According to Danny Boyle, director of “Trainspotting,” “28 Days Later” and most recently “Millions,” it’s all about simplicity.
“The focus should be plain,” he says. “You don’t want to feel the artifice.”
Yet Boyle is responsible for an incredibly diverse collection of movies. Throughout his career, he has skipped across genres, including the thriller, the romantic comedy and the horror flick. It’s a fine delineation, but Boyle seems intent on exploring a complicated mixture of subjects in a simple way.
“Millions” is the story of a young boy in Manchester, England, who finds a quarter of a million pounds in a field near his home. Intent on doing good, he begins to give the money away, stuffing it into strangers’ mailboxes and donating to charity. When his family discovers his stash things quickly become complicated. “Millions” is about childhood innocence and the force with which money pulls us into the adult world.
While making the film, Boyle used “simple” as a guideline for working with his young cast. Eight-year-old Alexander Nathan Etel played the film’s main character, Damian. “Millions” was his first role, and Boyle didn’t want to suffocate Etel’s natural affinity with the character.
“Sometimes when a child is acting, you can see your thumb prints all over him,” Boyle says. “It’s horrible. It’s manipulative. For (Damien’s) part, I didn’t want an actor.”
To illustrate this concept, Boyle pointed out a particular scene in which Damian and his older brother look at an online lingerie catalog. Bathed in the blue light of the computer screen, Damian’s eyes get wide with fascination. Boyle said that the reactions he got from Etel were totally natural. It was simply a matter of exposing the 8-year-old to the images, then capturing his response.
Boyle made his theatrical debut in 1994, with the offbeat thriller “Shallow Grave.” Two years later “Trainspotting” made Boyle a well-known name. In the late ’90s he tapped some of Hollywood’s premiere talent, including Cameron Diaz and Ewan McGregor in “A Life Less Ordinary” and Leonardo DiCaprio in “The Beach.” He insists that in spite of his high celebrity profile, his movies are small, self-contained projects, “of a scale that’s down below the radar.”
He also says he thinks his films are unified by a vibrancy, a certain energy that stays with the viewer after they leave the theater.
“I like to make them as vivid as possible,” he says. “I’d like them to pulse with life on the screen. If you buy into a film, you will leave feeling exhilarated.”
For “Millions,” this meant a re-evaluation of Manchester’s image. Manchester is Boyle’s childhood home, and instead of the gray, industrial wasteland seen in most films set there, Boyle wanted to capture the city’s returning vitality.
“I’ve always wanted to show it through its personality,” he says. “It has resurrected itself from industrial decline.”
True to his word, Boyle’s Manchester is bright and glossy, with splashes of color in the shape of school uniforms and the thousands of pound notes that flit through the film like confetti.
“It’s sort of a love letter to a place I love,” Boyle says.
The film also is semi-autobiographical. “Millions” echoes both Boyle’s strong catholic upbringing and his extraordinary imagination. The film’s protagonist regularly converses with catholic priests who advise on what to do with his money. Boyle is careful to separate himself from Damian, but he did seem to recognize the similarities when he read Frank Boyce’s script.
“I just felt really connected (when I read the script),” he says. “I had a vivid imagination. I found that amazingly close.”
In a strange twist, “Millions” concludes with Damian and his family blasting off in a cardboard rocket ship. After a hard landing, Damian pokes his head out of the vessel to find himself in a remote African village, where the inhabitants are pumping the first drops of water from a newly tapped deep-water well.
For Boyle, the film’s ending gives body and shape to Damian’s naivete — the belief that 10 pounds given to a charity will really pay for an African well. However, throughout “Millions,” Boyle took pains to represent this innocence in a positive light and without cynicism.
“A big part of imagination is naivete,” he says. “That’s kind of a pejorative word, and I wanted to address that.”
The ending of “Millions” could also be interpreted as a political statement — some kind of message about the importance of portable water, or the profound impact European nations can have on the quality of life in Africa. At the very least most viewers will inevitably chalk up Damian’s spontaneous transport to pure fantasy.
Boyle insists that the right explanation is always the simplest.
“I don’t think of it as a fantasy,” he says. “For him, they are there.”4
Weinberg junior Josh Malmuth is a PLAY writer. He can be reached at [email protected].