Hey everyone. Capone in Chicago here.
You know him, you love him, and somehow filmmaker Danny Boyle has managed to stay relevant not by remaining in a single genre but by never being predictable in terms of the kinds of projects he selects. He started out in an almost punk-rock style with tales of murder and drug use with SHALLOW GRAVE and TRAINSPOTTING. He allowed himself to get more extravagant and elegant with A LIFE LESS ORDINARY and THE BEACH, and dialed it way back for the fantastic made-for-TV comedy VACUUMING COMPLETELY NUDE IN PARADISE.
But it was 28 DAYS LATER… that began, in my estimation, his five-film streak of near-perfect films. If you haven't seen MILLIONS or SUNSHINE, correct that glaring error in your viewing history. And then of course came the Oscar-winning SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE. I'm sorry, but anyone that rages against this film saw it long after the hype machine had been running full steam for weeks, because those of who saw it knowing next to nothing about it loved it passionately, not just as as abashed love story but as a visual feast.
And if you've convinced yourself that SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE didn't make you want to dance in the streets after seeing it, none of that matters as you prepare yourself Danny Boyle's latest bit of incredible-ness, 127 HOURS, starring James Franco in the role of his life, literally. Nearly every friend I have is afraid to go see this movie because they don't think they can handle the sight of a man cutting his own arm off after being trapped for days in a mountain crevice with an immovable boulder pinning his arm against the mountain wall. They've heard the stories of the fainting filmgoers (which I talked to Boyle about when he was in town recently for the Chicago International Film Festival), and they've decided that Aron Ralston's (whom Franco plays) true-life story would be too much for them. While Boyle does a remarkable job keep the makeshift surgery relatively tasteful, there are far more disturbing things that he has to deal with in Ralston's ordeal. It's an extraordinary, life-affirming film that you all need to see as soon as humanly possibly. It will make you just a little bit happier about living, I promise.
I had met Boyle once before when he was touring behind sci-fi masterpiece SUNSHINE. We did a post-screening Q&A in Chicago, but for reasons I still kick myself about today, my recorder malfunctioned the following day during our interview, and I was never able to post our first talk on AICN. And even though our only other meeting was three years ago, when he walked in the room for our talk in October, he not only remembered my first name but also the circumstances behind our first meeting. It doesn't hurt that Boyle also happens to be just about the easiest man on the face of the earth to interview, and his enthusiasm is infectious. Please enjoy the remarkable Danny Boyle, and be warned: there are SPOILERS galore all through this interview.
Danny Boyle: So are you well?
Capone: Very much so, thanks.
DB: And how’s business?
Capone: As far as I know, it’s pretty good.
DB: Right.
Capone: So how did the Q&A go last night?
DB: It was alright, yeah.
Capone: Was it?
DB: Yeah, it was good. Lots of people. We were very lucky, a couple of years ago, we won prize here [for SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE]. I didn’t get to come back after the initial screening to pick up the prize. The great thing about this film festival is that they are all in that one cinema now, like 21 screens and they take over eight screens?
Capone: That’s right.
DB: And of course that’s the way to do a film festival. It’s insane, and then the lunatics just spend all day inside this building going from screening to screening, and I can’t think of anything better, because you can see the weirdest films and some films that you get a bit of a preview of that aren’t out yet and things like that.
Capone: It does give the people a chance to--if they have a three-hour gap between films they know they want to see--pick something at random that they know nothing about.
DB: Exactly. Yeah, that chance thing which is the wonderful thing about film festivals.
Capone: Exactly, so obviously this film has struck a nerve with some people.
DB: [laughs] You can’t say things like that. You can’t say, “struck a nerve.” You can’t say it’s an 'armless film. You are not allowed to say all of these jokes about arms and nerves.
Capone: I’m serious. Some people I know are afraid to see it. I almost have to dare them to see it, because they are terrified.
DB: I think because it’s a true story. It takes it out of that category of a horror movie, because in a horror movie you see much worse than what you see in this film, but the context is completely different. It's not that your defenses are up in horror movie, but they seriously have to show some stuff like that in a horror movie, otherwise it’s not going to fulfill it’s obligation to you.
But this of course is a true story, and I think the other thing that happens--and this is what we hoped would happen and this is the approach we took--is that you would put yourself in that position, not literally, not even voluntarily. Some of it is “Can I do that?” But it’s also that the approach to the film is to make it subjective, to literally not let you leave that canyon unless you can sort of participate in what he does. So in a way, you can’t look away, or you shouldn’t be able to. I mean everybody can if they want to, but what has amazed me… We did have a few fainters early on, you heard.
Capone: Come on, you just made that up, right? I read those stories and was like “This is some publicity person gone insane.” [Laughs]
DB: In fact, they told me not to mention it because, in fact, for this kind of film it’s not good publicity. For a horror movie, it’s like you cannot dream of better publicity, but for this kind of film, it will put off women, for instance. It will. It just will, but in fact it isn’t fake, because I was there when it happened. I was in the auditorium, and it happened three times in three different screenings. I couldn't believe it.
Capone: I couldn’t believe it either.
DB: I thought, “Fuck.” And if you are terribly selfish, because what you should be thinking about is the poor person who is in distress and all you can think is “Fuck, we're at the end of this film.” You can’t really concentrate on James Franco when somebody’s going “Paramedic! Paramedic!”
Capone: All of those women you get to bring in because he’s in it are all going to be too scared to see it.
DB: That’s the danger, but what has amazed me, just to look on the bright side, is that we’ve had virtually no walkouts, and that is amazing I think for this kind of film with those kinds of scenes in it. People will stick it out, even though they don’t like it, they want to get through it with him somehow, and the euphoria you get after it is pretty deep. It’s not like a cheap thrill, it’s like you feel something sort of genuine really. That’s Franco’s performance, I think. He carries you through it and actually what you see is not that much; what you get is his acting.
Capone: I’ve been telling people that. I said, “They don’t really show that much, at least not in focus,” and you know what got me though was not the arm getting cut off, because I’ve seen that, like you said, in many horror films; it was the breaking bones. Oh man…
DB: Isn’t that amazing? People break their bones all of the time, soccer injuries… My dad’s in the hospital at the moment, he broke his hip, and the ward he’s is full of kids who’ve broken that [slaps his leg below the knee] playing football. So it happens to people all of the time, but somebody doing it voluntarily…
Capone: I'm guessing no one in the hospital did it on purpose. [Laughs]
DB: And you know what he’s doing, you think, “Oh my God he’s going to…” And it is tough, but it is accurate. We didn’t sensationalize any of that, because it’s just like it’s written in the book. It’s exactly how he describes it and this noise in the canyon, this fucking gunshot noise in the canyon and also his extraordinary reaction where he realizes “Yes, I can do it” after he breaks both of the bones and he doesn’t cry out in pain. He goes “Yes!” That was amazing. Franco doing that was amazing.
Capone: Yeah, let me back it up a little. In my head a lot of times I sort of wonder, especially in a film like this how certain things were shot and, in my brain, it was just you and James down there, because there’s not room for anything else.
DB: It sort of was, except I was on the monitor. There was James and then the cameraman and it was either [co-cinematographers] Anthony Dod Mantle or Enrique Chediak and I was outside on the monitor, and everybody else was outside too. So you are right, it was shot like that and it was so difficult to get in there, even though we built it just as it was where there were no floating walls or anything.
You couldn’t keep stopping and starting; you had to just do these long, long takes, and James would be in there for like 20 or 30 minutes doing these long takes and improvising with the cameraman. They would be working together, and it was amazing the two of them. I got two cameramen, because I thought they would be different and I thought that would be a good thing, that the film would have a varied look, but, in fact, you can’t tell they worked apart, because that relationship with James was so intense--the two of them and James. They just shot it the same way, and I was like "Oh well."
Because that was one of the ways I was planning to make it interesting, because the danger with something this static is that it’s inert, that it becomes a bit dull or repetitive or boring, and I thought “It can’t be that.” But in fac,t they ended up doing exactly the same work the two of them and fantastic work. I’m very proud of it, but it was like what you described, except it was them in there, and I was on the monitor and I had a microphone and I would shout things occasionally, you know trying to be God. [Laughs] They would ignore me and carry on.
Capone: I’ve got to imagine most people walking into this film either heard about this ordeal when it initially happened or heard about it when Aron's book came out, or just know what the film involves. Is it challenging then to make it still suspenseful? Is that tough?
DB: It’s really weird, isn’t it? I don’t know what it is…
Capone: You did it. I’m not saying you didn’t do it; you succeeded. But was it tough to say, “How are we going to make people…”
DB: …forget the ending?
Capone: Yeah, right.
DB: I think we do that. If it’s half decent, I think we do that. When I go to the movies and I know the ending and I know the guy lives, but I do get tense like that. I think that’s something that’s an amnesia that we participate in, because you know when everybody goes “Spoiler alert!” Basically, there are very few films that you go to see where you don’t pretty much know these days what’s going on, and yet you get in that black room, and the lights go down, and if the actor is good, you get frightened, you get tearful, you think “Don’t die!” And you know he’s not going to die, but it’s so weird like that.
So to be honest, we didn’t think about that very much when we were doing it. We weren’t like very conscious of it; we weren’t deliberately trying to avoid things. We did one thing which may have helped, which is in one of the first messages he left, when we recorded it, because we copied it, most of the messages are verbatim of what Aron said. He says “I’ve got four options” and he goes through the four options. He says, “I could do this, I could do that, or I could cut my arm off.” As soon as we got it in the editing room, we cut that bit of the message, so he never actually says, “These are the four options,” and we thought when we were writing it and shooting it, that that would be the structure. You would need that scene so that everybody knew where they were, and then they would see him go through the four options. But we didn’t, and it’s far better to let them unravel in front of you.
I think people know when he gets trapped, there’s a ticking time bomb in people’s heads saying, “I know he cuts his arm off, when is he going to do it?” I think that first scene or second scene when looks at his equipment and he picks up the knife, I think a lot of people think "What? Is it going to be already? It’s going to be this soon?” And then it isn’t, he chips away at the rock instead. And you can’t control people’s minds wandering through it like that with prior knowledge--with a lot of prior knowledge or a bit of prior knowledge. A great actor gets you through it.
Capone: Not to focus on the arm-cutting moment, but there are a lot of things leading up to that. The first half of the film is more just him impressing us with his survival skills, because there couldn’t have been a better person to have been trapped like this than Aron. He clearly lasted longer than anybody else would have under those circumstances.
DB: He certainly knows how to last. He certainly knows, and you can read it in the book, he goes through it exactly. He understands what’s happened to his body and how to slow that down if he can, the dying process, as much as possible, but none of that is any use to him. I thought, if this is just a survival story, it’ll be like a TV survival story, which I love watching. I love watching those things, but I thought “Why is it in the cinema?” I thought, “There has to be a journey that he goes on that isn’t just about his survival skills.” And Aron was interesting, because Aron agreed with this in the end.
When I first met him in 2006, I don’t really think he thought this, because he hadn’t really fully completed the journey of the process, and we compress that journey in the film into a neat 90 minutes. But in real life it was delayed by the media, because he came out in a bit like those Chilean miners, he was like a superstar, and it was likely you’re not going to learn anything in that spotlight about yourself, it was a blizzard of potential money, fame, people, girls, you know, all of which he admitted to. He’s like “That’s what it’s like,” and women particularly are fascinated.
Capone: Good thing he had the personality to handle that at least the women.
DB: Well afterwards, when it all finished, he acknowledged that what he had done is he went in as quite an arrogant man, almost reckless. The stuff in the film with the girls… It’s pretty dangerous what he does with those girls with those jumps, and he learned to appreciate people--the people who loved him and who he had not appreciated in his heart as much as he knew he should have done and that girl especially who he was quite casual with and you know she obviously loves him.
Capone: The French character?
DB: The French girl. And you know it’s not cruel, because we have all done it, but he’s like… He’s not heartful, he’s a bit heartless, and he kind of learns that as part of the process. And the kid, of course, is that ultimate end of that chain, which is saying “It’s not just about you, it’s about all of us really, and your place is to pass it on” and “You are just a part of this extraordinary chain we are all connected in” and that’s when we can get out, that’s when he can start to go.
Capone: Does it matter as much to you if we like him or not? He does come across as some one who some people might not like very much.
DB: I agree, in the beginning.
Capone: Does it matter that much?
DB: It did to the studio. We were quite clear, we said “This is one guy, it’s not like a normal film where you should be worried all the time about ‘Is he sympathetic?’ ‘Is he likable?’” I said, “It’s got to be so like life that there are blemishes on him,” and that he does wander around ignoring his mom’s phone call, [Laughs] like we all do. It’s like “Oh, my mom again? For God’s sake!” And so there are things like that that are not very likable about him. He’s a nice guy, but you know…like us all.
Capone: An we are gong to sympathize with him once he has the accident, but before that we are like “This guy’s kind of a jerk.” And getting back, the first half of the movie is about the physical survival; the second half is the psychological breakdown where he starts fantasizing about escaping and about girls and see his family. That’s really where it got me. There’s a frenzy to it in a lot of ways. It’s like a fever dream, but with life or death consequences, and if he doesn’t get out of it, he will die of insanity, if nothing else.
DB: He said, “It’s water.” People talk about drugs and stuff like that. If you basically do without water for two days, you start hallucinating supposedly. It’s like instant. Once your body doesn’t get it’s supply, you start hallucinating and he hallucinated wildly. His hallucinations were that he was trapped like that [stands up and puts his arm against the wall] and this door opened in the canyon wall like that, and he walked through into a living room. And so he went on these trips, these weird trips. So I said to him, “We won't do that Aron. What we are going to do is, I want to bring the hallucinations into the canyon with you, so that people visit him like Blue John and Scooby Doo, and all of this stuff starts coming into the canyon with you.”
I said, “We have got to somehow keep you in the canyon, so that the only release you ever get is either in that fantasy of the flood or when you finally get out. They are the only times you will ever actually get out of there.” And he agreed to that. He was very good by the end, Aron. He had learned, because it’s weird for people who are not involved in telling stories in the movies. I said to him, “You have got to let us tell the story, you can’t control it. If you control it, Aron, it will be a documentary,” which is great. But I said “I want it to be a feature, and you’ve got to trust us that we wont dishonor your story, we'll just tell it in our way, and by the end of it, it will be your story.” It’s weird that thing.
Capone: Literally we see him at the end.
DB: And we do see him at the end and we hand him back the story at the end, that was the idea of it, to give it back to him.
Capone: Back to the arm-cutting, that I can't seem to get away from, the touch I loved about that in particular was that guitar screeching sound you hear every time he hits a nerve. That is exactly what extreme pain sounds like. Pain has a sound, and it fills your ears. I’ve never seen anyone do that before.
DB: That’s right, and we did these test screenings, and I was watching the scene and I thought “What is that noise?,” and it was guys humming in front of me, because that’s what you do when you see stuff like that, to protect you against it, you go [makes humming noise], and I swear to God I could hear it.
Capone: I believe it.
DB: You sort of stop yourself from experiencing it and you try to protect yourself or put a barrier up against what he’s going through.
Capone: Talk about picking James Franco for this. How did you connect with him?
DB: We met a bunch of guys, kind of the good guys who seemed like they would be the right age and status for the movie, and a couple of wild cards as well. We saw about half a dozen or eight guys and we met him in New York, because of his bloody studying [laughs]. He’s always studying. We had this meeting with him, and it wasn’t a very good meeting actually. And I’ve learned, I know him very well now, and at the time I remember thinking “He’s stoned,” which is what everybody thinks about him, but he doesn’t do drugs actually. But I thought he was stoned and he’s like half asleep, and he wasn’t.
It’s a front he uses. His problem is he can’t sleep, he’s got this hyperactive brain and he’s kind of dabbling in everything all of the time and he’s exploring what it is to be in the lucky place he is, which is like a sort-of Hollywood star or with some of the power that that brings you and some of the problems that that brings you and he sort of hides behind this slightly semi-stoned persona that makes you think he doesn’t really know what’s going. He knows exactly what’s fucking going on.
So we asked to meet him again and someone said, in fact, I think it was Donna Isaacson, the casting woman at Fox, she said, “See him again. That’s what he’s like. Part of him is he’s sussing you out.” So we met again in L.A., and I said to him “Look, you’ve got to read some of it for us.” I wanted to get through all of this persona stuff, I said “You’ve got to read some of it for us.” He read and he was fantastic, and he read the message to his mom and dad that’s in the film, and it was like “Wow.”
When we really began to talk about it, he got interested in this process that it wasn’t going to be a biopic, because I think he had done a biopic. He had done James Dean. He'd done HOWL. I think part of him thought, “Am I just going to get pigeonholed doing biopics? That’s not what I really want to do.” I said to him, “Look, we are going to borrow the story and tell it our way, and what you are going to experience is the exact set of circumstances that Rolston went through, you are going to go through, and the people are going to experience you going through them. They are not going to watch somebody imitating Aron Rolston.” I was very clear about that. I didn’t want to make a biopic. I was very clear about that. I didn’t want to make a biopic, I wanted to make an interpretation of this story and that kind of buzzed him, I think.
So yeah, we got him, and I’ve got to say a big part of the reason for wanting him, for me, was PINEAPPLE EXPRESS. Yeah, when you see an actor who can do the solid stuff, terrific. But when you see an actor who can do comedy like that, that’s a serious actor. I always think that, because comedy is tough unless you’re a comic, naturally, but if you can do the serious stuff and then you can do that comic turn. I thought that would be wonderful, and that led to [screenwriter] Simon [Beaufoy] writing the talk show host routine with the radio phone in, and then James starts buzzing on that, and that refreshes you in the film, because it’s pretty depressing the film is in some ways, and then suddenly this bursts out of it, and you need that kind of relief really in a story like this.
Capone: What does it say about Aron that he that he documented so much of this?
DB: Three years before YouTube.
Capone: Did he think on some level that he might survive, and he just wanted a record of it? Or was he leaving something behind?
DB: No, he did, especially later on. He was leaving messages. When you look at the read messages, he looks like a guy who knows he’s going to die and is trying to stay dignified, so that his mom won't be left with a terrible impression of him. He wanted to leave a dignified impression of “I’m getting on with it” and “I’m so sorry.” Fuckin' hell. But yeah, three years before YouTube, he was documenting everything and he did video the girls when they were climbing, they didn’t swim, but they climbed. We sort of put that in, the swimming, to make it sexier and more sensual and more water saturated.
Capone: There’s a lot of water imagery in this movie that he doesn’t get to drink.
DB: But he videoed the girls. He videoed himself cycling. Just like we have in the film it’s like. It’s amazing really. Some people said he’s a control freak and he wants to record everything, because that’s how you keep control of things, so you can make your own film of your own life eventually, regardless of whether something like this happens to you. But I’m not so sure about that.
I always thought of it a bit more as he’s a wilderness guy and he’s really into that, but he doesn’t leave the city behind; he takes his music, he takes his cameras. This technology, he takes with him, he won't leave the city behind. The real wilderness people, the proper ones, they don’t like people going in the wilderness with earphones on. So I don’t know, I think he’s more of an urban creature than he likes to think he is.
Capone: The moment where he finally gets him arm off, and he just sort of steps back, it’s almost anti-climatic, and yet you hold your breath for that second, and you're like “Is that it? There’s no big trumpet sounds? No cymbals crashing?” That’s a great moment, and he has the fortitude to go back snap a photo of the arm in the rock.
DB: Yeah and he did. You couldn’t invent that. If you invented that, it’d be shouted down, but he did it. And the photo, the actual photo he took, is in his book. He took more photos of himself as he left. When he was drinking the water when he finally got to that puddle of water, he took a picture there as well after he had drunk the water of himself. We didn’t use that in the end, but yeah it’s extraordinary; he was documenting himself.
There are some people who said he faked it, that he set it all up, which is nonsense, of course, but you can see why they are led to think that, because how could somebody take pictures of himself in these kinds of circumstances? But then until you are in these kinds of circumstances, who knows? We are all different. We are all weird. Who knows what you would do? Especially now with YouTube. Everybody would document it. If something like that was happening to yourself, you document it. Like those Chilean miners, we were desperate to get a camera down there. The first thing we wanted when we knew where they were was to get a camera down there, so we could see them down there. We want that live experience, don’t we, of being able to live through it wherever it’s happening.
Capone: It’s not real if you don’t get to see it.
DB: I know, that’s right.
Capone: Last question, there have been a few rumblings that you are thinking about revisiting one of your old storylines from years ago. Is that true, or do you have something else in mind?
DB: I’m an optimist and I try to keep hope alive whenever I can and I would love to do it. I’ve got an idea for it. The problem is I’m unusually committed to… I’m doing a play in the theater next. I’m doing an adaptation of "Frankenstein" at the National Theatre in London, which is a really interesting adaptation. Then, I’m doing the opening ceremonies of the Olympic Games in 2012, because it’s in my neighborhood.
Capone: I did hear that you had been awarded that task.
DB: I lived a mile from the stadium, yeah. It’s a rundown area, so it’s a brilliant investment in the area and stuff, and that’s going to take me until mid- to late 2012, so I don’t know if it’s very practical, but I would love to do it, yeah.
Capone: Why do you think people are so obsessed with the idea of you coming back to 28 DAY LATER…?
DB: I don’t know. It’s a great premise, I think. It’s a very simple, very classic premise. It’s sort of been done in other ways before, but it’s got something about it. And this new idea is, you think, “That could work.” But anyway…
Capone: Alright, well great. It was great to see you again.
DB: And you. Nice to see you again. Keep well; keep busy.
Capone: Have fun with "Frankenstein." I’m seeing Guillermo del Toro tomorrow.
DB: Are you?
Capone: He’s had a Frankenstein movie on his backburner for a while.
DB: He has, hasn’t he? Well, what we are doing is we are doing it from the creature’s point of view, which is extraordinary. It has never been done. We’ve looked into it. It’s been adapted hundreds of times. When [Mary Shelley] first wrote it, it went straight in the West End in London in 1817 and played for years in the West End, so people love it, but nobody’s ever done it from the creature’s point of view. So it begins with the creature waking up. So it’s an interesting way to view it, you know? To look at something that everybody knows or thinks they know, and it re-examines it, but it’s pretty faithful as well to the story. We’ve stripped it out obviously, but it’s good, yeah.
Capone: And that goes up next year?
DB: It will be in February on the big stage at the National Theater, yeah.
Capone: Cool, great.
DB: It will be interesting, yeah.
Capone: Alright, well take care.
DB: Thanks, bye now.
-- Capone
capone@aintitcool.com
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