Volta™ – Irish Independent Film Online

After dropping out of the University of Wales, Boyle’s started his career in theatre. As deputy director of the Royal Court in the early 1980s, his productions included award-winning plays by Howard Barker and Edward Bond. Later, while working as a television producer for BBC Northern Ireland, he produced Alan Clarke’s 1989 Troubles classic Elephant, while also directing episodes of television series such as Inspector Morse.

In 1994, Boyle teamed up with producer Andrew Macdonald (the grandson of renowned British director Emeric Pressburger) and Scottish writer John Hodge for his debut feature Shallow Grave, a darkly comic story of greed and jealousy set mostly in an apartment in Edinburgh where three friends find a suitcase full of money, left behind by a recently departed tenant. The low-budget film became an international hit, winning the BAFTA for Best British Film and launching the career of Boyle’s leading man Ewan McGregor, who would go on to star in his next two films.

The trio reunited in 1996 to adapt Irvine Welsh’s cult novel Trainspotting, in which McGregor played a young drug-addict trying to go clean and escaping his junkie friends in Edinburgh. The cast of up-and-coming actors included Ewen Bremner, Robert Carlyle, Kelly Macdonald and Peter Mullan in a film that is as darkly comic as it is disturbing. Released internationally to critical and commercial acclaim, Trainspotting received an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay and won a BAFTA in the same category. Now a certified cult film, ever since its release Boyle has suggested that he may revisit Renton and his friends for a sequel, based on Welsh’s follow-up novel Porno.

The success of Trainspotting led to Boyle gaining the attention of the Hollywood studios, who offered him the opportunity to direct 1997s Alien: Resurrection (subsequently filmed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet), based on a script by Josh Whedon. Boyle felt the big-budget, effects-heavy sci-fi project was too ambitious, and chose instead to work again with Hodge and Macdonald on the screwball musical comedy, A Life Less Ordinary. The 1997 film, starring McGregor and Cameron Diaz, told the story of a young janitor who kidnaps his boss’s daughter and, thanks to a pair of meddling angels, falls in love with her. The complicated, cross-genre film did not meet with box-office success, but it was followed by an even more disastrous project, The Beach.

Adapted by Hodge from Alex Garland’s cult novel, and starring the most famous actor in the world at the time, Leonardo DiCaprio, who had recently completed James Cameron’s Titanic, The Beach told the story of a group of backpackers living on a remote island in Thailand. Having endured a difficult shoot in trying and dangerous conditions, Boyle’s film met with a savage critical response on release; even if The Beach would go on to make decent returns at the international box office. The project also created a rift between Boyle and Ewan McGregor, who had been cast in the lead before being replaced by DiCaprio. The two have not worked together since.

Boyle regrouped and headed back to television where he directed two dramas for the BBC in 2001, Strumpet, starring his Shallow Grave star Christopher Eccleston and Vacuuming Completely Nude in Paradise, which earned Timothy Spall a BAFTA TV Award nomination for Best Actor. Strumpet also marked the first occasion Boyle worked with cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, who has shot almost all of his films since.

The following year, again partnered by Macdonald and screenwriter Alex Garland, Boyle crossed genres once again to direct the zombie horror 28 Days Later. The virtuoso horror told the story of a handful of survivors attempting to find safety a month after a mysterious virus turns almost everyone in Britain into a flesh-eating fiend. Starring Cillian Murphy and Brendan Gleeson, 28 Days Later was an international smash hit and spawned a 2007 sequel and a bestselling graphic novel. Having regained his reputation as a daring, energetic director, Boyle’s next film was an idiosyncratic return to small-scale filmmaking and his first children’s film. Adapted by writer Frank Cottrell Boyce from his award-winning novel and starring James Nesbitt and newcomer Alex Etel, 2004s Millions told the story of a young boy who finds a bag full of money just days before the currency becomes obsolete. The film won the Best Screenplay at the British Independent Film Awards and was a mild commercial success.

In 2007, Boyle switched genres once again to direct the big-budget science-fiction thriller Sunshine, again written by Alex Garland and starring Cillian Murphy. Murphy plays one of a group of scientists on board a spaceship sent on a mission to reignite the heart of the Sun, whose dimming light has cast the world into permanent winter. Beautifully photographed and featuring a series of exciting and innovative effects sequences, Sunshine crossed elements of classic sci-fi with a claustrophobic psychological thriller and, although well received by critics, proved too ambitious for the box-office.

Boyle’s next film was to be his biggest commercial success to date and a profound personal triumph for the director, who once again showcased his extraordinary creative flexibility. 2008s Slumdog Millionaire, based on the novel Q&A by Indian author and diplomat Vikas Swarup, starred Dav Patel as a young man from the slums of Mumbai who becomes a contestant on Who Wants to be a Millionaire? in an effort to reunite with his lost love (Frida Pinto). Filmed on location in India on a budget of only $15m, the film was an immediate box-office sensation, taking almost $400m at cinemas around the world. Slumdog also swept the board at the Academy Awards, winning eight Oscars, including Best Picture, Cinematography, Adapted Screenplay and Editing. Boyle won the Oscar for Best Director, in the process becoming one of only seven directors to win a Golden Globe, a Directors Guild of America Award, a BAFTA and an Oscar for the same film.

Riding a wave of international acclaim, Boyle’s follow-up to the enormous success of Slumdog Millionaire was, typically, a claustrophobically small-scale film about a man trapped by a rock that has fallen on his arm in the middle of nowhere. Adapted from the real-life story of Aron Ralston, 127 Hours had James Franco play the young adventurer who finds himself in a deadly situation while on a hike in the desert and must resort to extreme measures to free himself. The vibrantly directed story saw Boyle return to the Academy Awards, where the film was nominated in six categories, including Best Film.

Although at first sight it might appear that Boyle is a cinematic magpie, flitting from genre to genre attracted by whatever shiny story catches his eye, there are directorial themes running through his films. He is a consummate stylist, finding a unique and extraordinarily energetic way to tell his stories through cinematography, editing and a keen ear for soundtrack. Although they are all catalogued in different genres, his films can be connected by recurring ideas: sudden windfalls of money, narrating bodies laid out on beds or in graves, the faint possibility of escape from difficult circumstances or unfair situations and the vibrant splashes of colour that illuminate a filthy toilet, a vast spaceship, a decrepit Mumbai street or a child’s bedroom.

Boyle has put his directing career on hold briefly to act as Artistic Director for the London Olympic Games later in 2012, but shortly after the closing ceremony he will start work on a new project, which sees him reunite with his Shallow Grave screenwriter John Hodge. Trance is a thriller centred around a failed art robbery that pits two men against one another, even as they fall in love with the same woman. Starring James McAvoy, Vincent Cassel and Rosario Dawson, the film should be released in 2013.