Danny Boyle Quotes - Page 2

I haven't got anything against films that are about the minutia of relationships or customs, but I love extremes.

You can do anything you like - really - but this Sci-Fi is absolutely disciplined, it's Zen, you have to be absolutely focused in an area. You have to zone into an area and you then you can achieve when you get there. It's really weird!

The awards season gives a chance for independent films to have a bit of longevity in the press and the media.

The perfect equation is form equals content. The style of the film reflects the story, and that's what you're always aiming for. You're not always necessarily successful at it, but that's the ambition that you're trying to do.

Once, a French journalist told me that all my films are the same. I said, 'Excuse me? I work hard to make them different.' What she meant was that in my films there is a character that faces insurmountable odds, and they overcome them. But I thought that might be true, but you need certain factors for drama, and you need to overcome them.

I've just been to the Taj Mahal which I'd never been to and I'm not a very romantic kind of guy but it is the most romantic thing I've ever seen.

There's lots of things that can be solved with cash. And there's occasional things that can't be solved with cash, which become a bureaucratic nightmare for some reason, and there's no distinction between the two. There's no way of reading a situation and saying, "Yes, that'll be a bureaucratic nightmare, but that one we'll be able to buy off." It just depends on the day, apparently.

Most films that I do, whether successful or not, just fade away. They have their moment in the sun, then they are gone. 'Trainspotting' did not, and especially with journalists. So whenever I launched a new film, I'd end up talking about 'Trainspotting.'

There's lots of things that can be solved with cash. And there's occasional things that can't be solved with cash, which become a bureaucratic nightmare for some reason, and there's no distinction between the two.

The most extraordinary thing, you'd be given permission for, and then the weirdest, simplest things, you just wouldn't be able to obtain permissions. And it would go on and on and on forever and ever, and there was no way to know. You have to kind of approach it with an open, quite optimistic mind, no matter what's thrown at you, because it will only ever result in damaging the film if you let any kind of despondency get to you.

I find it difficult enough being called "Mr. Boyle," which as I age I'm increasingly called.

Film industry is a pretty brutal business. If you fall too far behind, all of the perfectionism in the world won't save you.

It just seduces you when you read a story and your brain relates to it. You recognize or connect with it. You identify with it; you're bound to.

Everybody expects you to be qualified to talk about your films, but in a way, you're the least qualified person to talk about them. When you're finished, you don't watch them at all.

Your first film is always your best film, in a way. There's something about your first film that you never ever get back to, but you should always try. It's that slight sense of not knowing what you're doing, because the technical skills you learn - especially if you have a film that works, that has some kind of success - are beguiling. The temptation is to use them again, and they're not necessarily good storytelling techniques.

Everybody knows Aaron Sorkin's scripts. There's a huge amount of lines. There's a huge amount of interchange. You gotta do a lot of learning to be able to get it up to pace.

I'm always after putting people in extreme circumstances. I'm always after not knowing what I'm doing in those extreme circumstances.

To force yourself out of the comfort zone, the main ingredient is trying to work in a world where you haven't been before, that you don't know the rules of. And that involves a lot of research, so you begin to see where the other people have been, but you are starting from as vulnerable and as low a point as possible.

You use elements of noir, but you don't want it to be too noir-ish. You don't want it to be advertised as though you're asking people to go and watch an updated noir. I don't think they'll go do that. They want to see a modern story.

I have a philosophy, a belief, which I can see in many, many other directors that your early work is your best work, because you don't know what you're doing.

Events in the present can trigger quite a young part of ourselves. If we don't take responsibility and start looking after that young part of ourselves, we can start asking partners to look after that part of ourselves or we wound ourselves.

When you have children your own hypocrisy becomes more apparent because you're telling them how to behave, and you're not behaving like that yourself. So it obliges one to really go in and try to look at why there is a huge gulf between how one knows one wants to behave and how one actually does behave.

Normally, I'm a very controlling director. Directors are controlling. It's part of the job, but there's various degrees of it and the constructs I normally work on are very controlling constructs.

You live your life and it ends quite quickly and all you can do with it is pass it on decently to someone else. Whether directly or indirectly, behave decently to other people.

There are three huge, titanic, space movies which if you ever make a film [about space] you cannot avoid. You may want to avoid them but you cannot. I've never known a genre like it where you are dictated to by these films, 2001, Alien, and Tarkovsky's Solaris.