A young, slightly giddy man introduces Danny Boyle, John Hodge and Andrew Macdonald – the hottest movie team in Britain, the sizzlers who brought you Shallow Grave and Trainspotting. There is polite applause. We’re in Dublin for the Republic’s premiere of their biggest film, The Beach. ”And as an extra special surprise, welcome to Mr Leonardo Di …” The audience shares a collective palpitation. ”… Actually, he couldn’t make it tonight.” The giggly anticlimactic groan is deafening.
The Beach cost $50-million to make. Close on half the budget was spent on its star – gorgeous, pouting Leo. Actually, DiCaprio is not simply the movie’s star, he is the film. A few years ago it would have seemed perfectly logical to cast DiCaprio in a BHM movie (as Boyle, Hodge and Macdonald’s productions are known). After all, he was a fine actor who made adventurous independent movies like What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?, The Basketball Diaries and William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Then came Titanic, Leonardo won the world and lost his past. He was no longer an actor – simply the biggest star in the world.
The day we meet, the team is touring the movie before its official release like pop stars. Only, it’s as if Boyzone had left Ronan Keating at home. ”It’s funny,” says Boyle. ”We were in Belfast the other night and the audience didn’t ask us a single question. It was only afterwards that I realised the guy who’d introduced us said you can ask them anything so long as you don’t ask about Leonardo.”
He retains the flat vowels of his Lancashire childhood, and often talks about the fantasy age when Bury were a football club to be reckoned with. Writer Hodge (who worked as a doctor until three years ago) and producer Macdonald (a grandson of the great screenwriter Emeric Pressburger) are both Scottish and in their mid-30s, a few years younger than Boyle.
With Shallow Grave and Trainspotting, they changed the landscape of British film. They were taut, manic black comedies, the filmic equivalent of the three-minute pop song. They laugh at the notion that they had a manifesto, but actually it’s not so far from the truth. They knew exactly what they wanted to do, and what they didn’t want to do. Macdonald talks disparagingly about victim movies, and says it would be easier for him to name the three British movies he liked before they came along rather than the ones he hated – The Hit, The Long Good Friday and Gregory’s Girl.
”When we started out we didn’t want to make art films. The art house ghetto is an easy place to flee to,” says Boyle. ”You know the kind of thing – you don’t understand this film, do you? It’s not for you, it’s for other people.” He knows what he’s talking about. Boyle has a consummate arty background having spent his late childhood glued to Buñuel and Chabrol films in dingy rep cinemas, followed by years directing at the Royal Court, home of radical theatre.
Nor did they want to make mainstream films. They aspired to the hybrid model of Americans like Spike Lee and the Coens and Steven Soderbergh – indiestream, if you like.
The trouble with British film-makers was that they made their films in a vacuum, argues Macdonald. ”People were incapable of understanding who the audience were … people under 25. It doesn’t take a genius to understand that. Tony Blair knows who his audience is. He worked out exactly who they were, and then he went for them.”
As did BHM. Such ruthless branding is not surprising when you see the films, but it is when you meet them. As I walk into the room, Boyle is moaning about the macho culture of film-making, Hodge is so retiring he’s invisible, and Macdonald apologises for his earnest nerdishness as he tells me of the 1 001 films he would love to have made.
Critics suggest their work is derivative, that they are opportunists. None of the team is likely to disagree. ”I mean, Trainspotting is just nicked off GoodFellas, really,” says Boyle. ”It’s just a lift really in terms of style. But that’s one thing we try to do, we try to own up to how ‘indebted’ we are to our predecessors.” He scratches his recidivist post-punk spikes. ”That’s a polite way of putting it.”
Macdonald says their best film is not as good as Scorsese’s worst.
This is crunch time for the boys. Never have they been so powerful, never so vulnerable. Their third film, A Life Less Ordinary, was a commercial and critical failure. It was backed by Rupert Murdoch’s Fox, which has given them another chance with The Beach. But Murdoch is careful with his money. Success is measured strictly in terms of box office. And if it doesn’t succeed in America it will have failed full stop. It’s also critical because having created a niche in trendy youth movies, they already feel they’re getting old, past it. And they don’t really fancy becoming a Jaggeresque parody of themselves.
Why did they cast DiCaprio? For one, they say Alex Garland’s novel about a backpacker who discovers purgatory in paradise was too English, so they wanted to broaden it out. Second, says Macdonald, ”One of the things that really interests us is taking someone well known for two or three films, and playing with his image.” It’s an interesting rationale.
But perhaps the truth lies more in what Boyle said earlier in the day: ”Essentially, you go and watch movies these days for the actors. An audience lives the film through actors, they have to believe the actors. Hence the star system. You have to have a degree of humility about that.”
The Beach is an unmistakable BHM film – fast, febrile and pounding with dance beats. At times the characters seem like a backdrop to the soundtrack. While Trainspotting and Shallow Grave had small casts and were perfectly formed team movies, The Beach has an enormous cast and only one actor matters. Hodge and Boyle have almost been reduced to operatives in the process. And however much they praise DiCaprio’s attitude, his professionalism, the way he turned up every day, you can’t help sensing they feel they’ve emasculated themselves.
Macdonald says: ”Taking on Leo was the biggest decision we made. It’s not known as Danny Boyle’s Beach or the people who made Trainspotting’s Beach, or Alex Garland’s Beach. It’s only known for one thing now … and that’s great … but you know everything rests on that now.”
When interviewed as a team, they verge on the insouciant. The previous night at the movie’s Dublin launch party, I spoke to them individually, and they were more open. Macdonald said it’s a sticky time, that Fox is anxious about The Beach. It’s no secret. In January movie trade magazine Variety led with the headline, ”Fox brass muscles buzz: Studio hype muted as marketers hit The Beach”. The story revealed that the studio was cutting back on promotion to damp down expectation that cannot be realised. The movie will never be another Titanic – though to be fair, it was never intended to be.
In South Africa the film is rated 16, which is enough of a problem. But in the US, it is rated R (you have to be 17 to see it), which could be disastrous. Macdonald said this was their fear. ”Most of Leo’s fans are young girls who won’t be able to see the film. The ideal audience is young men, but they may not want to see it because it stars Leo. They may get turned off because they think of DiCaprio as a romantic star who their girlfriends fancy.”
All three look the part – younger than their years, trendy, the right jeans, jackets, kiddie trainers. It can create a misleading impression. At the party they stuffed themselves into the first obscured sofa. ”Where are the celebrities?” asked Boyle with mock disappointment. ”Where are the Corrs? Where’s Neil Jordan?” He looked relieved he didn’t know anyone. More opportunity to talk football, books and admire the mute action movie playing out in the background.
”We’re not clubbers or anything,” says Boyle understatedly.
Hodge quietly adds ”If you had an exciting life you wouldn’t need to go out and make films about it.”
Boyle has three children, Macdonald one, Hodge has one on the way. ”The reason we get on is that none of us talks too much,” says Hodge tersely. Boyle says in a way they are similar people, and their values are reflected in their films. ”The morality is old-fashioned. I don’t think they’re moralistic, but the morality is quite old-fashioned.” How? ”The hedonism that is in all the films is clearly disapproved of, clearly disapproved of.”
In Shallow Grave, the characters steal a dead man’s money and discover it doesn’t buy happiness; in Trainspotting, the junkies find endless misery; in A Life Less Ordinary a romantic kidnap caper ends bloodily; in The Beach Leonardo discovers his heart of darkness. Hodge says: ”What you said before sums it up. In our films you have a few thrills, and then things go wrong.”
Suddenly they’re into a discussion about movies that could last forever. ”There is an alarming moment when you’re making a film and you think basically it’s just the same one,” says Hodge. Look at the greats, they say, again citing Scorsese – they’ve also made the same film all their lives.
”The only difference is that you tend to have a halcyon period at the beginning, 10 years if you’re lucky,” says Boyle.
Today, Macdonald is more upbeat about The Beach. Instead of talking about his worries, he talks about the challenge of casting DiCaprio. ”A lot of people, friends and family of mine who are not in the business, say ‘Ooh, why are you casting Leonardo DiCaprio? He’s a girl, he’s too young, he won’t be right.’ And they see the film and think he’s fantastic.”
”He’s very good in it, isn’t he?” he asks, looking for confirmation. DiCaprio is pretty good in the entertaining if baggy movie. But this is not the uninhibited DiCaprio of early days. He can’t afford to be. If you’re paying $20-million for him, he has to play to his perceived strengths – so instead of the unrequited voyeur of the novel, DiCaprio’s Richard is a glistening irresistible anti-hero who gets the women.
We are walking to the park to have photos taken. I ask Macdonald if he really meant it when he said earlier that if The Beach fails this could be the end of the team. ”Well I think you have to blame somebody in failure, and I think you end up blaming each other quite naturally. If you don’t make films that are successful together then you probably won’t continue making them together. Failure is the thing that nearly always splits up teams.”
The experience of making The Beach has been nothing like the three other movies. Throughout its three-year gestation, it’s never been far from the headlines. There were stories about Ewan McGregor, who had starred in the other movies, being peeved that his part had gone to DiCaprio.
The strange thing is that McGregor, who was unknown when he starred in Shallow Grave, is now a big enough star to take the lead in Star Wars, but apparently not big enough to star in a BHM film. ”Ewan is not the only one who’s upset that he didn’t work on the film,” says Macdonald. ”There’s a brilliant cameraman, Brian Tufano, who’s not very happy either, but nobody cares about him because it’s nothing to do with Leo.”
Then there were stories about the environment – Leo wrecks paradise, that kind of thing. Not only did the press get it wrong, says Macdonald with disgust, not only did it fail to mention that Thai locals were suing the government rather than the film-makers, ”but the papers don’t even care about the environment. It’s just showbusiness dressed up as serious news.”
But isn’t that the way the world is going – for anything to be newsworthy, there must be a celebrity peg? ”Yes,” says Boyle. ”It’s a big problem, isn’t it?” – The Guardian