The team behind Trainspotting is fast becoming the most formidable of talents in British cinema. They talk to Adam Sweeting about their great adventures on the big scereen
FROM the team that brought you last year’s black and sardonic thriller Shallow Grave, Trainspotting is certain to be one of the cinematic hot shots of 1996. If Shallow Grave was a show-stopper, Trainspotting is brilliant, a horrifying, exhilarating slalom through a low-life of heroin, squats, death and grand larceny. Its vivid characterisations and super-intense action scenes hit you like a string of killer punches, and when the lights come up you could weep with relief to find that you’re still alive.
Adapted from Irvine Welsh’s hit novel, Trainspotting is further evidence of the triumphant arrival of a rare combination of British film-making talents. Again rejecting the director’s conventional big byline, Danny Boyle was an equal third of a creative partnership, alongside producer Andrew Macdonald and screenwriter John Hodge. “I don’t think we produce great auteurs in this country,” Boyle observes. “The really great work comes from partnerships.”
Initially, Boyle was the best known of the trio. He worked at the Royal Court theatre and the RSC in the mid-Eighties, then moved on to TV direction and production. Hodge, in contrast, was a full-time doctor until last year. Shallow Grave was his first foray into writing for the screen, and during shooting he was still working at a hospital in Romford. Macdonald had studied production at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles before returning to the UK to work on independent films and for Scottish TV.
Macdonald’s grandfather was Emeric Pressburger, half of the Archers film-making partnership with Michael Powell. Powell and Pressburger’s commitment to teamwork, and their vision of a distinctively British cinema with a European outlook that illuminates films like The Red Shoes or A Matter of Life and Death, has rubbed off on him.
“Certainly the teamwork idea comes a lot from them,” Macdonald agrees. “Not just the two of them, but the team of people they worked with, often going back to certain actors and so on. They made international films based around British stories, they didn’t try to ape American films. I think their films are timeless. They also managed to avoid the idea of class, although it’s obviously there in different types of characters they used. I think British films have been obsessed by class, and that’s why they don’t do well internationally.”
With the buzz about Trainspotting building rapidly, Boyle, Macdonald and Hodge go through their self-promotional paces at Soho’s painfully trendy Groucho Club, though Hodge mutters darkly that they aren’t members. Most interviews with more than two people are a nightmare, either a crossfire of non-sequiturs or a monologue from one participant with sullen grunts from the others, but typically, this lot have got it organised. Macdonald, who looks more like an eager undergraduate than a cigar-chewing, ass-kicking deal-maker, delivers the basic narrative. Boyle and Hodge choose their moments to deliver blasts of explanation.
The decision to film Welsh’s novel immediately threw up prickly problems. For all its vividness and pace, the book’s narrative structure is emphatically non- linear, so the first question was, could Hodge turn it into a workable script? “I felt intimidated by the book and by the popularity it has gained,” Hodge admits. “It was a responsibility, put it that way.”
Some superficial similarities between Shallow Grave and Trainspotting – in both cases, a character played by Ewan McGregor double-crosses his friends and steals the loot – has become a source of some amusement. “Shallow Grave is a conventional film and was conceived as such,” Hodge goes on. “Three thieves fall out over a bag of money. That’s the start, then you build from there. Whereas you can’t summarise Trainspotting really. You can say it’s about a bunch of guys on heroin, but that’s not really accurate, though I’m sure it’s what a lot of people will say. And you can’t really summarise the novel, because it’s kaleidoscopic.”
A pivotal scene was the one where Renton, the central character, immerses himself in the “worst toilet in Scotland” in determined pursuit of drugs. The trio treated the sequence as a grotesque fantasy, and regard it as an index of their approach to the picture.
Macdonald: “John wrote 40 pages before we’d finally tied up all the rights, and that scene was basically it. To me, that showed that he’d cracked the tone of how to do it as a film, visually. I imagine that scene will become quite well known, just as that toilet scene is the famous bit from the book. I heard that whatsisname, that comic who runs away from stages … Stephen Fry can recite it as an after-dinner turn.”
Hodge: “We treated the scene that way to say this is not a realist film, so people could settle down and enjoy it and not worry that they’re going to have to engage in a totally realistic way. It’s more cinematic. Also the book is very clear about describing what it would be like to put your arm down among strangers’ excrement. Symbolically, the chapter is about how far you are prepared to go for your heroin, and that’s what it’s about in the film. Besides, if you did it absolutely realistically it would be unwatchable.”
Cunningly, they gave Irvine Welsh a cameo role as a drug dealer, partly to pre-empt any negative feelings he might have about their filming of his book. The threesome evidently regard the enigmatic Welsh with some wariness, and Boyle was suffering nightmarish premonitions of the author taking out trade-paper ads denouncing the movie.
There was relief all round when he approved of Hodge’s script. “He gave us some notes which were generally positive, with a few minor criticisms,” Hodge remembers. “It was great, because obviously he could have chosen to be very difficult and precious about it.”
The next challenge was getting to grips with junkie life and a world viewed through a heroin daze. Boyle accepts that simply by putting the addict’s lifestyle on screen, you run the risk of glamourising it, particularly when you’re making a movie intended to be attractive to audiences at some level. The trick is to try to reveal truths of some kind at the same time. Hodge, who did his medical studies at Edinburgh university in the Eighties, already knew about the medical effects of the drug.
“Hearing the medical truth about heroin was fascinating, and seeing how compatible the drug is with the human body,” says Boyle, a Mancunian sandwiched between two Scots. “Immediately all your alarm bells start ringing, you realise how force-fed we are with the image of heroin. You must never speak positively of this drug because it will lead people to use it and lose their lives. You have all these images that it’s like a virus, and as soon as you touch it you’re finished.
“But if you’re going to do a film about it, you’ve got to find out about it and tell it like it is. If that doesn’t conform to the expected picture, that’s too bad. Clearly there is a glamorous side to the drug too: people don’t take it because it’s going to kill them or because it’s going to make them sick. They take it because it’s going to make them feel wonderful, and you’ve got to tell the truth about that.”
The film’s accomplishment is to generate hilarity and pumping excitement while giving full rein to the horrors of heroin addiction. The team’s early research on junkie existence filled them with despair.
“It was really depressing, and we didn’t really want to make the film,” says Boyle. “We couldn’t relate to it creatively at all. But then we met these guys from Calton Athletic, this drug rehabilitation centre in Glasgow, who are fanatical. They don’t condone the methadone programme and gradual reduction. They say you give up now and never go back on it, and if you go back you’re out of the group.
“It was inspirational to see these ordinary people with no money or job prospects, struggling to give up this creature that’s taken over their lives. They took us through all the details so we got them right. These are people who are there now, today, giving it up, because they’ve got to do it each day.”
There will be a Scottish premiere of the film to raise funds for Calton Athletic, though the team is wary of being pushed into a public role as anti-heroin campaigners.
“I don’t think there will be that expectation,” says Macdonald, “but I always worry about that when I speak to Calton Athletic, to be honest. They feel it’s got nothing to do with the drugs, they’re just really happy they were involved in the film. They like Danny personally, they liked Shallow Grave and they love John’s and Irvine’s writing. If it’s wrong they’ll tell you it’s wrong.”
Critical appreciation for the film seems a foregone conclusion, and its prospects must be boosted by a superb soundtrack, featuring Primal Scream, Pulp, Damon Albarn and Sleeper, plus the uncannily apt Lust For Life by Iggy Pop. But as Boyle points out, “it’s really easy surviving these triumphs, but it’s when we make a really fucking lousy film and surviving that.”
Their next objective is to shoot Hodge’s script, A Life Less Ordinary. Boyle calls it Money Bags III, since yet again there’s a bag of money involved, and the trio could have obtained sacks of real-life lucre from backers eager to fund them. But Boyle is adamant that over-budgeting your films is a guarantee of disaster.
They made Shallow Grave for 1-million and Trainspotting cost 1,6-million. Macdonald is thinking in terms of rustling up 8- million for the next one, “but it will remain an independent film, it will remain our film. If we fuck up it’ll be our money we’re spending, so we have complete control over it.” Alien IV and Terminator V can wait for a while.