When nearly a billion people watched your last project, it’s not an obvious move to follow up with a low-budget, pitch-black mindfuck of a movie. But then again, Danny Boyle didn’t anticipate that taking a breather from making Trance to direct the London Olympics’ opening ceremony would result in, as he puts it, a “fiendishly more complicated” final product. Indeed, Trance—a psychological thriller in which a hypnotherapist (Rosario Dawson) helps an art auctioneer (James McAvoy) recover memories of where he stashed a stolen Goya—promises to confuse viewers in the best possible way when it comes out in April. Here Boyle provides some clarity in advance.
Wired: You actually had a hypnosis consultant on the set of Trance. Did you get hypnotized yourself?
Danny Boyle: I didn’t. Two of the actors, James McAvoy and Vincent Cassel, had a go. But the expert said the demonstration was too public for them to truly relax, so they never actually went into a trance. And I suppose I didn’t because I’m a control freak—which is what directors are, really.
Netflix Isn’t Just Rebooting Arrested Development —It’s Revolutionizing TV
Buckle Your Brainpan: The Primer Director Is Back With a New Film
Wired: Your previous two films were highly lauded. Slumdog Millionaire won eight Oscars, and 127 Hours got six nominations. As an action thriller, Trance is much less likely to be a contender.
Boyle: Yeah.
Wired: Was that deliberate?
Boyle: When you’re doing something like the Olympics, which is socially responsible and family oriented, the dark side of your brain doesn’t go to sleep. It’s still there, fevering away, wanting to do something dark and unacceptable. So this is what we came up with. It’s like the dark side of the Olympics.
Wired: What’s the dark side of the Olympics?
Boyle: There are lots of dark sides, believe me, none of which you’re allowed to mention. The IOC is a corporation, like Coca-Cola, with massive vested interests and an ethic to protect its image in a way that doesn’t fit with the festival of peace it’s meant to be.
Wired: Is that why, when you were done with the Olympic ceremony, you said that you were looking forward to “treachery and intrigue on the screen rather than behind the scenes”?
Boyle: They wanted to cut parts of the ceremony to make it more about the kings-and-queens side of British history rather than what we chose to focus on, which was the Industrial Revolution. I basically used Slumdog‘s Oscars to protect our vision: “OK, if you want to do that, I’m resigning.” They knew that if I walked the publicity would be fucking terrible.
Wired: Your work on the Olympics happened between the shooting and editing phases of Trance. How did that affect the finished product?
Boyle: One of the ironies of being a director is that you know the film so well, you’re less qualified than anyone to know what it’s like to watch it just once. So to get a glimpse of that—to come back to it and watch a rough cut and not know what’s coming next—was really interesting. There’s a story that M. Night Shyamalan almost had to be forced to include the line “I see dead people.” He thought it just gives it away. You’re so close to it, you think they’ll guess straightaway. In fact, it’s pretty tough to guess. So you start putting in little clues to give people a chance of figuring it out.
Boyle: Who would have thought? I don’t like zombie movies. I never did. We took a genre and fucked with it. Zombie aficionados, they’re quite precious with all their rules. Like with running: “They don’t do that!” Of course there are so many manifestations of zombies now, the rule book has gone out the window. I saw one episode of The Walking Dead, and it was very gripping. But the zombies were stumbling around again, which I hate.
Wired: You turned down the chance at a knighthood in recognition of your work on the Olympic opening ceremony. Doesn’t “Sir Danny Boyle” have a nice ring to it?
Boyle: I’m very proud to be an equal citizen rather than a preferred subject. I find “Mr. Boyle” embarrassing enough as it is.
