effects would be, Boyle seemed to sense the trouble ahead. A video team shooting interviews for the film's website stopped by, asking "Sunshine's" cast and crew what item they would bring into space. The 50-year-old Boyle had a succinct answer: "A noose."

Nearly two years later, "Sunshine" is finally finished — and Boyle didn't quite kill himself making it (though he went about $5 million over budget).

If Boyle faced a difficult test in reproducing zero gravity, distributor Fox Searchlight now is confronted with an equally daunting trial. In a season filled with big-budget blockbusters on the high end and smaller, personal films on the low, the studio somehow must fit "Sunshine" in between.

Neither a glossy popcorn movie nor an intimate art film, "Sunshine," premiering tonight as the closing film of the Los Angeles Film Festival and opening in theaters July 20, occupies dangerous territory: it's a thinking-person's save-the-world film. Imagine "Armageddon" — with good reviews.

Like much of Boyle's earlier work — the Manchester-born filmmaker burst onto the scene with 1994's "Shallow Grave" and made "Trainspotting" two years later — "Sunshine" is visually stylish and narratively idiosyncratic. His new film embraces some of the familiar beats of science fiction and tries to reformulate others. Where Boyle brought new urgency to the zombie genre with "28 Days Later," he delivers contemplative patience to "Sunshine."

"I think fans of original science fiction will really appreciate it," Steve Gilula, Fox Searchlight's distribution president, said of "Sunshine." "The question we had internally is, 'Can you release a "2001" in 2007?' We think there is an audience, but we don't want to minimize the challenges."

Together again

"SUNSHINE" marks a reunion between Boyle and novelist-screenwriter Alex Garland, the director's collaborator on both his biggest hit — 2003's "28 Days Later" — and his principal disappointment, 2000's "The Beach."

Both movies grossed about the same domestically, but "The Beach," adapted from Garland's novel of the same name, was a $50-million, post-"Titanic" Leonardo DiCaprio movie whose difficult production (and subdued reception) led Boyle to steer clear of sprawling, big-budget movies for a while.

But Hollywood kept calling, and after his "28 Days Later" and his saints and miracles fable "Millions" were behind him, Boyle was set to direct "3000 Degrees," a hefty Warner Bros. movie about a Massachusetts blaze in 1999 that killed six firefighters. But then that movie fell apart, as some of the victims' survivors and other firefighters opposed the production.

Around the same time, Garland's "Sunshine" script came in. "I knew it was a mission to the sun," Garland said of his initial "Sunshine" idea, "and that it was going to belong to the strand of science-fiction movies of the 1960s and '70s — '2001,' 'Silent Running,' the original 'Solaris.' "

Those movies are anchored more by big ideas than big effects; the movies may be set in the cosmos, but space is used as much for mood as for drama.

"You go into deep space," said Garland, whose novels include "The Tesseract" and "The Coma," "and you encounter your subconscious."

However poetic that notion, the movie still needed a plot. "The original trigger for the movie was an article about the long-term future of the sun," Garland said. "We completely rely on the sun for life. And it's totally hostile. It's beautiful, but if you look at it, it will blind you. I'm an atheist, but you can make a fair argument for the sun as God. It does a lot of God-like things, even though it's not sentient. It's a life giver and a death giver, in equal measure."

When "Sunshine" opens, we're five decades into the future, and the big ball of light is in its death throes. Instead of global warming, "Sunshine" presents the counterintuitive idea of a freezing planet. The first mission to relight the sun with an island-sized nuclear device has gone missing, so a second crew sets off seven years later to try to finish the job.

After 16 months and 55 million miles of space flight, Icarus II approaches the center of our solar system. Cooped up together for far too long, its international crew of eight is starting to fray at the edges. When they find the remains of the original Icarus I spacecraft, let's just say one of its crew members might have taken Garland's God analogy a little too seriously.

The movie didn't come together easily. Boyle's longtime producer, Andrew Macdonald, had a deal with Fox Searchlight, which was initially nervous about "Sunshine's" subject matter and its preliminary $40-million budget, much higher than Fox's specialized film unit usually spends on a single film.

"Twentieth Century Fox was not bidding on 'Sunshine,' " Macdonald said. "They reason is pretty obvious — they had made 'Solaris.' " That 2002 Steven Soderbergh-George Clooney remake had been a critical and commercial dud, grossing just $15 million. And "Sunshine" wasn't going to be an obvious, down-the-middle movie: it would be part suspenseful thriller, part existential meditation.

To get "Sunshine" rolling, Macdonald had to cobble together money from British lottery funds, U.K. rebates, and outside investor Ingenious Film Partners.

"If you pitch the movie, it sounds like [the 2003 bomb] 'The Core,' " Macdonald said. "But the key thing is that the people — especially Danny — are going to do it a whole lot better."

One of the things Boyle tried to do better was to create a believable "Sunshine" world. To that end, the film's 2057 looks and feels a lot like 2007 — "Star Trek's" skin-tight Lycra thankfully hasn't replaced T-shirts.

"My problem with science fiction is when you try to invent too much," Boyle said. "A phone looks like a banana and not a phone, and that doesn't make any sense. You don't have to have everything reinvented. Look around today. You can have an iPod on a Victorian desk."

Boyle, production designer Mark Tildesley and costume designer Suttirat Anne Larlarb reached into all directions of history, industry and pop culture for visual and narrative references. The corpses of some of the film's victims (of course people die!) are modeled on Pompeii; the Icarus II interior is designed like an oil tanker, the disfigurement of burn victim Pinbacker (Mark Strong) was influenced by the scarring suffered by race car driver Niki Lauda, and the astronaut's space helmets owe more to "South Park's" Kenny than NASA.

At the same time, the "Sunshine" production team wanted to make sure the film's outer space looked severe and inhospitable, rather than Hollywood's usual cool and beautiful depiction. Producer Macdonald said one early scene needed to be re-shot because it actually looked too nice.

"It didn't look harsh enough," Macdonald said. "It was too warm — not threatening."

Even though the script is clearly fictional, Boyle and Garland met with scientists and physicists to try to keep the film from taking a constellation of factual liberties. "The script does take some leaps at the end," Boyle said. "But if you can ground it in the first quarter, you can believe the stuff that happens in the end, when it all goes time-warping ballistic."

Instead of the industry norm of farming out visual effects to a dozen vendors, Boyle essentially used one effects house (London's Moving Picture Co.) for almost all of the film's 750 effects shots. Macdonald said Boyle preferred working that way because it gave him the greatest level of quality control. Yet it also slowed the post-production to a crawl.

"Sunshine" was supposed to be completed a year ago, with a planned theatrical release in October 2006, which was then moved to March 2007. "Sunshine" eventually opened in Britain, and most other foreign territories, in April. The reception, like the movie's global weather, was cool.

View from the finish line

WITH Boyle's film finally done in early 2007, it's hard to get a read on the filmmaker over lunch. He's either excited, relieved — or both.

"No director, unless they are contractually obligated, will ever go back and do a sequel set in space," Boyle said. "When I finished it in January, I would have said no, it wasn't worth it. Because I fell out with everybody. To make these movies, you have to be so uncompromising and scorch all of the ground in front of you. But now, especially talking about it, you realize what you've learned from it."

In a way, the lessons of making this movie parallel what Boyle hopes audiences take away.

"Do we go back to the moon? Do we go somewhere different?" the director said. "Do we play safe? Or do we take a big risk?"

Boyle himself, who is remarkably candid for a director of his caliber, said his next movie will be far more manageable. Not that he's playing it totally safe. "Slum Dog Millionaire," as the movie is called, unfolds in Mumbai around the Hindi version of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire."

"But I can shoot it in summer," Boyle said, "and be done by Christmas."

[Fernando]

I saw it months ago and was pretty good, in fact only this and Zodiac are the only really good films I've seen this year. So my Top Ten right now has only these two films and I'm sure Ratatouille will get in there.

Edit: 28 weeks later wasn't so bad either.

[MacGuffin]

A slashing attack on a fellow director
Source: NY Daily News

"Trainspotting" helmer Danny Boyle says Eli Roth, who directed the horror film "Hostel," isn't very good.

"His movies aren't even particularly well done," he told us at a screening of his "Sunshine," out July 20. "They're not even scary. They're horrible, but that's not scary. It's not suspense. And if you watch my films in detail, there's actually not a lot of violence in them. You get numb with violence very quickly."

Roth's spokesman Simon Halls told us: "Eli has a lot of fans out there, and these last reviews he received were really great."

Regardless, Roth's sure to be crying all the way to the bank, with $65 million in box office so far for "Hostel" and its sequel, out now.

Boyle reinvented the zombie flick with his "28 Days Later." His latest project, "Sunshine," stars Cillian Murphy as an astronaut and physicist who must detonate a nuclear bomb that will restart the dying sun.

The mission, natch, goes terribly awry and had the audience peering through its fingers.

Chris Evans, Michelle Yeoh and Rose Byrne round out the cast of spacemen and -women, but even "Fantastic Four" hottie Evans - who Boyle calls "a brilliant actor ... like DiCaprio" - couldn't kick-start any intergalactic romance.

"It's an obvious thing when there's a young cast like this - you think it would develop romantically," said Boyle. "But it just doesn't work in space. We tried it and wrote some stuff, and it's just embarrassing."

That doesn't mean the cast didn't get personal time."I made them live together in the beginning," said Boyle. "I think they were all expecting to stay in the Dorchester or the Hilton, and I put them in student digs together. And it worked really well. They became a really strong ensemble really quickly."

Dorms instead of luxury suites? This director knows how to bring horror to Hollywood.

[MacGuffin]

The Space Odyssey of Danny Boyle
Source: New York Times

PEOPLE often ask what connects all the films," the British director Danny Boyle said recently. It's not a line of inquiry he enjoys.

"It's embarrassing when they start talking about the work in the sense of an oeuvre," he said, accentuating the Frenchness of the offending word. "It makes me self-conscious."

Mr. Boyle, 50, has directed nine movies, beginning with "Shallow Grave" in 1994, and his discomfort at being pigeonholed is evident in a filmography marked by both restlessness and agility. Like Steven Soderbergh and Michael Winterbottom he is something of a professional chameleon. His protagonists have included nihilist junkies ("Trainspotting"), enraged zombies ("28 Days Later"), neo-hippie backpackers ("The Beach") and saint-worshiping children ("Millions"). His genres have ranged from black comedy to apocalyptic horror to — with his new film, "Sunshine," scheduled to open July 20 — metaphysical science fiction.

In an apparently rare moment of self-reflection Mr. Boyle said that the one through-line in his career was not a thematic obsession but a faith in "sheer physical pleasure," as he put it, sounding every bit the hedonist director of "Trainspotting." He added: "I don't want people to sit there and objectively watch the film. I want them to experience it as something that's under their skin, so you try to make the films really tactile."

That principle of sensory stimulation is front and center in "Sunshine," which depicts a manned mission to the Sun. A crew of scientists (aboard the pointedly named Icarus) has been given the task of restarting the dying star by torpedoing it with a nuclear payload. The plot might evoke the dim, head-banging likes of "Armageddon" and "The Core," but the tone is a throwback to the age of Moon-landing utopianism and "2001: A Space Odyssey." (Completing the impression of '60s-style cosmic reverence, the premise seems to be lifted from the 1968 Pink Floyd title "Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun.")

During an interview in Manhattan last month Mr. Boyle said that he and his screenwriter, the novelist Alex Garland, who also wrote the script for "28 Days Later," embraced the idea that "Sunshine," precisely because of the vastness of its subject, would be a space odyssey in the most interior sense: a head trip. "It's like films about mountains," he said. "They're not about mountaineering. They're about the mind. Movies about space raise those questions of what we're doing here, and that inevitably introduces a spiritual dimension."

A journey toward the source of life, "Sunshine" is also a film about confronting death. In the time-honored tradition of the dwindling-crew thriller, it picks off its cast one at a time, often in spectacular fashion; many of the deaths verge on the rapturous. "I remember thinking when I first read Alex's script that it basically goes from one fantastic death to another," Mr. Boyle said. "That's the structure."

To get his international ensemble cast members (Cillian Murphy, Chris Evans and Michelle Yeoh, among others) better acquainted with one another and with the cramped dimensions of a spacecraft, Mr. Boyle put them up in East London student housing during rehearsals. He brought in a particle physicist to offer lessons on the science of the Sun. He also tried to inspire a suitable degree of awe for the scenes that simulated contact with the Sun (crew members peer out at the looming orb through Ray-Bans and filtered windows). "I'd say things like, 'Every bit of you is just a bit of exploded star,' " he said.

A visual stylist by nature, Mr. Boyle admitted that he was outside his comfort zone when it came to the computer-generated imagery so crucial to "Sunshine." "I didn't understand how C.G. worked, but I was adamant about how I wanted things to look," he said. To communicate his wishes to the effects team, he compiled an album of photographs that included images of the sun captured by the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, a spacecraft that revolutionized solar studies when it was launched in 1995.

"Sunshine" dares to imagine how the Sun would be experienced at unthinkably close range. "We could make the impact very striking immediately," he said. "You blast light, add loud music, and you're there, bang."

Mr. Boyle wanted to minimize the clichés of the genre: twinkling star fields, zero-gravity floats, cutaways to the spacecraft inching across the frame. He was also wary of the plastic images that are the hallmark of ill-deployed C.G.I. "I was desperate to avoid that thing that happens in big movies, where part of your brain goes, 'I don't believe that,' " he said.

The impulsive detours and quick course corrections of Mr. Boyle's career indicate a willingness not just to experiment but also to assess his own strengths and weaknesses honestly. "Shallow Grave" (1994) and "Trainspotting" (1996) made a star of Ewan McGregor and positioned Mr. Boyle, his producer Andrew Macdonald and his screenwriter John Hodge as the bright young hopes of the British film industry, part of the Cool Britannia wave that swept Britpop onto the music charts and New Labor into office. But the American studio movies that followed, the romantic trifle "A Life Less Ordinary" (1997) and "The Beach" (2000), an adaptation of Mr. Garland's best-selling novel, were critical and commercial disappointments.

Instead of hanging around Hollywood waiting for his shot at redemption, Mr. Boyle went back to basics and, in 2001, made a pair of low-budget movies for British television (where he began his directing career, after a stint in the theater). "Vacuuming Completely Nude in Paradise" and "Strumpet," both shot on digital video, loosened him up again and paved the way for 2002's jittery "28 Days Later," about the outbreak of a rage virus. As zombie movies often do, the film dovetailed with contemporary anxieties (in that instance, over anthrax and severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS). It cost under $10 million and grossed more than $80 million worldwide.

Mr. Macdonald, who has produced most of Mr. Boyle's films, said that the Boyle-Garland genre updates were notable for their high-concept nerviness. "They're not scared of big ideas," he said. "I think that's what separates them. British filmmaking can often be very parochial."

As for Mr. Boyle's highest profile project, "The Beach," with Leonardo DiCaprio, it exists for its director mainly as a reminder of how never to make a film.

"I had everything I wanted," he said, "and that just doesn't do me any good. I'm not recommending it to everybody — some people do need every little toy they can get — but for me, I had nothing left to do. I'm much better under the radar a bit and actually figuring out how to make things work. Money's so elastic in film anyway."

A Bright Future "Sunshine," given the go-ahead after the success of "28 Days Later," was made for $45 million, not a small sum but a little less than the budget of "The Beach" and a lot less than a studio would have spent on an effects-heavy sci-fi summer movie.

For now Mr. Boyle remains based in Britain. The industry he was supposed to have helped revive has, in his opinion, not changed at all. "The British film industry is best described as occasional," he said, laughing. "We get the cinema we deserve. We're not like the Americans or French or Indians, who are dedicated to the cinema in the millions. We just don't go."

Mr. Boyle, born in Manchester to working-class Irish parents, said class barriers still play a part in the British film scene. "Kids with talent form bands," he said. "With film it's still regarded as an Oxbridge thing, as though making a film is some kind of intelligence skill, which it's not, clearly."

His roster of forthcoming projects is typically diverse. He's teaming with the screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce, who wrote "Millions," on an animated film. And he hopes eventually to get around to "Porno," the novelist Irvine Welsh's sequel to "Trainspotting." It's set two decades after the original, so the actors will have to age visibly. "There's been no massive hair loss yet," Mr. Boyle said.

First up is "Slum Dog Millionaire," set in Mumbai. Written by Simon Beaufoy ("The Full Monty"), it centers on a boy who wins the Indian version of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire."

For Mr. Boyle the chief appeal of the film is that Mumbai is about as far as you can get from the airless confines of a spaceship. "It's the opposite of 'Sunshine,' which is such a controlled world," he said. "Movie productions are all about stopping life. In Mumbai life is splattered everywhere. You can't control it, so you've got to find a way to absorb it."

Mr. Boyle's years in the business have instilled a belief that success has nothing to do with growth as it's conventionally defined. "Ironically you've got to try and stay like you were," he said. "You get better technically, and technical expertise is a source of danger." In other words, professionalism can get in the way of what's important. "In a sense you never make one as good as the first film," he said.

Does he really think "Shallow Grave" was his career peak? "I'm not saying it's the best one, but in some way it is and will always be the best one," he said. "Everything after the first one is business. There's something about that innocence and joy when you just don't quite know what you're doing."

Mr. Boyle permitted himself another moment of introspection. His movies bear so little obvious relation to one another perhaps because they are devoted to recapturing the magic of the first time. "One thing you can do is change the technology you work with," he said. "That can be an enormous rebirth. You can also change genres a lot. You don't go back to what you've done. You do something that leaves you as a learner again."

[MacGuffin]

Danny Boyle's Space Odyssey, By Kurt Loder
In 'Sunshine,' the '28 Days Later' director takes us on a fantastic voyage.
Source: MTV

Fans of the English director Danny Boyle may have given up wondering what he'll do next. There seems to be no telling. Boyle likes to go to some unusual new place with each of his movies, but he's never been interested in going there twice. His first feature, the 1994 "Shallow Grave" (which also launched Ewan McGregor), was a tart, twisty crime caper, cultishly admired to this day. His second, the 1996 "Trainspotting," was an electrifyingly nasty (and influential) drug-world adventure. These impressive films were followed by a screwball fantasy ("A Life Less Ordinary"), an odd trouble-in-paradise tale ("The Beach," with Leonardo DiCaprio) and a smashingly successful low-budget horror movie ("28 Days Later") that actually managed to ring some new changes on the musty zombie genre. (Look at 'em run!).

Now, with his latest film, "Sunshine," Boyle ventures into another venerable cinematic precinct: outer space. Building on the work of such stellar predecessors as Stanley Kubrick ("2001: A Space Odyssey") and Ridley Scott ("Alien"), Boyle has extended the pictorial vocabulary of the rocket-ship thriller by sending his astronauts not to the moon, or to Mars, but to the sun. This was a considerable technical challenge (especially with a $40-million budget). Space movies usually play out in the inky, star-flecked blackness of some vast intergalactic waste. "Sunshine" — as the misleadingly cheery title suggests — is often bathed in solar glare as the ship draws ever closer to its fiery target. The sun is dying, and along with it the Earth, unless this mission can kick it back into gear with an onboard nuclear device. A sizeable problem, obviously. But not the only one, it turns out — or the scariest, either.

Boyle assembled a strong international cast for the picture, including Cillian Murphy, Rose Byrne, Michelle Yeoh and Chris Evans. He also did a lot of research, and he brought in University of Manchester physicist Brian Cox to be the film's science advisor. The project has clearly been a sizeable learning experience. We wondered what it had taught him — not just about space itself, but about space movies, as well.

MTV: Were you daunted at all entering this sci-fi genre, in which there are so many classic movies, and not having a blockbuster budget to work with?

Danny Boyle: Yeah, it was terrifying, because it's quite a narrow field. I've never worked on a film where your predecessors just kind of surround you constantly. Like, when you do a thriller, you don't think of Hitchcock the whole time. But when you do a space movie you're just thinking about, you know, "2001," and the first "Alien," of course. You can't avoid them.

MTV: Are there limitations on what you can do in an outer-space movie?

Boyle: Yeah, it boils down to three things: a ship, a crew and a signal. Basically, that's what you have in this kind of sci-fi. Not in fantasy sci-fi, like "Star Wars," where you can go to any planet and find creatures or whatever. But when it's based on a certain amount of realism, and on space exploration as we know it, then it comes down to: there's a ship and a crew and a signal that changes everything.

MTV: And then we watch the crew get picked off.

Boyle: And then you watch the crew get picked off. And you can kill them in any order you want — that's great. The good thing about space, it's [ideal for] ensemble acting; it doesn't really suit massive stars. These movies tend to suit a group of actors, and you don't know in what order they're going to die. That's one of the really cool things about it.

MTV: What did you want to add to this genre, to sort of twist it a bit?

Boyle: There are certain things you can't change. You think you can, but you can't. Certain principles have been established, some of which are fake, some of which are just movie [conventions]. Like weightlessness. If you watch [actual] space-station weightlessness, [movements are at normal] speed. But in movies, it has to be done in slow motion — if you do it the way it's done on a space station, it looks phony.

MTV: What did you learn about the sun?

Boyle: It loses some five million tons of mass every second, and yet it will burn for another four billion years. And we are about halfway through its life cycle. If you put a pin-head's worth of its matter out in the street, it would destroy Manhattan. There would be nothing left standing anywhere. It's extraordinary.

MTV: I think "Sunshine" has a pioneering look for space movies, because the sun is so dominant. That must have been daunting, how to convey the power of the sun, and shoot it.

Boyle: That was the biggest challenge, really. Because the film is ultimately meant to be quite frightening. But in movies, normally you use darkness to create fear and terror. But [this movie] is based on light — it's the art of lightness, really, rather than the art of darkness. So to portray [the sun's] power, and to incrementally increase it as they get closer and closer, was the greatest challenge. And the way we did it, we tried to rob the audience of the colors orange and red. We didn't have any of those colors inside the ship. And then when you went outside the ship, you suddenly felt all this orange light. It's like you had been thirsty without being aware of it; you had been denied this color range. And then suddenly you're flooded with it.

MTV: It doesn't feel like there's a lot of computer-generated imagery in this film, but obviously there must be.

Boyle: There must be. I think that's the reason there hasn't been a film made about the sun, because I think until recently there wasn't a way technically to represent it. But CG is now capable of almost anything, as we've seen in this summer's releases. And we tried to do it in an organic way, so it didn't feel like a big special-effects movie. We always tried to give the actors something [to look at] that was similar to what the audience would eventually see them facing.

MTV: So it wasn't green-screen all the time?

Boyle: There was very little of that. We had this extraordinary set for the end, where Cillian faces the sun bursting into the bomb chamber. They built this huge rig of scaffolding with lights on it. It looked like a U2 concert; it was incredible. And they put it on wheels and pushed it down the room towards him, this huge thundering thing, and that gave him a sense of what it would be like to be out there.

MTV: Some of the big CGI films, like the "Spider-Man" movies, sometimes look like cartoons. Do you think that that computer technology loses its effect after a while?

Boyle: I think our eye is extraordinary, the way we know that's not real. It doesn't stop people enjoying it — you still enjoy it. But I think there will always be filmmakers who will come back and do it for real sometimes. The effect is different. There's still something slightly plasticated about CG, and I don't know whether they'll ever conquer that. The brain is so quick in saying, "That's not possible. That isn't a human going through that."

MTV: Why is there never any sex in space?

Boyle: It's very difficult in space. I'm not quite sure why, but for the movie it didn't work. We put it in — we actually tried it in the script — but it just felt really wrong somehow. You would think it would be a natural thing with Chris Evans and Rose Byrne, or Cillian and Rose Byrne, for it to develop romantically in some way. But it doesn't really suit it at all.

MTV: What are your favorite sci-fi movies? What did you grow up watching?

Boyle: I was a big "Star Trek" fan when I was a kid, the TV series. But I never watched the movies. I don't know why. I never made that transition to the movies. I'm not a big fan of the fantasy stuff, like "Star Wars." It's really more the hard-core stuff, like "Alien," especially the first one, using that almost Victorian industrial look in space. It's brilliant. It's about 28 years old and it still just stuns me. It has been much-copied.

MTV: Weren't you asked to direct the fourth movie in that series, "Alien: Resurrection"?

Boyle: I was, and I was very tempted, because I was such a big fan. But then I realized I would ruin it, so I kept away. I felt a responsibility toward the other film, so I said no and stepped away.

MTV: In "Sunshine," there's a very unusual-looking bad guy. Did you already have the design of this character in mind going in?

Boyle: He's not your regular villain. We had an idea that he was a spectral presence — but not a ghost. Because he's real, because of the damage he does. But somehow, the forces of light he's been exposed to have sort of reorganized him. And when [the crew members] see him, it's a challenge to their sanity: Is it possible for somebody to be like this? Not just in terms of disfigurement — he is burnt — but also because it appears that all the pieces that make him up — the protons and neutrons — have been reorganized in some way and put back together differently. And that is not a CG effect. We did that all live with a special lens on the camera.

MTV: In the end, the movie seems to start sailing off into the metaphysical ...

Boyle: There's a bit of that in there, yeah. They see something out there that's not entirely natural. Something much bigger than we could ever [comprehend]. You [have to] realize how narrow our thinking is, normally. You've got to imagine that there might be something else out there that's much bigger and wider than we think.

MTV: Did the company you did this movie with, Fox Searchlight, get involved in the making of it?

Boyle: They did mention changing the title to something a bit less like a musical. But no, they were brilliant actually. We had made "28 Days Later," which was very successful, and that buys you a certain amount of freedom. And we used that freedom to set up the film in the way that we set up "28 Days Later" — we made it in London, in a small studio, and we kept control of it and used the kind of actors we wanted to use, and [Fox was] brilliantly supportive.

MTV: One of the casting surprises in "Sunshine" is Chris Evans. A lot of people probably think of him as that guy from "The Fantastic Four." He's so underrated.

Boyle: He's a superb actor — and I'm not saying that just 'cause he's in my film. I didn't really know him — I hadn't seen "Fantastic Four" when I cast him. The casting director in America said, "You should meet this guy. He's underestimated. I think he's brilliant." And Chris came in the room, [and he was] superb. He's a very, very talented guy, really very special. He can do anything.

MTV: You might be able to go into the franchise/sequel business with this movie. You did executive-produce the "28 Days Later" sequel.

Boyle: I'm not particularly keen on franchises. I find it really depressing that they're so successful. It used to be, when I started, that a sequel would only make 60 percent of what the original movie did. Now, of course, the sequels are much more successful than the originals. I'm more interested in doing originals. If you can come up with good enough ideas, people will come and see original films, rather than the rehash, you know? Rather than the sequel.

MTV: But there must be some studio enthusiasm for another "28 Days" sequel — "28 Years Later," maybe?

Boyle: There is an idea for the next one, something which would move [the story] on. I've got to think about it, whether it's right or not.

MTV: Would you actually go back and direct it this time?

Boyle: Well, I didn't want to do the second one, because I was involved in "Sunshine." But I went out and I helped them [with "28 Weeks Later"]. I did some second-unit shooting on it. And I really enjoyed it, actually. There's something about doing something trashy that's great. Where basically you just come in the door and you just kill them. That was rather refreshing.

[Pubrick]

dude has officially spent more time talking about the movie than he did making it. and surely more than anyone will spend talking about it after its american release.

depressing.

moreso because every interview he's given has been infested with spoilers to the point where nobody who's reading them would ever have to watch the movie.

[MacGuffin]

Exclusive: Danny Boyle on Sunshine!
Source: ComingSoon!

Danny Boyle has been at the forefront of British cinema since his 1994 debut feature Shallow Grave showed he had the chops to hold an audience in suspense. In 1996, his heroin-infused Trainspotting became an international sensation and made a star out of Ewan McGregor. After a sour turn at studio filmmaking with The Beach, he created another star in Irishman Cillian Murphy and simultaneously revived the zombie genre with 28 Days Later.

Boyle has re-teamed with Murphy for the new sci-fi thriller Sunshine, which depicts eight scientist-astronauts in the future flying a bomb the size of Manhattan through space in order to reignite the Earth's dying Sun. When they pick up a distress beacon from a ship thought lost from the previous attempt, Murphy's lead scientist decides to divert the mission, throwing it, the crew, and the lives of everyone on Earth into jeopardy.

In the New York interview, which follows, Boyle talks more about the research that went into making this a more serious sci-fi venture in the vein of 2001 or Silent Running. Boyle also talks about his next film, an India-set comedy-romance called Slumdog Millionaire.

ComingSoon.net: There's a recurring element in the film, never discussed, which is the idea of the sun being addictive or having a kind of power over the crew, specifically the Cliff Curtis character who gets gradually more and more sunburned. Can you talk about that?
Boyle: It manifests itself physically in him, but it's true of all of them really. It becomes addictive, and we talked about that a lot. We talked to NASA as well and they said if you did this kind of travel one of the biggest problems is psychological. They've got a serious problem which is gravity, which is what's preventing us really leaving our planet at the moment on long-term space travel. They can provide oxygen, like an oxygen garden, which is exactly how they'll generate oxygen. They can provide long-term food source, all that kind of stuff. The problem is gravity, but the other big problem that they don't really know what will happen is psychology. There's a great book that we read as research by a guy called Andrew Smith who's a journalist. He had this very clever idea of trying to interview all the guys who'd been on the moon. He didn't get to talk to all of them, 'cause Armstrong won't talk to people, and they're all f*cked up on some level or other by it, either by the celebrity that followed or by, and this was the big thing, about being out of sight of the Earth. These were the first people to ever leave our Earth, you know, and the most lonely moment is when you fly around the dark side of the moon 'cause there's no radio contact for 45 minutes and all you can see is eternity out there, just nothing. He talks in the book about the psychological effect on these guys, and we tried to manifest that through this addictive thing. What replaces that is this sense of going to meet your maker, if you think of it in religious terms or spiritual terms, but it is going to meet the source of all life as we know it, the single most important thing there is. If you could... and the movie lets you do it, if you could pull up really close to it what effect would that have upon you? That was wonderful for the actors to have, and it's addiction, it's like drugs. After a while you just cannot do without it, it begins to kind of pour through you, course through your veins.

CS: To what degree do you adhere to genre standards in production design? There are certain things like the catwalks are grated, and the pipes on the walls, and everything seems stripped down, it alludes to aesthetics we've seen in previous sci-fi films. How do you break the mold while continuing to adhere to it?
Boyle: It's the constant thing you're doing all the time. It's so narrow, this genre, much narrower than say a zombie genre. This is really narrow. There's two branches. There's fantasy, Star Wars and Star Trek, where you can do anything you want. This is the other branch, it's based on realism, that man goes into space in a steel tube. Because of your predecessors, you're constantly in debt to them, either because you want to be like the steel blue-grey look of "Alien" you create that inside the ship, everyone wants to use that, that's great. Or because you can't avoid it, but occasionally you try to break away, you try to make your own little passageway through, like the spacesuit is very original, and that's very dangerous. The producers were really alarmed that we were gonna do something as risky as that, 'cause every other one uses the white suit, it's based on the NASA white suit, but ours is gold, BLING GOLD, and you're not gonna be able to see into the helmet. That really worried people, 'cause all the sci-fi movies use the goldfish bowl and then they have a big problem 'cause you cannot see through it 'cause it's there to protect the astronauts from light! But in a movie you have to have a light inside so that you can see that it's John Hurt or Sigourney Weaver or whoever inside. We said we're not gonna do that, what we'll do is put the camera inside the helmet, and that helped add to the claustrophobia.

CS: It seemed to have a lot of credibility to it just because if you were going on a mission like this where you were getting this close to the sun you would need another kind of material to be resistant to the heat.
Boyle: Yes. Absolutely. In fact what they use is gold leaf. The shield, which we built of solid gold, they use gold because it's the best reflector of heat, it dissipates heat straight away, but what they use on satellites that fly quite close to the sun to photograph it, they use incredibly thin gold leaf. It's astonishing, you think "what?" You go behind a shield of gold leaf that's so thin, thinner than paper. That's how they do it. We couldn't use it for practical reasons 'cause we'd have just torn it (laughs) as soon as the film crew went near it would have torn, we'd still be shooting.

CS: What about Brian Cox and just the thought and physics that went into the designing of the ship?
Boyle: We used this science advisor, Brian Cox, who's the new... I'm sure you have the same problem here, Britain and Europe have a big problem in terms of the face of science to young people. Not enough young people are doing science in school. They've traced it back, when you say science to kids they still think "Einstein... old man, bald head, gray hair, who wants to do that? I wanna be like Rihanna, I don't want to do Einstein!" (laughs) So they point to this guy Brian Cox. He's literally a European-wide face of science now, and he's young, trendy, he was in a group called D:Ream who did a famous song "Things Can Only Get Better". He's super-trendy, you'd never think of him as a scientist but he's absolutely brilliant. We also used NASA, there's ways you can ask NASA just constant questions. Because of their demand for your taxpayer's money they're very PR conscious, they help everybody all the time, they see themselves as a library of information that everybody can access. So we used those two to build the film, the knowledge of the actors on a character, the technical requirements of the ship, what was feasible, what was believable. They'd use gold, they'd have an oxygen garden, and they would cook. NASA said if we ever do long-term space travel it won't be like in "2001" where you have bits of pre-packaged food 'cause that's a sure way they'd go insane. What they'd do is let people grow food, possibly even taking fish and breeding fish so you could nurture and gather your food, cook it, eat it, then wash it up afterwards. They think that cycle is CRUCIAL to your sanity when you're out there, which is really amazing. In fact when the astronauts go up, when they circle the Earth they experience 12 or 14 sunrise and sunsets, but they keep them strictly to the same pattern of Earth, which is one sunrise and one sunset in terms of your sleeping pattern. That's so deeply imbedded in our DNA, that lifecycle of the sun, that to challenge is a certain way of sending them insane, to ask them to sleep in different patterns, so they keep them in the same pattern as on Earth.

CS: Cillian Murphy and the rest of the cast visited CERN in Switzerland in order to prepare for their roles, which is appropriate since it's the only scientific project on Earth that comes close to what they're doing in the film just in terms of scale. Have you visited also?
Boyle: I've never been, actually. I'm due to go in October when they open it, but I don't think I'll get there now because of the film I'm doing in Mumbai. It's meant to be amazing. It's a particle accelerator that's 27 kilometers. There's one in Chicago as well, but this is gonna be bigger than Chicago, this is going to be the biggest one on the planet. Chicago and here are searching for a particle called the Higgs Particle. They fire protons in opposite directions around this 27 km circumference at staggering speeds, just short of the speed of light, and then they crash them into each other and they're looking for that moment of explosion that's the Big Bang in miniature. They're looking for a particle that's smaller than a proton, but these guys, ironically, call it God's Particle. (laughs) That's their nickname for it. So even with these guys, who are top class atheistic scientists, the question of where we come from, who made us, is still hanging in there.

CS: Have you ever been this involved in researching a project?
Boyle: Probably not in a way that I can talk about it afterwards but I try to do this level of research on everything I do. You just absorb yourself completely in the world, or you try to. The other thing we found out at CERN, which is amazing, is in October when they do hit these protons into each other there is a chance, a small chance, that they will create a black hole. They don't know whether they will or not, and if there is a black hole created that's it, we're all finished. Supposedly when the Americans exploded the first Atom Bomb they had to go to congress because the scientists said there was a 10% chance they might set the sky on fire, the whole sky around the Earth. The congress and the president said "go ahead anyway". (laughs) In fact, I said to Brian Cox "so there's a black hole in which we'll all disappear instantly?" and he said "don't worry, you won't remember anything, it'll all be just over like that. (laughs)

CS: Does that add some pressure for you to finish on time?
Boyle: (laughs) Actually it relieves all the pressure!

CS: Can you tell us a little more about the movie you're making now in Mumbai?
Boyle: It's called "Slumdog Millionaire" and it's written by Simon Beaufoy who wrote "The Full Monty," which is one of my favorite British films. When he sent the script I didn't really... the byline is about a kid who goes on the Hindi version of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" and wins it. I thought "I don't want to make a film about "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?", but I read it out of respect for him 'cause he's a fantastic writer and it's just brilliant. It's incredible, the Hindi version of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" isn't like the American or British version. It's actually INCREDIBLY difficult to win, because what you have in India is this incredibly highly populated educational strata who are very poor, they don't have much money, but they are professors so they go on "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?". After the first couple of questions, the first couple of easy questions to settle you in, the question level jumps straight away to nuclear physics! Boomph, like that! I can only ever get past the first 3 or 4 questions, that's it. Anyway, this kid is from a slum, uneducated, literally went on it and won it. They thought he cheated and everything like that, but the structure of the film, which you'll see when you see it hopefully, explains how he knows all the answers which is really the clever bit of it. The heartfelt bit is the reason he goes on the show isn't to win it, it's actually 'cause he lost his girl in Mumbai, she's a slum girl and he can't find her 'cause there's like 20 million people in the city. All he knows is she watches the show religiously so he goes on the show in order to get back in touch with her. So it's a love story. But it's good, I'm really looking forward to it! It's completely the opposite of "Sunshine," 'cause Mumbai is kind of an ordeal of humanity, just humans coming at you endlessly day and night!

CS: And it's an all-Indian cast?
Boyle: Yeah. So it'll be opening at a film festival I think, not a multiplex, 'cause there won't be much to sell it besides the film itself.

Sunshine opens in limited release on July 20 and then wide on July 27.

[Just Withnail]

Exclusive: Danny Boyle on Sunshine!

Haha

[MacGuffin]

Handmade visual effects warm Boyle's "Sunshine"

Smack in the middle of the summer's CG-heavy, massively budgeted tentpole blockbusters, Fox Searchlight is boldly going where few have gone before. On Friday (July 20), the specialty films distributor launched the sci-fi thriller "Sunshine."

Produced at a cost of $40 million, the space pic looks like it could have cost more than twice that, but it didn't because the filmmakers constructed most of their special effects by hand.

"The industry has made sci-fi this holy grail of VFX (visual effects), that you have to spend money to get anything good," said Tom Wood, "Sunshine's" VFX supervisor. "I don't agree with that. I feel filmmakers are put off doing sci-fi because of that idea."

Sci-fi is hardly alien territory to director Danny Boyle, who notes that "Sunshine" took some budgetary cues from his 2002 hit, "28 Days Later." The two features even filmed in the same small London facility, 3 Mills Studio.

"Working with a slightly crippling budget, which would make other people despair; I know what I'm best at," said Boyle, who felt strongly that he could make a visually exciting sci-fi film -- about a crew flying to the sun to save it from dying -- without major use of computer graphics.

In one sequence, a character is shown tumbling into the sun. To achieve the effect, Boyle explains that they put the actor on a large gantry, then had 20 men wheel a vast sliding rig of lights around during filming. Later, another character turns into dust, which was literally whirled around the actor for the effect.

FEELING IT

Such methods save on costs and come with hidden benefits, Boyle said. "When we blasted (the actor) with the dust, it didn't cost much -- just a couple of air blasters and a lot of edible dust and lighting. But you could feel it when it happened. Now, if I can feel it, you're not telling me that doesn't affect the spirit in the actor. Whereas if you say to him, 'We're going to blow your hair and put the dust in later,' he's going to fake it. That's the thing with actors."

CG effects' lifelike mimicking is meant to save problems on the back end, said Boyle, but ultimately the human mind knows better. "There is part of our brain where we admire the effect, but we put it in a side compartment of our experience because you know there's no way an actor can live through that, or be there in that moment," he said.

Boyle added that he's no Luddite and noted that there is room for CG in places -- the film's spaceship, for example, was computer-generated. But he's not entirely alone in trying to dial back the overwhelming use of CG to tell a story this summer: 20th Century Fox's "Live Free or Die Hard" has been praised for the verisimilitude of its stunts, which were done by stuntmen and only rarely computer-assisted.

"I think there's a staleness to films that rely too heavily on CG," said Wood, who's now working on Buena Vista's CG-fest "The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian." "I felt like on 'Sunshine' ... I was making shots for Danny Boyle's film in a way that Danny Boyle would have made himself."

As for Boyle, this was his final frontier. "I will never go back into space again," he said with a laugh. "You can feel when you're making the film that the audience expects, and you have to reach, that standard or forget it. It's very much a premiership league."