When Shallow Grave dropped like a bomb from the skies of British filmmaking, it seemed it could only be a matter of time before Hollywood swallowed up its three makers, director Danny Boyle, screenwriter John Hodge and producer Andrew MacDonald. So what did they do next? They made a movie about Scottish heroin addicts.When Shallow Grave opened last year to instant critical raves and subsequently went on to take 13-million pounds worldwide (having cost slightly over 1 million pounds to make), lucrative offers were showered on its creative trio to repeat the performance - in Hollywood. But this was no ordinary triumvirate. They were homegrown Brits of a taciturn nature and shrewd patriotism who decided to let the bright lights of LA do without them for a while. Producer Andrew MacDonald is the man with the plan. A wiry, 29-year-old Glaswegian whose grandfather was screenwriter Emeric Pressburger, MacDonald met 31-year-old John Hodge, also Glasgow-born and then working as a medic, at the Edinburgh Film Festival in 1990. MacDonald encouraged him to write what has since become known as "the one about the flatmates breaking up over money and murder", - Shallow Grave. Experienced 39-year-old Mancunian director Danny Boyle, whose work on stage and TV the duo admired, was brought in as The Third Man - and the team was in place. Shallow Grave proceeded to do for body-disposal thrillers what Reservoir Dogs had done for heist movies. Given a blank cheque after the not-altogether-astonishing success of that film, the hitmakers decided to take on a book generally regarded as unfilmable and which, according to Hodge, the man charged with turning it into a screenplay, had "no story". The book was, of course, Irvine Welsh's 1993 novel Trainspotting, already saddled with the title "cult", but emphatically not about people in anoraks jotting down the numbers of locomotives. But it is about locos. And losers, liars, psychos, wasters, junkies and drop-outs, all set in and around Leith, Scotland. Turn it into a screenplay Hodge most certainly did. And whatever you think of the result - controversial, filthy, arrogant or sad - one thing is for sure: you just have to have seen it. This is the team that has put Britpack cinema back on the map. Here, they describe how the most eagerly awaited follow-up since Pulp Fiction was given the go-ahead after John Hodge had finally set the tone - and done That Toilet Scene In Full. Danny, you said after Shallow Grave that "I hope we can make a second film as good as Pulp Fiction." MacDonald: What he meant was that Tarantino did make a better second film - the idea being that a follow-up album, novel or whatever is always harder. Boyle: Trainspotting was intended to be a more ambituous film than Shallow Grave. It wasn't an easy option. The easy option would have been to make another thriller. Or a Hollywood remake - which was offered. Was that why you decided to stay together? MacDonald: Shallow Grave was such a success it seemed crazy to break it up - our collaboration was a big part of it. We knew we wanted to use as many of the team as possible, from Ewan McGregor - although it could have been the other two Shallow Grave actors - to the main crew, the cameraman, the designer and editor. I suppose the biggest decision was whether or not to try it again, because the minute you have any kind of success, like Danny Cannon [The Young Americans, Judge Dredd] or Paul Anderson [Shopping, Mortal Kombat], you get offered Hollywood movies. Our decision was to stay in Britain, to use our own clout, if you want to call it that, to do something difficult rather than go off and do some big science-fiction film. How did you decide what to do? Boyle: It was always going to be a risk, no matter what we did. But not everybody could have got to make Trainspotting the way we could. We got final cut for the theatrical release. We got to make it our way, provided we made it cheap enough. And we got the rights. MacDonald: In financial terms there was no risk, really. The budget was small [1,6 million pounds]. Channel Four were able to pre-sell it all over the world on the back of Shallow Grave to cover the cost of the film. But the challenge of adapting a book from Danny's and John's point of view was another strong reason. Hodge: It would be selfish indulgence to make a film that can only be watched by the makers and their small coterie of Islington admirers. Boyle: We have been entrusted with a huge amount of money. One and a half-million is more than most people see in their lifetime, and we spent it all in three months! If you want to do something private then write a book. But making films is a public event and people were watching us. Hodge: We were aware of our responsibility to be in a postion to make a third film if this was a success, and were conscious as filmmakers not to squander the opportunity. Wen did you first hear about Trainspotting? MacDonald: I read it on a plane as I was going back home to Scotland for Christmas in 1993. When you fancy yourself as a film producer, the first thing you ask about almost anything you read is, Is there anything in this for our work? Which is a horrible thing about reading. I never was much of a reader, but I find it difficult to read anything now - it's so unenjoyable. I gave it to these guys - "Do you think we could do anything with this?" The idea right from the beginning was to work out a way of doing it that was as amazing in film terms as the book was in book terms. I had no idea how to tell the story or even what the story was. Danny felt the same way I did. John gave his copy of the book to someone else. I knew he liked to, but to convince him to write it into a screenplay was quite a tall order. How did you convince him? MacDonald: Cash. Hodge: When I first read it I didn't think it could be translated into a film - there were so many different characters, it's told in a very strong vernacular language, there's no internal monologue and there's no story. But since these two were so keen I thought I'd give it a go. Macdonald: We started working on it before we evan had the rights, working speculatively. We hadn't taken anybody's money to write a script, so we didn't have to deliver anything. If it hadn't worked out we wouldn't have gone any further. There was a lot of thinking and a lot of putting it off, a lot of other things falling through - it took over a year. But then it went very, very fast. Hodge: Because it was clear that we weren't going to be able to include anything like the whole book in the film, and I wasn't convinced about how well it could be made into a screenplay, I was very keen that the other two should share the burden of deciding which bits should go into the film. We spent a long time discussing the book, arguing over what we liked, what we didn't like, which chapters would and would not translate. That was October 1994. I went away and had a first draft finished by December. MacDonald: John wrote the first 50 pages in November 1994 and once we read those we thought. This is it, he's got the tone right. He'd done the toilet scene. Boyle: I remember reading it on the tube and just roaring with laughter. The feel of the book is surrealisitc and he'd captured it brilliantly. John wrote a second draft over Christmas and that was the one we hawked around. Presumably funding came quite quickly. MacDonald: There were certainly plenty of offers. Money wasn't short because of Shallow Grave - and we could have taken a lot more money from bigger studios. But Channel Four were part of the team. And if you can get the financiers and the marketing people wanting to make the same film as the filmmakers, as we had on both films, you're already streets ahead. Where did you begin to research? Boyle: We went to Leith, outside Edinburgh. Although the book's obviously authentic you automatically want to do your own research. We met a lot of real junkies. That was really, really depressing. Suddenly there didn't seem any real energy to build the film on other than the book. When you meet the real things it's like all the life has been taken away and there's nothing left but victims and you don't want to make a film about victims. It's a debiliating experience rather than something that gives energy and life. But we ended getting in touch with a drug rehabilitation group called Carlton Athletic in Glasgow. They don't take the route of methadone and a reduction programme. They're very anti-methadone, saying it's more addictive and dangerous than heroin. Instead they say you just have to stop, join us and never touch it again. You can smoke and that's it. It's really fanatical and it was amazingly invigorating to meet them and to see them claw their way back into humanity. They'd sit around in these therapy groups which, if it was in California, you'd say, "Wankers, wankers." But these are really heavy, working-class Glasgow guys sitting there talking about what they'd done to their mother and how ashamed thy feel, purging themselves of it and inspiring other people to admit how far they'd gone down. It was suddenly a reason to continue. It gave us something positive to hang on to. They stayed around for the whole time. One guy called Eamon took part in a lot of practical things with us. He held all these cookery classes where the actors learned how to cook up. How was the casting problem solved? MacDonald: We started pre-production in April 1995. The only piece of casting we did in advance was Ewan [McGregor]. He's going to be a big movie star, isn't he? Him I should be staying friendly with. We told him if he lost two stone he cold have the [lead] part [of Renton]. Hodge: We followed him around while he ate his lettuce sandwiches and drank mineral water and told him to get out of the pub whenever we saw him. Boyle: Actually, when you meet the real junkies you find them quite chubby. They come in all shapes and sizes, like the rest of humanity. But you go with the stick thin, artificial version which Ewan achieved since that is the conceived idea of a heroin addict. MacDonald: The key for the rest of the cast was getting Ewen Bremner, who'd played Renton in the stage play. He'd lived with the material for over a year and was in two minds about doing it again. But it was great when he said yes to playing Spud. Boyle: When that happened we knew it was going to happen. People watch actors and they believe them or they don't believe them and that's crucial, that's everything. Bobby Carlyle (who plays Begbie) expects, quite rightly, to carry a film. He wants the lead and we were offering him a part under Ewan McGregor. He accepted, and we knew we were getting thoroughbreds all the way down. Next we got Jonny Lee Miller. We'd heard a lot about him, how he'd just played an American in Hackers and we thought, Who is this guy? He came in and did this amazing Sean Connery accent. Right, that's it, he's Sick Boy. Did you know he's the grandson of Bernard Lee? MacDonald: Not his son, as it says in the production notes. His mum rang up the other day and put us right. Boyle: This beach boy came in to audition in Glasgow - Kevin McKidd [Tommy]. He looked like something off Home and Away via Bondai Beach. We thought, Great - he's the one we want to kill. That innocence - we need to destroy that. We advertised for the girl. She's meant to be 14, so we needed someone with no previous exposure so that no one would twig that a 19-year-old was playing the part. We sent flyers around all the clubs, hairdressers, boutiques and also went up to people on the street and said, "It's yer dream come true. I'm a film director, do you want to be in my new film?" - that kind of thing. Hundreds of them turned up. But as soon as Kelly [MacDonald] sat down I knew it would be her. How did you set about rehearsing? MacDonald: We played a lot of footie. And cooking up with syringes like The Generation Game. Ewen Bremner couldn't play football at all, could he? Some others fancied themselves and were crap as well. Boyle: It's great that, because it breaks down barriers. You play football and everyone starts screaming at each other - "What the fuck are you doing?" then we watched films, like Kathryn Bigelow's vampire film New Dark. Although the book is set in Edinburgh, you shot in Glasgow. Why was that? MacDonald: It was important that it stay very Scottish, but nonetheless it has to be understood by the rest of Britain. So we made it working-class, central-belt Scotland. We set out to create a world that could be anywhere - pubs, estates and dole offices, Glasgow has this huge old cigarette factory in which we built 30 of the 50 locations we needed. The factory's old social club doubles as a pub in the film. Hodge: We were making it accessible to audiences outside Scotland, so there aren't jokes about Hibs in it. MacDonald: The shoot took about seven weeks, beginning in May. The nicest day we had was when we went up to the railway station on the West Highland line, in the middle of nowhere, for Ewan McGregor's Braveheart / Rob Roy/"Fuck-off Scotland" speech. There is nothing else, no road, just the station. It was so quiet. Although we did have Sky TV with us. What sort of problems did you experience during the shoot? Boyle: The script was written in so many little bits that whilst working you lost sight of the overall picture. You put your trust in the script, that the continuity and excitement you felt from reading it was going to reassert itself at some stage once everything was put together again. When the daily rushes came up on cassette and we'd watch them in the hotel room that night, I remember feeling that it was difficult to get a grip on it because it was so fragmentary and there's not much story. Hodge: It was especially difficult for Ewan McGregor since so much of his character is defined by the voiceover. Boyle: You keep thinking something's missing and you realise what it is to work on films like Good Fellas with huge amounts of voiceover. It was a pretty steep learning curve for me, never having done anything like that before. Hodge: Never again. Don't do drugs or voiceovers. Word has it that you are about to do like Danny Cannon and Paul Anderson and go to Hollywood to make a big science-fiction-film - the fourth installment in the Alien franchise, no less. MacDonald: Nothing is definite. We're talking to them, they have an excellent script, but we'll do it our way or not at all. Set in Scotland? Boyle: They're here and they've arrived on earth in Paisley... Hodge: The entire film takes place in some rather stylised house. Four characters - none of whom are aliens. MacDonald: And our fees are 50 million. Vincent Ward's idea [when he was originally set to direct Alien] was Planet Hollywood, which he almost got to make. We're prepared, I suppose. We don't neccessarily want to go over there to make movies. The money is the easy bit. The relationships, like we have here, are the hard part. Although another possibility would be John's script The Life Less Ordinary, about severed heads in swimming pools... |