“We wanted the film to have a vibrancy, to be larger than life”: Danny Boyle on Trainspotting

Few British movies begin quite as arrestingly as Trainspotting. Iggy Pop’s ‘Lust For Life’ is pounding away on the soundtrack. With store detectives in hot pursuit, Renton is running down Edinburgh’s Princes Street, that cynosure for shoppers, tourists and tartan-and-shortbread connoisseurs. His face, seen in big close-up, is sporting a wry smile. He’s enjoying himself. As he sprints, there’s a voice-over, extracted directly from the novel.

It’s the sheer, untrammelled energy of the scene that impresses. “From the team that brought you Shallow Grave,” trumpets the publicity. Given the success of that movie (it made over £5 million at the domestic box office), you might have expected the team to play it safe: to take the large budgets being offered to them by Hollywood or to set up shop at Pinewood or Shepperton. Instead, they chose to make an adaptation of Welsh’s scabrous lowlife novel. They had a disused Glasgow cigarette factory as their homemade studio. The shooting schedule (seven weeks) was tight. There wasn’t that big a budget. But the very constraints they imposed on themselves ensured the film’s vitality. They seemed to relish the tension: “It’s like trying to keep plates in the air, everything is always slightly out of control,” as Danny Boyle puts this.

Channel 4 provided development funds for the script in early 1994, before Shallow Grave had even been released. In the end, they pumped more money (£1.7 million) into Trainspotting, the first film they’ve ever fully financed, than into any other single movie in their history. Not that it was an especially risky investment. At the time of writing, the film has already made in excess of £2 million in pre-sales alone. The arrangement was also one that suited the film-makers. “We feel very strongly that we want them involved. Not so much from the financial point of view (we were offered much more money elsewhere) but from a creative point of view.”

The three key members of the team were once again Danny Boyle (director), Andrew Macdonald (producer) and John Hodge (scriptwriter). I interviewed them together in a little room above their production offices in Noel Street, deep in the heart of Soho filmland. They were in confident mood, happy that the film had received a certificate without the BBFC asking for cuts, and also optimistic about its chances of being in competition at Cannes in the summer. 

Geoffrey Macnab: Somebody who saw the film suggested to me that it reminded him of the Richard Lester Beatles movies. There’s a lot of running and jumping going on. 

Andrew Macdonald: We looked at a few of those 60s films when we were thinking about the montage scene in London. We tried to steal some ideas. From films like A Clockwork Orange or Alfie. I think that was the last period when Britain actually made films about contemporary subjects that were exciting and impactful, and actually meant something to British audiences.

Could you say something about the opening sequence with McGregor in close-up, running from the store detectives. It’s a very arresting beginning, not really in the book. 

John Hodge: There is a reference to shoplifting in the book, when Renton gets caught shoplifting and runs along the street. I thought that was an attractive opening image. I looked at other possible opening scenes. They were all kind of static or too complicated. But that one’s very direct and very simple. It’s just straight into the action. 

Danny Boyle: But there was a very important shift. John’s original opening was going to be silent. But quite near the end of the script process John shifted the monologue which goes with the opening. He shifted that from the middle to the front. And then we all felt the script began to take off. It gave us tremendous confidence. 

Hodge: The whole monologue seemed to summarise Renton’s attitude, his credo. His decision not to want any of these things that are being offered to him, certainly at the start of the film. 

In the film, that scene is like something out of Gravity’s Rainbow. He disappears headfirst down the toilet and swims into a sea. It’s not like that in the book. Did you make many changes along these lines? 

Hodge: No, there are just a few moments like that. One reason I did that was I wanted to show, early in the film, that this is not a realist, gritty drama. I wanted people to feel they are watching something different. Anyway, to do it very realistically would be unwatchable. You see this dirty toilet you know is full of excrement. But for me, this moment was symbolic. How much are you prepared to do to get opium? Are you prepared to submerse yourself in the toilet? 

There’s so much slang and vernacular stuff in the book. You’ve kept some of that. But you’ve also made changes and toned it down. 

Hodge: I tried to keep as much as possible. When you read the book, you can go back as often as you like to decipher it. But you don’t have that luxury with the film. Everything is exposed to the audience once only. And it’s not necessarily an audience that speaks ‘Scottish’. So some of the slang had to be watered down, basically. 

As for the milieu, the heroin subculture is quite a leap from the gentrified New Town Edinburgh of ‘Shallow Grave’. 

Boyle: The appeal of the book wasn’t just the heroin aspect. One of the appeals of the book to me was that it seemed as if it was speaking about drugs in general. That’s something society fails to address. We’re still stuck in the 70s in terms of attitudes to drugs. In the late 80s and early 90s, society changed. The use of drugs massively increased. There’s still this stigma attached to it. The people who are actually drug-users may actually pay lip service to that general consensus, but they know that their own experience is different. We did a lot of research. The initial research we did, which was among present-day heroin addicts in Scotland, was very depressing. You realise that nobody would go and see a film about that. And also that wasn’t the approach that Welsh took. For all the veneer of realism, the gruesomeness and repulsiveness is used stylistically. The book is exciting, funny and dangerous in a way that a severe heroin addict’s life isn’t. The book has that vibrancy which connects with why people take drugs. It blazes away with this sense of experiment and risk. 

And did this extend to your formal approach? If you think of other filmic representations of drug-taking, things like The Man With The Golden Arm or Christiane F., they’re relentlessly gloomy, doom-laden films. 

Macdonald: That wasn’t the kind of film that we wanted to make – 

Boyle (interrupting): That isn’t what drugs are about. When you take drugs, you have a fucking great time – unless you’re very unlucky. We wanted the film to capture that. There’s half of the film which obviously is considerably darker. If you prolong your experience with drugs, your life will darken. The film doesn’t try to hide that. But it also doesn’t try to hobble along with the moral consensus. 

Hodge: There’s such a difference in tone between the two halves of the film. In the first half, a lot of what takes place has nothing to do with heroin. It’s shooting dogs in the park, job interviews, that sort of thing. It’s mainly fun. We wouldn’t have wanted to keep that tone going through the second half, which is mainly to do with time spent on heroin. We wanted to contrast the exuberance of what happened before with the downside of what came later. 

Did you view the film as a kind of sequel, at least in stylistic terms, to Shallow Grave? 

Macdonald: It’s the same designer, director, cameraman who actually put the images up there. We made a very early decision (it was one of the things that attracted us to the book) that it wasn’t realism and we didn’t want to do it like that. We didn’t want to make the film on location. I believe that to make a film of this scale on location, even if it wasn’t on a grim housing scheme, is almost impossible. I’ve seen so many other small British films fail because they only have six weeks shooting, and if it rains, it rains. The only way we tould make it – especially with 230 scenes in the film – was to do as much of it in the studio as we could. That decision, stylistically, affects the rest of the film. 

Boyle: If we had a chance to go back to Trainspotting, we’d make even more of it in the studio. Realism is Britain’s trademark in terms of television drama and film. We’ve made this choice to dampen ourselves down so that sex and colours are not something to be celebrated. And if you go out on the street, we’re such a small country architecturally and geographically that it’s very difficult to create a sense of myth. It’s very difficult actually to expand – to create a space big enough for the cinema screen. That’s why television has evolved so well. We see so much of our country shown on television and it fits very nicely. It’s very difficult to show those same images, to expand them, for the big screen. Unless, of course, if you can do it in the studio and build your own world, and you’ve got a good designer (which we have) and you can use colours, space and movement that is not natural in British flats and houses and streets. The problem with Britain, as far as interiors are concerned, is getting shots of people you can go full length on. That’s why our instinct is always to build the room so we can do that. The big screen is about trying to show people’s physicality rather than just their faces. 

Hodge: In writing terms, I have this fear of scenes which involve British streets, or interaction with a lot of people in a normal setting. I always like to think of characters isolated. So that’s like when Renton comes out of the pub after the trial and he has to get to Swanney’s to take the drugs. I was thinking, how can I get him there? Are we going to have to see him on the bus or on the street. I thought, no, I can’t be bothered with that. We’ll just have him jumping off the wall and running there because to me, that’s more natural. 

Can you say something about the music, for instance your ironic use of ‘Perfect Day’ by Lou Reed in the overdose sequence? Was it easy to get permissions? 

Macdonald: It was a nightmare. It is still going on. All the contemporary British bands we were able to meet somehow through Shallow Grave and through the book – Blur, Primal Scream, Elastica – they all did it for the same price, no matter what the length of the track. I tried to tell them there’s no fucking way you can have ‘Perfect Day’. It’s going to cost a million dollars. It was the editor who put the music there and cut the images to it. He’s the one with the real ear. That’s what he is so brilliant at. 

Boyle: What we were talking about regarding Britain, the light, the streetlife, the feeling of it being more to do with morality than imagination: one of the things that you don’t get that in is pop music. 

So is this the first Britpop film? 

Boyle: Well, we didn’t want the film to stop, like the book, in the 80s. We wanted to bridge across to now. So we decided to use the music. It’s also there in Welsh’s writing, not just in Trainspotting, but in Acid House and Marabou Stork Nightmare. We wanted to go through dance music and emerge into what is currently sweeping the nation, if not the world – Britpop. So it has got an appeal to people who go to the cinema. 

How much licence did you give the actors? Take Spud’s job interview while on speed, for example. 

Boyle: A lot of that was based around Ewen’s performance. Ewen Bremner is a unique performer. If you try to do anything with their performance, like give them notes, you just ruin it. They’re freewheeling spirits. If you get all the ground set out right, you just let him have a go at it. We shot in a series of different sizes, but just let him do the scene straight through and waste film. Just let him fire away at it. We wanted him in a big open space. We imprisoned him in a chair at the far end of the room. His whole body language, if you know him as a performer, is about getting out of that chair. You don’t want to say to him, don’t move so much, we can’t hold focus on you. It’s restricting him. You want an actor like him to be free to do what he wants. So you shoot it wide and he can jump about as much as he likes. We shaped the film around the actors. You have a big screen. And the wonderful thing about a big screen is that people can select. That’s the wonderful thing about Tarantino which nobody says – that he lets you select what you watch. He lets the actors get on with it rather than shape everything all the time. 

A criticism levelled at the book is that it lacks strong women characters and that there’s a vein of machismo running through it. Was this a problem for you? 

Hodge: Yes, we discussed it. The book is very much about a gang of boys. There are a couple of token chapters from a woman’s point of view – 

Macdonald: – which somehow aren’t the best chapters of the book anyway. 

Boyle: John wrote some more scenes for the main girl, the school girl which we filmed, but which were cut. She was very good in the scenes. The scenes were very good in themselves. But they didn’t quite live in the film. When you get down to honing the film, cutting and cutting it, they drop out – they’re not quite as organised as the scenes with the boys. 

Macdonald: We probably tried a bit too hard to use them to define her. We probably worried about it too much. 

Boyle: It’s quite interesting all that boy’s own stuff. We deliberately put in a scene where she looks at his dick and says, “not a lot”, to balance what some people see as a misogyny in it. The boy’s own thing is what the title is really about. It’s this thing about lists in the film. Everybody talks in lists. They’re always listing their achievements – it’s a mentality, an attempt to try to get a fix on the world. Tarantino is an absolute trainspotter. It’s a very male thing. You can’t get a grip on the world because it’s spiralling, escalating out of control. So you do it through small things. It’s a typical male attitude. It’s the Nick Hornby in us all, trying to keep a hold on things.

Do you see it as a Scottish film? After all, there’s no Scottish funding. 

Macdonald: Somebody said to me that in France, Shallow Grave was sold as a “Scottish thriller”. It was very popular. In France, they think Scotland is terribly exotic. I suppose I feel, because I live in London now, that Trainspotting is a British film. As a producer, I hope it appeals to people in London. It has to appeal to people in London. Otherwise, we’re fucked. In terms of the accents and all that sort of thing, we wanted everybody to be able to understand it. We wanted it to play in the UCls and for people to go and see it. I still don’t feel it will be as popular as Shallow Grave. There’s a line to cross, namely heroin, and people will feel that it’s not a pleasant subject. In a way, I still see it as a Scottish film. I think, great, it may be the first ever Scottish film in competition at Cannes. [John Hodge has to leave for lunch.] 

Many of the football and sectarian references in the book were taken out. Are you worried that by shooting in the controlled environment of the studio you’ve lost any sense of local identity? A lot of people were very protective about the book, and there’s a sense that you’ve taken it away from them. 

Macdonald: Oh yeah. There will be lots of people like that. But then it’s not just Edinburgh. It’s Leith versus Edinburgh, it’s Hibs versus Hearts. It’s all that stuff. Our approach was determined by the actors as much as anything else. We could have gone a different way, taken real kids from the estates. It was a stylistic choice not to. 

Boyle: It’s interesting that. Looking at the book, you think: should we pick real kids and do it that way? You think, could kids on the street perform these scenes, even as they’re written? And they can’t. They’re not scenes written down by a tape-recorder of real things happening in a room. They’re highly stylised performance scenes which Welsh has chosen to use to illustrate characters. And you need actors for that. Choices like that push you toward a slightly stylised approach which eschews the detailed “this is Leith, this is no 23 in the street” approach. But, of course, somebody like Ken Loach would go for a different approach. We always said that Loach would make a really interesting film of this book. It would be very different. 

Even in the most horrific scenes, there’s always the sense of dark humour. Was this something intentional? That you were never going to let matters get too grim? 

Boyle: I hope they get horrifically grim. We just didn’t want to go into that usual drug world where things are so appalling that you can’t even watch it. It just wears you down. We wanted the film to have a vibrancy – a humour, an outrageousness, we always wanted it to be larger than life really. You can get away with so much with humour, smuggle so much in. 

There’s always this sense of class tension in the book which seems slightly less pronounced in the film.

Macdonald: I didn’t really notice it much in the book. It’s the characters that grab your attention. You don’t really worry about the outside world. 

Boyle: You talk about class. Class is such a fucking nightmare in this country. Particularly in terms of Sight and Sound and something like that. One of the really interesting things in the book I found was that the characters went everywhere in taxis. And I remember saying that to Andrew, “Fuck me, they go everywhere in cabs.” That is one of the wonderfully contradictory things about the book. The really interesting thing about class is not how it is defined. As soon as it is defined, people slip away from it. People who are really experiencing hardship or are affected by budget – they want to get out of their class, and they find ways of slipping their class. If they’ve got cash, they spend it on cabs. They spend half of it on a cab and the other half of it on heroin or smack. It’s things like that. You go with that spirit in the book. The book isn’t an examination of class. Anybody who wants to make it out to be that has their own particular axe to grind. It’s a much more interesting book than that. 

The end of the film, where the four characters have the bag of money. It is in the book, but it’s very close to the basic situation of Shallow Grave. 

Macdonald: John Hodge manages to twist it round to his agenda. Like any writer would. He managed to make it about friendship and betrayal. That’s what the film is about. Not heroin. That’s what you should compare it to if you’re writing for Sight and Sound. I Vitelloni or Diner. It’s basically about their friendship and how Renton has to escape from it, to get away, in order to survive. 

There’s something quite entrepreneurial about Renton. 

Boyle: But that’s Irvine Welsh. You learn a bit about Irvine and Irvine is an entrepreneur. Those things about Renton in the book were true. Irvine went to be an estate agent. He bought himself a flat to benefit from the property boom. That’s what is interesting about class. If you come with this blinkered idea about the way the world is organised, you’ll think this can’t be true. I know this guy. He’s a working-class hero. But when you actually get to find out about him, you realise he doesn’t quite fit that pattern. He squirms out of that. We obviously tried to reflect that in Renton. One of the things that keep people in their background is their friends, if they stay loyal to their friends. The people I grew up with are all still in Radcliffe, where I come from, near Manchester. They’re all still there. And some of them are a lot brighter than me. But they stayed there, they stayed friends – and I got out. I left. And that’s what Renton does. You have to do that – to break with people like Begbie. He uses the money as a catalyst to get out of there. He knows Begbie will chop his hands off if he ever goes back. That’s an interesting thing about class, your own private relationship with it, what you do with it. Not just “it” as a monumental force controlling everyone. 

In Shallow Grave, you were going for all those dark red colours. What was the colour scheme here? What was the look you wanted? 

Macdonald: There was a lot of stuff about the floor. We wanted the camera low. 

Boyle: It’s very difficult to get a 35mm camera down there and operate it. It means that you’ve got to have ceilings. It means that you see the floor and the ceilings. You realise that that is why most things aren’t shot like that. It takes too much time. But we had a cameraman who was prepared to indulge these fantasies we had about the camera wriggling across the floor. You’ve got to have an organic reason. The reason was they were going to end up on the floor. That’s where the characters are coming to. That’s where they want to be. Oblivion is just to fall over and not feel it. The book’s like that – they’ve got that desire just to fall over. The colours? We talked a lot about Francis Bacon’s colours –

Macdonald: – purples – we found a great wallpaper shop. You know the trainspotting wallpaper in Renton’s childhood room. There was a shop in Paisley that had all these amazing wallpapers left over from God knows when. I’m sure the film is going to herald a big revival in wallpaper.

► Trainspotting is in UK cinemas from 21 August.