Danny Boyle Interview For 127 Hours
Danny Boyle Interview For 127 Hours
Danny Boyle Interview For 127 Hours
I recently had the good fortune of catching up with Danny Boyle to talk about his fantastic new movie 127 Hours. A visceral, thrilling real life story that will take the audience on a never before experienced journey and prove what we can do when we choose life. Check out what he had to say below.
How would you like people to feel at the end of 127 Hours? There were so many different emotions I felt while watching the movie.
Danny Boyle: Yeah absolutely. Aron used the word Ecstasy, but I said we probably won't be able to use that in Britain, it might be misleading (laughs), perhaps euphoria would be better . But there is a very profound, deep sense of euphoria in getting out of there. I thinks James' acting of that pain, of that process he goes through not just the arm cutting scene is an extraordinary empathetic thing that takes you to a place that you do feel very venerable in. The way we talked about it was childbirth, I've witnessed it, I've got three kids, the first one was an extraordinary moment I will never forget, I actually talked to James about how women go to a plateau of pain in child birth that's way beyond anything that guys will every feel, so we tried to get into that territory really. It is an extraordinary thing, that is disturbing but also worth so much more than the suffering it involved. We always wanted the end to feel like a passageway to something that was much greater than what was being left behind.
Before he was against the pull of the crowd.
Danny Boyle: Yeah, it was like life being given back to him, and really because he's acknowledged how he has ignored the pull of the crowd, and he hasn't had enough respect for peoples affections towards him, or their love for him. He grows in the canyon, it's a journey, we didn't really want to make a survival film, really that's a documentary in a way. It's often honoured as a survival story. It felt very clear from reading the book and then especially speaking to Aaron about things that weren't in the book, Aron grew in there, under those circumstances, it becomes a journey that he's on, where he grows as a person because if you think about it he's got everything he needs to get out of there, he's an incredible survivalist anyway, he's an ultra marathon runner, he's a brilliant athlete, he's an achiever, he conquers all these peaks and does everything against the clock. There must be a reason why nature stops him. That's why James done this take at the beginning of filming trying to get out of that rock, when all that skill and power was proved to be utterly pointless.
There are lots of bright colours in the film, was that symbolic of the hope within it?
Danny Boyle: It's certainly symbolic of Utah, where it's set and where we shot it, it's in the middle of nowhere but what you get is that blue sky with the plane trails in it, its bizarre to see, for every time you fly into LA or San Francisco, youre one of those people up there, it was weird seeing that. There's thousands of people 25,000 feet above it, that was weird.
We wanted it to be very vibrant looking, obviously where it was set looks like that anyway. We have to pay a lot of respect to the two cinematographers Enrique Chediak and Anthony Dod Mantle, they did all this movement with James in the canyon that gives the film its physicality. But they also agreed when we graded the film not to grade it in the normal way you grade a film, the typical way of grading films is to make it look wet, so it looks sexy, the black looks liquidy. But we didn't want that because one of the things that's hard to do is to suggest thirst. Obviously James acts it the whole time, but you can't dehydrate James, it'll kill him, you can do things like weight loss, James did that, but with water you've got to be very very careful, so he has to do a lot of acting, he does his best lip acting in this movie (laughs), and you also have to find other ways of suggesting it, obviously we have the diminishing water in the bottle story. But then we graded everything dry, and it doesn't look sexy, because we wanted his whole environment to feel arid, like there was no moisture anywhere. That's what we did in the grading, it's a tribute to them that they took that risk. If you're look for reviews with cinematography you go for that dark, sexy look. I'm very pleased you pointed out the allure of the film colour wise, even though there's something hopefully working on you subconsciously to make it feel dry.
If you were faced with the same situation do you think you would have done what Aron did?
Danny Boyle: I think one of our things going in was that we would all do it. One of the extraordinary things when it's told in a superficial way is that people would always go I'd never do that', but I think we'd all do it, if you didn't have a knife you'd chew it off, it's an extraordinary thing to say but animals do it all the time and I think when everything is stripped away, yes you would do it I think.
What's incredible about his story is that it appears that he has acquired super human strength and courage to do this kind of thing, but it actually makes it clear that when everything is stripped away, it's the very simple things that bind us together and that will bring us all back together again. The individuals will to survive is often seen as just that, an individual thing, in fact its sort of a gene we all carry and contribute to when it's individually needed, so yes, I think we would all do it.
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