Danny Boyle: Olympic Opening Ceremony Artistic Director
It is a typical spring day in London, which means, of course, that the clouds are heavy and the temperature verges on chilly. discount coach bags, we are standing in a particularly gray part of London, in the depths of the industrial East End, an area generally described with the euphemism urban. To the right, red, blue, and silver subway trains clatter incessantly past; in front, a scrap yard teems with builders shouting out the occasional obscenity to passing joggers; behind, the skeleton of the Olympic stadium looms. It is not, to be frank, an especially lovely London tableau.
“Just look at that!” gasps film, theater, and now Olympics–opening ceremony director Danny Boyle, pointing at a sludgy waterway. “That flows right into the Olympic village—isn’t that amazing?” And he shakes his head in delight.
At this point, the builders in the scrap yard notice Boyle posing for the Vogue photographer and now direct their hoots at him: “Yeah, bay-bee! Yeah! Ooh, look at the model!” they cackle. Boyle, a tall, rumpled man in his mid-50s whose expression flickers between intense solemnity and boyish enthusiasm, laughs even louder: “Ahh, brilliant, that’s just wonderful,” he says with a grin.
Finding beauty where others see only barrenness is something of a Boyle specialty. In Slumdog Millionaire, which won eight Oscars in 2009, including Best Picture and Directing, he took a story set in the grimmest of Indian slums and, without shying away from the realities of the setting, created a film that left one feeling almost breathlessly euphoric. He followed this up with 127 Hours,the true story of outdoorsman Aron Ralston, which inevitably became known as the film in which James Franco cut off his own arm. Yet what could have been a gruesome gorefest in hands less adroit and affirmative than Boyle’s became a dizzying celebration of the human spirit. From heroin addiction to global apocalypse, his cinematic oeuvre is littered with the grittiest of tales, and yet each film is shot through with wonder and joy. There is nothing Pollyanna-ish about Boyle’s work (one would be hard-pressed to describe with dewy eyes a film in which the female lead is sold into prostitution, as happens in Slumdog Millionaire); rather, it is better defined as realism overlaid with optimism, and one doesn’t need to spend much time in his presence to see that this reflects the nature of the director himself.
“Danny is a very earnest man in the sense that he cares deeply about social issues, but he is never dour, never pessimistic,” says Tessa Ross, of Film4, the British company that developed Slumdog Millionaire. “What he wants to do is inspire people, and the way he does that is by portraying the truth but with adrenaline—because he himself is optimistic.” It is perhaps no surprise that in his youth Boyle was, he cracks, “a punk, but a cheerful punk. A bright, shining punk!”
Aside from the vivid bolts of pleasure, it is the immersive nature of the best of Boyle’s work, with its dazzling technical set pieces, sensitive music, coach online store, that makes it truly stand out. One thinks of the jaw--dropping scene in 1996’s Trainspotting—a cult British hit that made stars out of both Boyle and Ewan McGregor and was credited with resuscitating the British film industry—in which McGregor’s heroin overdose is represented by the actor apparently sinking into a hole in the floor, to a biting sound track of Lou Reed singing “Perfect Day.” shoescircleling www.askbag.com
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