Background
Danny Boyle was born on 20 October 1956 in Manchester, United Kingdom.
Danny Boyle was born on 20 October 1956 in Manchester, United Kingdom.
In Shallow Grave and Trainspotting, writer John Hodge and director Danny Boyle seemed to have achieved a wonderfully nasty edge—as cold as Edinburgh in winter, but as startling to the taste as your first sip of Laphroiag whisky. Shallow Grave was a kind of screwball Repulsion, much affected by its bleak (yet pretty) flat, with spiffy performances from Kerry Fox, Christopher Eecleston, and Ewan McGregor. Trainspotting (adapted from Irvine Welsh’s novel) was an hilarious surreal fantasia on hard drugs—overrated at the time, perhaps, but a very striking movie.
So much for promise. A Life Less Ordinary was a title that seemed upside down: the setup was very weird but nowhere near life. And Ewan McGregor and Cameron Diaz together were not quite chemistry. Still, that was a minor misstep compared with the lamentable The Beach, an attempt to exploit Leonardo DiCaprio that proved all the wrong ways to go with a movie career.
So, in effect, Boyle has to start again—and his most likely ground is still Edinburgh. Vacuuming and Stnnnpet were headed in the right direction: rigorously cheap, scathing social satire, and a thousand miles from Hollywood.