Danny Boyle - Lust for Life: A Critical Analysis of All the Films from Shallow Grave to 127 Hours

Taylor

Introduction

‘I want people to leave the cinema feeling that something’s been confirmed for them about life’

(Danny Boyle)[1]

The genesis for this book was the moment Danny Boyle came bouncing, in his words ‘in the manner of Tigger,’ onto the stage to collect his Oscar for Best Director in 2009. Slumdog Millionaire had been in competition with David Fincher’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button in a number of categories, and proceeded to win every single one. On the one hand, Fincher’s movie had a $150 million budget, state-of-the-art special effects, and a cast headed by Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett; on the other, Boyle’s movie had only $20 million behind it, no special effects to speak of, dialogue that was partly in Hindi and a cast of minor actors and non-professionals. In fact, before Fox Searchlight picked up the film for a theatrical release, it was destined to go straight to DVD. Could Fincher, a perfectionist famous for demanding extended re-shoots and with a highly technical approach to filmmaking, have even been capable of making Slumdog Millionaire? It would be hard to imagine a greater juxtaposition of styles and it made me think about Boyle’s career and how he had reached that point.

Boyle was born on 20 October 1956 into a working-class family (his mother a hairdresser and dinner lady; his father a farm labourer) and was imbued with a strong work ethic from an early age, underlined by an all-encompassing sense of Catholic sin and redemption. He had a place at a seminary in Upholland in Wigan until persuaded by a priest, Father Conway, that perhaps this was not his true vocation, and instead went to Bangor University to study English and Drama.

His career began in the theatre, as an usher for the Joint Stock Theatre Company, known for their cutting-edge productions, and eventually as a director. In 1982 was appointed artistic director at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs, where he was responsible for a number of small-scale productions including Howard Brenton’s ‘The Genius’ and Edward Bond’s ‘Saved’, the latter winning a Time Out award. In 1985, he graduated to the main stage, directing several further successful projects, including ‘The Last Days of Don Juan’ for the Royal Shakespeare Company.

When he moved into television, he went first to the BBC in Northern Ireland to produce the powerful drama Elephant (Alan Clarke, 1989) about the sectarian killings, before moving back to the mainland to direct an historical drama about a religious sect, Mr Wroe’s Virgins (1993), and two early episodes of Inspector Morse, one on Masonic ritual and one on rave culture. While his work on Morse shows little obvious cinematic flair, his direction of these episodes did help to create, in collaboration with actor John Thaw, one of Britain’s best-loved TV detectives. It was this experience at the BBC that taught Boyle the basics of media production, working with modest budgets but within an organisation committed to high quality drama and with a reputation for social realism.

Boyle began his filmmaking career in 1994 with Shallow Grave, the first of three films made with producer Andrew Macdonald and writer John Hodge (Trainspotting was to follow in 1996 and A Life Less Ordinary in 1997). The first two of these, produced in collaboration with Channel Four Films, helped revive the British film industry, although the portrayal of drug-taking in Trainspotting provoked criticism and Boyle became characterised as a director interested only in gritty, working-class pictures. A Life Less Ordinary was an attempt to break away from this and to connect more directly with an American market. This brought its own problems: Boyle found that larger budgets and crews entailed creative compromises, something that was also to affect the follow-up film, The Beach, released in 2000. Both films were met coolly by critics and neither met the commercial expectations of Twentieth Century-Fox, now Boyle’s financial backer.

In 2001, Boyle took a step back from feature films, returning to the small screen to direct two small-scale, gritty dramas for the BBC: Strumpet and Vacuuming Completely Nude in Paradise. The break gave him the chance to re-group creatively and to experiment with lightweight digital cameras in collaboration with cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, an experience which directly contributed to the success of his next feature, the horror film 28 Days Later. Released in 2002, and backed by Fox Searchlight, Twentieth Century’s distribution arm dealing with more experimental and innovative filmmaking, it was a commercial and critical success. It also marked Boyle’s ability to move between a variety of genres with equal success, a tendency continued with Millions in 2004 and Sunshine in 2007. Millions failed to find its audience on general release, partly due to its ambition and partly due to the sad fact that an intelligent children’s film is something of a generic rarity. The science fiction of Sunshine was more successful but took a long time to bring to the screen - the creation of a complete fictional universe was an experience which Boyle found exhausting and probably not one which he would want to repeat any time soon.

Still with Fox Searchlight, Boyle teamed up with writer Simon Beaufoy, whose work he admired, particularly on The Full Monty (dir. Peter Cattaneo 1997), to create Slumdog Millionaire in 2008. Vikas Swarup’s 2006 novel Q&A had been a bestseller and Boyle leapt at the challenge, intrigued not so much by a narrative based on a TV show as the idea of filming a Bollywood-style love story in India. The film was a huge success and led to eight Oscars in 2009, including Boyle as Best Director.

After much industry and media speculation, Boyle followed this up with 127 Hours in 2010, based on the true story of Aron Ralston, a climber and thrill-seeker who was partly trapped under a boulder for several days in the Utah mountains, and who had to face the dilemma of dying a slow death or cutting off his own arm.

There is little existing critical literature about Boyle’s work. Only one of his films to date, Trainspotting, has received individual book-length consideration. Martin Stollery (2001) and Murray Smith (2008) both write interestingly about the film, but their studies are fairly brief and do not use intertextuality as a critical tool. There is growing interest in Boyle himself, with two books of interviews published in 2011 (by Amy Raphael and Brent Dunham), but in a sense these act as something of a distraction from the raw material of the films themselves. Before this book, the only attempt to open out the field of studies into Boyle’s work has been Edwin Page’s Ordinary Heroes: the Films of Danny Boyle (2009). Page takes an auteurist position and looks at the films for evidence of what he identifies at the beginning as the director’s favoured themes and stylistic devices. The difficulty with this approach is that it assumes these themes are present in all his films and are readily transparent to every viewer, whereas I would argue that meanings in any visual medium are by no means undisputed or universal. It is important to remember that Boyle is telling stories, not delivering themes, and that seeing characters as ‘carriers’ of messages can lead to reductionist assertions about ‘the ultimate message’ of a film, such as Page’s contention that ‘money does bring happiness’ is the message of Shallow Grave and that Slumdog Millionaire is ‘part of the university of life for all who watch it’.[2] Page also overlooks an opportunity for more insightful contextual analysis by trying to assign single meanings to particular stylistic devices, so that voice-overs are categorised as being used to denote main characters, multiple screens to show more than one setting, and shots through glass and water to ‘add texture’. [3]

Rather than seeking to impose a reading across all Boyle’s work, this book looks at each film and considers what makes it effective, through a close analysis of style, narrative structure and performance. It views Boyle not as an auteur but as part of a collaborative team that consists of actors, writers and cinematographers with whom he has a close and trusting relationship. In watching Boyle’s films, I was struck by their celebratory, life-affirming tone - the way he seems always to opt for the positive over the negative - and how he continues to make brave choices in terms of genre, narrative, character and directorial style, subverting the expectations of the industry and of the viewing public. This book is written for discerning film viewers who are familiar with, or curious about, Boyle’s work: hopefully, it should make readers reconsider films they think they already know and seek out some they might have missed.

1 Page 2009 p.3.

2 Page 2009 p.29 and p.220.

3 Page 2009 p.15.

Chapter One: Adaptation

‘It is written’

(one of four options from the opening gameshow-style credits in Slumdog Millionaire)

Writing on Danny Boyle has routinely overlooked one important fact - that a number of his best-known films are adaptations. Trainspotting, The Beach and Slumdog Millionaire are all based on novels, and 127 Hours is taken from Aron Ralston’s book about his own experiences, Between a Rock and a Hard Place (2004). Even Boyle’s early TV work including episodes for Inspector Morse (ITV 1990 and 1992) and the drama Mr Wroe’s Virgins (BBC 1993) had a pre-existing literary framework. The Morse episodes ‘Masonic Mysteries’ and ‘Cherubim and Seraphim’ were scripted by Julian Mitchell but based on characters created in Colin Dexter’s novels; and Mr Wroe’s Virgins was scripted by Jane Rogers from her own book. As well as favouring established literary sources for his films, Boyle prefers to work - where possible - with the original writers who, by implication, know the material best. For his first four features Boyle worked with John Hodges, who produced original scripts for Shallow Grave and A Life Less Ordinary and adaptations of Trainspotting and The Beach, then with Alex Garland on 28 Days Later and Sunshine, and more recently with Simon Beaufoy on Slumdog Millionaire and 127 Hours. The film Millions was a one-off project with writer Frank Cottrell Boyce. Beaufoy, though not a novelist, had proven his ability, with films like The Full Monty (dir. Peter Cattaneo 1997), to craft involving, human-centred dramas with which audiences can connect.

Commentary in the mainstream media about film adaptation is often dominated by a strain of adaptation theory known as fidelity criticism, which - as Brian McFarlane explains - assumes that an author’s intention is transparent and that the further a film version diverges from what the author intends, the weaker the adaptation.[4] This stance is underlined by studio marketing campaigns, which routinely emphasise a film’s connection to a book or author in order to underline the closeness of the bond between source and adaptation, thus implicitly stressing its cultural credentials.

The cultural dominance of the fidelity discourse means that films based on texts are routinely scrutinised for how ‘faithful’ they are to their literary source, with all the moral failings implicit in such a term when it is felt that the adaptation ‘strays’ from the original. This is perhaps felt even more powerfully when the source text is based on a real event. Some negative on-line reactions to material added by Boyle to 127 Hours, such as the scene in which the three main characters drop into a large pool and which does not appear in Ralston’s book, are exacerbated by the sense of departure from the ‘truth’.

This chapter considers what happens when Boyle translates texts from novel to screen: what he keeps, what he changes, how and why. Discussion will include analysis of why some adaptations are more successful than others and why faithfulness to a source text does not necessarily produce a more effective film. The chapter will focus less on issues of fidelity than on the effect of changes and perhaps, more interestingly, where residual elements of a source text persist.

One possible way to break out of the critical cul-de-sac of adaptation theory, a relatively new area of debate and one which seems to be hamstrung by the use of similar, repetitive case-studies, is to look at the ideas of Gérard Genette. A literary theorist, Genette seeks to separate the process of adaptation into distinct but related elements. More recently, Robert Stam has refined Genette’s work to talk of ‘transtextuality’, which Stam takes to mean ‘all that which puts one in relation, whether manifest or secret, with other texts.’[5] This broader, more flexible approach helpfully starts to move analysis away from a straightforward one-to-one relationship with a written text (what a specific scene does with a specific extract of text). I have discussed the theory underlying Genette’s ideas in my book on the films of David Cronenberg, but a basic summary would be helpful here.[6] Genette identifies five types of transtextuality: intertextuality, paratext, metatextuality, architextuality and hypertextuality.

The first, ‘interxtextuality,’ refers to the ways in which other texts are directly referenced in ‘quotation, plagiarism and illusion’ both in the form of words and in aspects specific to particular media, such as a recognisable camera movement.[7] This use of referencing is of particular relevance to Boyle’s use of multigeneric elements, discussed in Chapter Two.

Genette’s second type, ‘paratext’, refers to ‘the relation, within the totality of a literary work, between the text proper and its ‘paratexts’- titles, prefaces, postfaces, epigraphs, dedications, illustrations...in short all the accessory messages and commentaries which surround the text.’[8] Actual text on screen is rare in Boyle’s work, usually only appearing as self-aware, tongue-in-cheek references like the ‘Yin and Yang’ in A Life Less Ordinary or the delusional sequences in The Beach, during which the colours and movement on screen become redolent of a primitive video game with the words ‘game over’ appearing in flashing lettering. An exception to this is Slumdog Millionaire, where text-on-screen is an implicit part of the gameshow that is at the centre of the narrative: the words ‘it is written’ can legitimately appear in the opening sequence, thus linking the narrative to Swarup’s novel, to a sense of destiny and to conventions of Bollywood love stories. Stam extends Genette’s term beyond texts to include ‘posters, trailers, reviews, interviews’ and even DVD commentaries. Boyle’s commentaries, compared to many of his contemporaries, are particularly energetic and enthusiastic and he seems happy to embrace this means of connecting with his audience.

That said, Boyle seems to avoid what he would see as ‘unnecessary’ comments about his work, unless specifically related to the promotion of a new film. He is quite content to be interviewed by the media and usually appears helpful, even charming, to journalists but does not court publicity beyond this. He has little presence as a celebrity in the mass media and his private life remains just that. The controversies surrounding the treatment of the location for The Beach, or the question of exploitation of the young cast in Slumdog Millionaire, both discussed in Chapter Five, were in neither case sought by him and indeed had been actively anticipated. His plans for the restoration of Maya Beach on the island of Kho Phi Phi Leh in Thailand and the setting up of trust funds that would activate when the Slumdog Millionaire child actors reached a certain age, were in place before the topic was picked up by the international press.

Genette’s third and fourth categories further articulate a sense of relationship between texts. The third group, ‘metatextuality’, describes the process by which one text comments upon another critically, explicitly or implicitly. This can include ‘readings or critiques of the source novel.’[9] Unlike filmmakers such as Wes Anderson, whose work is full of such interlinked references, each film of Boyle’s is discrete, with only occasional exceptions, such as the character of Hugo (Keith Allen), the enigmatic and short-lived flatmate in Shallow Grave, who also appears as a drug dealer in Trainspotting, thus underlining the fact that the money, discovered in Shallow Grave after Hugo is found dead, is likely to have come from drugs.

Genette’s fourth group, ‘architextuality’, refers to the titles or subtitles of films. There are both issues of legality and marketing here. Boyle generally works with his writers throughout the filmmaking process rather than trying to remove them at the earliest opportunity and thus far legality has not been an issue: Boyle has been able to re-use titles wherever he thinks appropriate. There is a tension, however, between retaining close links with the source material and the importance of being able to ‘sell’ a title, leading to the novel Q&A being renamed Slumdog Millionaire for the film and Between a Rock and a Hard Place being re-titled, more succinctly and dramatically, 127 Hours. The term ‘Q & A’ has connotations as a cliché of office/management-speak, a software program and even a talk-show in both America and Australia. It also lacks precise relevance to the story Boyle is trying to tell. In the UK ‘trainspotting’ is a well-known sign of cultural ‘loserdom’ but as a title, it proved mystifying to other markets, particularly the US, where subtitles were also needed to decipher unfamiliar Scottish accents.

Stam defines Genette’s fifth term, ‘hypertextuality,’ as referring to ‘the relation between one text...to an anterior text or hypotext which the former transforms, modifies, elaborates, or extends’.[10] For Genette, the hypertext ‘speaks’ to and of its hypotext, and would be unable to exist without it.[11] Hypertextuality then represents ‘the ongoing whirl of intertexual reference and transformation, of texts generating other texts in an endless process of recycling, transformation, and transmutation, with no clear point of origin’.[12] Therefore one might speak not only of the link between a hypotext and its derivative hypertexts, but of relationships between different hypertexts. This has particular relevance for filmmakers closely associated with specific genres, such as John Carpenter’s work in horror, or for a particular series or franchise, such as George Lucas’ Star Wars films. As yet, Boyle has not produced a sequel (although he has an ongoing interest in a follow-up to Trainspotting) and all his feature films have been based on modern texts with contemporary settings, giving slightly less opportunity for hypertextual interweaving.

Lust For Life: Trainspotting (1996)

The adaptation of Trainspotting, written by John Hodges and based on Irvine Welsh’s 1993 novel, is discussed further in Chapter Four on national identity, but some comment here is appropriate. The film’s appeal is both related to and different from that of Welsh’s narrative. Early editions of the novel, published by Norton, feature front-cover illustrations of a large grinning skull or two figures wearing skull masks. Boyle takes this narrative of death and decay, and turns it into a celebration of youthful energy against the background of heroin addiction that warps everything with which it comes into contact. Welsh’s use of non-Standard English, and particularly the ranges of different dialect forms for different speakers, is an overt challenge to the literary mainstream. Boyle retains a flavour of this but the main narrator, Mark Renton (Ewan McGregor) is changed from a red-headed, spotty youth with a working-class Leith accent to a young man with boyish good looks and a more socially prestigious Edinburgh accent.

The film focuses primarily on Renton’s point of view delivered via voice-over from the outset. Whereas novelists like James Kelman are not prepared to compromise on the regional nature of the language in their novels - Kelman has resisted having his works, including the Booker Prize winner How Late It Was, How Late (1994) adapted for the screen at all - many of Welsh’s more unusual dialect terms and phonetically transcribed speech (as well as ubiquitous swearing) were not translated directly from novel to film. Even then, some dialogue had to be re-recorded at a slower pace for American audiences. The linguistic assault of the novel, in which there is no speech punctuation and most of Renton’s internal monologue is delivered in the manner of random thoughts, is moderated into conventional on-screen dialogue, clearly attributed to specific speakers. In the novel, Welsh indicates the obsession of Sick Boy (Jonny Lee Miller) with Sean Connery by transcribing all his thoughts with the ‘s’ sounds shifted to the distinctive ‘sh’ (as in ‘Mish Moneypenny’). This is fully appropriated by Boyle, particularly in the scene in the park which features close-ups of Sick Boy’s face, as he delivers his Connery impression while taking aim with an air-rifle at an annoying dog and its owner. Welsh, who himself has fostered something of the status of a counter-cultural icon, appears in the film as Mikey Forester, a dealer who provides Renton with suppositories. This suggests that the film has Welsh’s tacit approval, although he had no input in the script.

The power of Boyle’s film primarily derives from the pace and exuberance of its storytelling and from its driving soundtrack. The editing is ruthless in cutting between action which might be simultaneous but which also features little eddying sections, such as when we see both the myth and reality of the fight involving Francis Begbie (Robert Carlyle) in a sequence that mixes past and present at will. To reach a more mainstream, transatlantic audience, more transgressive elements were stripped out of the novel, such as the casual sexual violence of Begbie who openly and repeatedly punches his ‘girlfriend’.[13] The film also subverts the politics of the novel so that Renton becomes less a left-wing rebel and more a model Thatcherite. Indeed, there is almost a political misanthropy at work in the novel, which Boyle and Hodge removed. For example, in the novel Renton describes tourists and shoppers on Princes Street as ‘the twin curses of capitalism,’[14] a sentiment which does not appear in the film. In the novel, the first day of the Edinburgh Festival is significant, foregrounded as the point at which Renton begins (and abandons) his self-imposed detox programme, but in the film the Festival is merely made into a gag about the group’s embracing of random violence and rejection of (stereotypical) loud Americans. The death of the baby, a truly horrific climactic scene in the film, occurs much earlier in the novel, underlining the lack of hope in Welsh’s narrative. Moving the death of the baby to later in the film allows Boyle to build viewer engagement with Renton so that, by the time this horrific event does occur, Renton does not forfeit viewer empathy completely. The novel’s passing references To Lou Reed and Iggy Pop, in the internal monologues of Renton and Tommy, are moved into the soundtrack of the film, most obviously in the sequence when Renton overdoses (Lou Reed’s ‘Perfect Day’) and in the opening chase (Iggy Pop’s ‘Lust For Life’).[15]

Not only is the narrative reconfigured around Renton, but episodes which occurred at some distance from one another in the novel (such as Spud and Renton’s sexual experiences) are brought together so that the film can intercut between them. The novel’s tangential episodes, especially those which showed Renton in a less sympathetic light - throwing stones at squirrels, having sex with a partner of a supposed friend, and fleecing the benefit system - are not present in the film. A scene of Renton with a psychiatrist, who attempts to coax him into considering why he is drawn to heroin, is also not used except for the ‘Choose Life’ speech, Renton’s sarcastic list of the lifestyles and symbols of consumer capitalism, all of which he rejects. This speech is expanded and delivered as the opening mantra for the film and all versions of the theatrical trailer. The choice not to use a scene with the psychiatrist may have been for reasons of length or to remove a slightly static situation, but without it the film does not really attempt to explain why Renton takes drugs, apart from the obvious pleasure it provides. Episodes in the novel featuring Renton in London frequenting seedy pornographic cinemas, and an unpleasant sexual incident in which he is the object of a predatory Italian, remained unused for similar reasons, as they would cast him in an unflattering light and make it hard for the audience to