“Choose Life”
We are facing Danny Boyle, the British filmmaker of the extreme nuances and the crazed contrasts… we face the extraordinary person with overflowing passion and energy that could take his country’s film out of academicism with just one of his gazes … we are facing that singular creator so full of life, that only to attempt to bring his biography to the screen, would require the direction of Boyle himself.
Born in Radcliffe, Lancashire on October 20, 1956, in the bosom of an Irish Catholic family, for more than eight years he held very small occupations such as altar boy in his church. At fourteen he almost gave up everything to enter the seminary, had it not been for the fortunate warning of a priest, which veered the teenager’s path towards his indisputable vocation. To this day, Boyle is uncertain whether this advice saved him from the priesthood, or the priesthood was saved from him. The truth of the matter is that the Church lost a very unique asset while cinema won one of its greatest directors.
Boyle defines himself today as a ‘spiritual atheist’, and repeatedly throughout his career he has found similarities between the world of religion and the arts. Boyle’s artistic versatility is clear to us, and while we are all familiar with the intensity of his film, he has equally excelled in television production and theater direction. Since his first contact with the dramatic arts, this young 56 year old has not stopped searching and experimenting with new forms of storytelling.
A couple of moments sealed his fate as a filmmaker. The first being an early screening of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange during the few weeks that it remained in theaters before being mired in controversy; Boyle does not deny having been undeniably affected by the violence, sexuality and style, an influence still identifiable in the frenzy of his films.
The second moment which would forever change his life: Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. It had eviscerated my brain, completely. I was an impressionable twenty-one-year-old guy from the sticks. My brain had not been fed and watered with great culture, you know, as art is meant to do. It had been sandblasted by the power of cinema (…)
Boyle knew only one thing: that he had to be a filmmaker. And he finally achieved his dream in 1994, with his cinematic debut Shallow Grave, a dark comedy that astounded as the most successful British film of 1995, and which led to the immediate production of his next work, Trainspotting, which would very soon become a key piece of contemporary cinema and define the personal style of its director. Based on the novel by Irvine Welsh, Boyle directs a vivid and corrosive look at the Scottish underworld of drugs with free use of irony and black humor. This pair of films was sufficient for the young filmmaker to be appointed the new and true savior of British cinema in the ’90s.
He turned down the opportunity to direct the fourth installment of Alien to better engage himself in the production of A Life Less Ordinary using a British cast and British financing. The pressures to incorporate the British prodigy within the Hollywood system culminated with The Beach, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and set in Thailand, and would leave the director with a bittersweet taste of blockbusters, ensuring that he would want to do things his way in the future.
After directing two films for BBC television in 2001, Vacuuming Completely Nude In Paradise and Strumpet, he segued into his next collaboration with Alex Garland which represents one of the most refreshing modern horror proposals: 28 Days Later which deals with the dispersion of a strange disease in British territory. And in 2005 he demonstrated once more his multifaceted abilities with Millions, small budget film and which pays tribute to his parents, the child’s flourishing imagination and family integrity.
For his next project in 2007, he teamed up once again with Alex Garland on his science fiction film Sunshine, which explores the possibilities of the genre with always a strange and mysterious twist. In 2008, he premiered Slumdog Millionaire, a film that brought him eight Academy Awards. Recently Boyle returned with 127 Hours, which details the struggle for survival of the protagonist, played by James Franco, in an extreme situation in a Utah canyon.
Danny Boyle’s work oscillates with an inexhaustible force, going from noise to calm, from the conventional to the eccentric, always leaving clear his identity: a stamp at once surreal and rebellious, an energy that is necessary and essential. Boyle’s sensitivity has become more acute from film to film until finally being naturally calibrated to understand the marginal, to redeem those most disadvantaged sectors of humanity. With his experience, his technique, his versatility, his wit, the world can rest easy, knowing that behind the camera we have one of the most talented directors of our time.