Olympic Park’s favourite son Danny Boyle made a return trip (of sorts) last Friday when he paid a visit to the Vue Cinema at Westfield Stratford City shopping centre to chat with cinema audiences following a screening of his latest film, Trance.
Boyle was his usual engaging and exuberant self, answering questions with the kind of enthusiasm and down-to-earth charm which makes him the appealing filmmaker he is.
He began by talking about having a female character as one of the central protagonists:
I have two wonderful daughters who, increasingly as they got older, reminded me that I had never made anything where a woman is absolutely in the engine room of the film.
On wanting the make the film:
I’m a big believer that movies are like a trance. They’re kinda weird things. We come to these dark spaces with strangers and a flickering light, and we believe in the story being told on front of us. We’re shocked, repelled. We laugh and cry. I love that almost primitive relationship we have storytelling. You begin to be unable to differentiate between the actual trances in the film and illusion and reality, even though the whole thing you’re seeing is an illusion, because it’s a movie.
The similarities which exist between some of his recent work:
The last three films we’ve done have all been about memories. Slumdog Millionaire is like memories of a karmic, good fortune nature, and in 127 Hours memories are a redemption for the character. They’re what save him, actually. They’re both a positive use of memory, but Trance is much more about how memories wreak havoc and destruction once they’re unleashed.
On how a change of location dictated the kind of actress he was looking for:
I’ve always wanted to make a film in New York. I think every filmmaker would like to. Originally, we were going to shoot it there with an English actress. Then we had the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games to do, and thought it would be a great opportunity to make the film at Three Mills studio in East London instead. We’d shoot it in London and get an American, French or maybe a Spanish actress, and that’s how we got Rosario [Dawson]. She brings this relaxed Californian style, which is a therapy thing. Americans can talk things through much easier, and they have they notion of how therapy is for everyone. You get that ease with her character.
On casting James McAvoy and Vincent Cassel:
I’ve always loved McAvoy as an actor. I thought he might be a bit too young, but then we met and he read for us, and was fantastic. We were planning on casting [Michael] Fassbender as the gangster, but he was very funny, and said he’d rather play the girl’s part! Vincent Cassel then became available. The casting process always becomes a bit of a dance. You’re dancing around [the actor’s] agents, their fees for the part and their availability. But I’ve always thought Cassel is one of the best actors in the world, so I was really happy.
As the Q&A was opened up to the crowd, talk inevitably turned to his role as Artistic Director for the opening ceremony of last year’s Olympic Games. Boyle was asked how he balanced that role with shooting Trance.
I think both projects helped each other. The Olympics was a two year job. If you just did that for that whole time, you’d go absolutely insane, because it’s just committees, procedural and paper pushing all the time. Everything takes so long. Some of those who had worked on the previous ceremonies did warn us and suggested we do something else, if we could. The first year we did Frankenstein at the National Theatre, and the second year we shot Trance. We put a rough edit together of it, but we left the fine cut until we’d finished the Olympic Games. It was pretty much all the same people working on both projects, so we were a team which was moving between projects, so it was very smooth.
A fun evening (Boyle continued answering questions well beyond the allotted time slot) in the company of one of the UK’s most endearing cinematic figures.
Trance is on general release from today.
