“Oh Danny-boy, the pipes, the pipes ar colling,” wrote an Englishman a long time ago, and now it’s like even the anthem of Ireland.
And I think they're singing "Oh Danny Boyle" and Boyle is definitely a movie icon of Manchester and the surrounding area.
Although, of course, he is an ethnic Irishman.
"Poor boy! The local priests slandered him so much, fumigated him with Catholicism, that he still had to sing in the church choir for eight more years and he was even going to go to the priesthood, but then he saw Coppola’s picture “Apocalypse Now” in the cinema, and everything went according to the star. That is, he went to study at Bangor University in English and drama. Bangor University is not in India, it is in Wales. And he began to call himself a "spiritual atheist." Although, after all, Scorsese, and John Woo, and some other prominent filmmakers in the world also wanted to be priests. But, apparently, God saved them, giving their talent to the whole world, not limiting this entire theater to the kliros. As Boyle himself says: "It's basically the same job, telling people exactly what they should think."
The university is very good, the most prominent poet of Wales, Robert W. Parry, studied here at the beginning of the last century.
Directors and actors studied here - comedian John Marshall, John Ogwen (you saw him in Doctor Who), John Evans (he directed Elementary), as well as politicians, doctors and even one police chief.
It seems that Danny Boyle was in excellent company and in a creative atmosphere throughout his studies.
After university, he moved to the Joint Stock Theater Company (joint stock theater company) in London.
It was organized in the 1970s by the writer and playwright David Hare, whom we know from the screenplays for such films as The Reader with Ralph Fiennes, The Hours with Meryl Streep, and the hit play Pravda - and this is only at first glance.
It was primarily a company that presented new plays.
Joint Stock has created its own way of working. In their seminars, writers such as David Hare, Howard Brenton, and Caryl Churchill gathered "living" material for the very first stage of writing a play. This methodology is sometimes referred to as the Joint Stock Method. Notable productions include Hare's Fanshen, Brenton's Epsom Downs, Stephen Lowe's Rag Philanthropists, and Churchill's The Ninth Cloud.
Charged with creativity at Joint Stock, Danny Boyle moved to London, where he got a job at the Royal Court, located in the most expensive area of the capital - on Sloan Street in Belgravia.
The traditions of this theater have been going on since the 19th century, so there is a real platform for entering the top theatrical life in Britain.
Boyle was there first as an assistant to director Max Stafford-Clark on a production of Chekhov's The Seagull, and then staged Genius (a play by Howard Brenton from the same Joint Stock Theater Company).
In fact, the theatrical legacy of Danny Boyle is much more significant than his film projects - 15 productions, of which, unfortunately, I saw only one - "Frankenstein" in 2011 at the Barbican Theater, but with Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller.
Boyle's main feature was that one night Cumberbatch plays The Creation of Frankenstein, and the next he and Miller switch roles.
He did part of the productions for the Royal Shakespeare Company, a highly respected theater institution in Britain.
Actually, we are now talking about completely different film schools - America and Britain.
A huge part of British actors and directors goes through theater school.
And television.
In Hollywood, this is not the case at all.
In general, Boyle went to work for the Air Force Northern Ireland and immediately made a scandal, as he produced the picture Elephant (Elephant, 1989) for the company. "Elephant" - because "the elephant is in our living room", an expression used in Northern Ireland to denote a conspiracy of silence about the problems of this territory. The director was Alan Clark, and the action takes place during the Troubles (Troubles).
We know this era as the Northern Ireland Conflict.
It was filmed on 16mm with plenty of steadicam, there are few lines and dialogues, but there are 16 murders alone.
Alan Clark does not hide the fact that his main creative method is socialist (or social) realism (“Made in Britain” with Tim Roth is also him).
There is no special scenario in the picture either, neither the victims nor the killers are described.
But the effect was terrible.
By the way, Gus Van Sant clearly used Clarke's painting as a reference when he filmed his "Elephant" in 2003 - about "Columbine".
Boyle then began filming for television himself as a director - in particular, the series "Arise and go" (Arise And Go Now), with a clear reference to the poem by William Yeats "The Lake Island of Innisfree", for the series "Script". It's about a small town in Northern Ireland torn apart by conflict and the IRA. And about the priest, Father Dade, who is trying to stop the madness. The series won BAFTA awards. Then he did Not Even God Is Wise Enough about a boxer and a musician, three episodes for For the Greater Good about politicians who undertook to reform the penitentiary system. Two episodes of "Inspector Morse", three episodes for "Mr. Ro's Virgin" based on the novel by Jane Rogers.
His first film was Shallow Grave (1994).
Russians consider this film a thriller, the rest - a black comedy.
The cast includes Ewan McGregor, Kerry Fox and Christopher Eccleston.
Both Eccleston and McGregor have a theatrical education and rich stage practice, so they found a common language with the theater director Boyle.
The picture was noticed.
Moreover, with a budget of $ 2 million, she collected $ 19.8 million in the world. It was such a commercial success that allowed Boyle to shoot the second picture.
Trainspotting (1994) is Boyle's second film, an adaptation of Irving Welsh's first novel that had just burst into British contemporary literature.
I went with trump cards - from the story of heroin friends from Edinburgh.
A good literary foundation allowed building a first-person narrative that became wildly popular from the very first lines.
Or, as they would say now, a meme: Choose Life.
Choose a job.
Choose a career.
Choose a family.
Choose a fucking big tv.
One problem - in 1994, the Internet was so-so.
The composition, although young, has become stellar - Ewan McGregor, Robert Carlisle, Jonny Lee Miller.
The distribution company positioned the film as a British version of Pulp Fiction, and they managed to overcome the prejudice of the American public.
As many as two soundtracks came out right away - one more rock, with the participation of Iggy Pop,
The second disc is all electronic, aimed at a younger audience - Underworld, Bedrock and Ice MCs.
Actually, among the general public, Danny Boyle forever remained the director of Trainspotting, and the film itself is now considered one of the coolest in the history of British cinema.
With a budget of $1.5 million, it grossed $78 million. It's a wild success for a movie that was originally doomed to an arthouse existence.
Boyle seems to have greatly revitalized British cinema in the 1990s.
In the wake of Boyle's wild success in the world, the Americans decided to sign him to create the fourth part of "Alien", but he refused and took off "Life less ordinary" (Life less Ordinary, 1997) with Ewan McGregor and Cameron Diaz.
A slightly sugary story with some references to other films - for example, Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs.
But in spite of everything, having spent $12 million, he collected only $14 million. At the same time, shots from the film were distributed on videos of good artists like Beck (the song Deadweight) or Faithless (the song Don't Leave).
In 1996, writer Alex Garland released a novel that became very popular with a certain young, urbanized audience, The Beach. The Beach is considered by some to be a kind of "Lord of the Flies" of modern times. In 2000, Danny Boyle filmed it with Leonardo DiCaprio in the title role. The film turned out to be beautiful, and Robert Carlyle also could not do without it. Boyle received the Berlin Festival Award, and Leonardo DiCaprio - "Golden Raspberry" for the worst performance. The soundtrack features excellent Mancunians New Order (formerly Joy Division), as well as Blur, Underworld, Orbital, Faithless and Sugar Ray. With a budget of $50 million, it raised $144 million.
Alex Garland also wrote the script for 28 Days Later, and in 2000 Boyle made a post-apocalyptic horror about how crazy green activists release a terrible virus from a laboratory into the world with a monkey.
But it’s impossible to write or read about the virus, so let’s limit ourselves to stating: the film collected ten times more money than was spent on its production, namely $ 82 million.
In 2001, he directed the television film Vacuuming Completely Nude in Paradise, in which one can trace the stylistic kinship with Trainspotting (well, the name Trainspotting doesn’t fit me, even crack!).
Such a dark comedy.
It can be found on YouTube in the original.
Actor Timothy Spall was nominated for a British Television Industry Award for his role in this film.
The family film Millions (2004) is about schoolboys who get a bag of money dropped on their heads from a train just before an English bank was about to switch to the euro.
The film is based on the first story by Frank Cottrell-Boyce, one of the screenwriters of the London Olympics.
He himself rewrote the text specifically "under Boyle."
But the fees of this picture are quite modest - $ 7.5 million. And many Boyle fans do not even know about his existence.
And here comes the writer Alex Garland again, who wrote the script for the film Inferno (Sunshine, 2007) for Boyle.
This is a very beautifully filmed boring science fiction, so it's no wonder that he did not make any breakthrough in terms of the box office.
And the technical solutions there are, yes, very advanced.
So it was for them that the picture received the British Independent Film Award.
But "Slumdog Millionaire" (Slumdog Millionaire, 2008) brought him a real harvest - eight Oscars alone and incredible success, especially in India.
The film is based on the book "Question - Answer" by Indian writer Vikas Swarup.
But it seems that everything that later surrounded the film, child actors - scandals, intrigues, investigations in real life - is even more interesting than the movie itself.
With a budget of $15 million, the box office was $378 million.
In the same year, he made a 30-minute "Alien Love Triangle", which was supposed to be part of a larger project, but did not work out.
But what remained was a nice fantastic vignette of a great master.
It is better not to watch his next picture for claustrophobes or to scroll through it on rewind.
The true story of Aaron Ralston, who spent six days in a canyon while rock climbing, had his hand pinched by a 300-kilogram stone.
Spoiler: he cut off his hand.
To myself.
Enjoy watching the picture "127 hours" (127 Hours, 2010)!
He was nominated for six Oscars.
Including for Daido's original song If I Rise.
Surprisingly, with a budget of $ 18 million, he raised $ 60 million - but then, apparently, he was simply overtaken by the Oscar hype.
Because the next picture "Trance" (Trance, 2013) with Vincent Cassel and James McAvoy, a psychological thriller, dynamically filmed, with signature Boyd techniques, would have deserved a much higher box office, but for some reason it did not happen.
The story of the robbery of a certain auction house and the theft of the painting “Witches in the Air” by Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes is technically flawless.
Do not worry, in reality, the Goya painting never left its place in the Prado.
And yes, "Trans" is not about transgender people and "Prado" is a museum, not a handbag.
We spent $20 million, raised $24.
Lively somehow.
In 2015, he is making a film about Steve Jobs called Steve Jobs based on Isaacson's book. Jobs is played by Michael Fassbender. Boyle said of the book: “That's what Shakespeare did. He would take some facts about a person in power and guess a lot of other things and just walk away from it to actually find the person in him. And what's great about this book, I think, is that it acknowledges people who didn't like Steve Jobs, people that he hurt. But in the end, he returns to a very simple father-daughter relationship, and he has to admit that he has created some of the most beautiful things in the world."
I can’t say anything about the cinematic merits of the picture, perhaps I just didn’t notice them.
Probably, it will be interesting to fans of Jobs.
Yes, I'm writing this on a MacbookAir, I've been on a Mac since 1992.
No, I don't like Steve Jobs and American corporate culture.
The painting cost $30 million and raised $34 million in total.
In 1993, the overnight popular writer Irving Welsh wrote a sequel to Trainspotting called Porno.
In 2017, Danny Boyle decided to shoot Trainspotting 2 (T-2 Trainspotting) based on him.
Well, who should shoot "Twenty Years Later" if not him.
This time around, the film grossed a miserable $2 million in the US, but it was well-received in the rest of the world.
The soundtrack features quite young bands like Fat White Family (Whitest Boy on the Beach song) or Wolf Alice (Silk song).
A total of $42 million at a cost of $18 million. This gave the director the impetus to talk about a third part of the film, which would be based on Welsh's book, Blade Artist.
This is the fate of the character played by Robert Carlyle.
The picture “Yesterday” (Yesterday, 2019) is tempting to call it “Yestedey” because it is about Beatles songs, and who would think of calling the song “Yesterday” the word “Yesterday”?
Pretty simple fiction: there is only one person left in the world who remembers the Beatles songs.
And now he sings them, and everyone admires his talent.
In an alternate reality, he even meets a man who looks like John Lennon, but he has already lived a completely different life, and he doesn’t care.
By the way, this detail - a meeting with the dead, as we know, John - gives an understanding of the whole plot as a whole, which is revealed only at the end, and then, if you carefully follow the details.
Worldwide, the film grossed $153 million at a cost of $20-40 million (data differ).
I don’t know about you, but I personally look forward to a new series from Boyle dedicated to the life of Sex Pistols member Steve Jones under the ingenuous name of Pistol.
Yes, Steve Jones is the guy who, in addition to guitar, also had to play bass on records, because the famous Sid Vicious could not play even by the standards of punk rock.
They promise this year.
The point of view of the author may not coincide with the position of the editors.