James Mottram
Adapted from Irvine Welsh’s cult novel, Trainspotting, Danny Boyle’s hyper-kinetic look at a bunch of seedy junkies in cold, dank Edinburgh was one of the flashpoint cult hits of the nineties, its hipster status only second to the cooler-than-thou films of Quentin Tarantino. And while Welsh penned a sequel, Porno, in 2002, the big screen follow-up has remained in limbo, partially due to the long simmering discord between the original film’s star, Ewan McGregor, and Danny Boyle. Once drum-tight friends and collaborators (they also teamed on 1994’s Shallow Grave and 1997’s A Life Less Ordinary), the pair fell out when Boyle replaced McGregor with Leonardo DiCaprio for his 2000 adaptation of Alex Garland’s novel, The Beach. “You just don’t treat your friends like that,” McGregor told The Time. “They absolutely made me think that I was playing the character in The Beach, but they were just keeping me there in case Leonardo pulled out, which is really nasty. And then afterwards, I just didn’t hear from Danny for years. When he told me, he was very conflicted and he was very upset, and I spent a lot of time making him feel better and saying, ‘No, it’s alright, I understand’. And when I went home, I thought, ‘Fuck! That doesn’t feel very nice.’ And my wife was furious.”
The pair, however, have worked through their differences, and Danny Boyle now has the job of following up one of the most seminal and groundbreaking British films of all time. “You don’t design any of those things; they’re outside your power,” the director says of the original film’s cultural importance. “It’s wonderful when it does happen, and it’s a shame that it doesn’t happen with all of your films. You have to be grateful, but you can’t let it affect you. It wasn’t so much the success of it…it’s more about people’s connection with it. People remember the names of the characters. With most movies, unless it’s titular like this, you never remember the names of the characters. You remember that Tom Cruise played it, or that was Meryl Streep’s part, but you don’t remember that they were called Jane or whatever. Everybody remembers their names in Trainspotting. You talk to people on the street, and they know Renton and Sick Boy. It’s a great one to go back to. It’s a task, and a big challenge, because there could be lots of potential disappointment.”
The follow-up’s themes will remain tied to those of the first film. “It’s about friendship,” Boyle tells FilmInk, while doing press for his latest movie, Steve Jobs. “It’s twenty years later, so they all look a bit different. There’s a physical manifestation of ageing on the screen.” And who will be back, looking considerably older on screen? “All of the cast is returning,” Boyle replies, before sighing about the difficulty of bringing in now highly in-demand performers like Ewan McGregor, Robert Carlyle, Kelly Macdonald, Ewen Bremner, and Jonny Lee Miller. “It’s very difficult…that’s the only problem at the moment, trying to work all of that out. But we’ve got a script, which solves half the problems, because that’s tangible, and you can actually go, ‘We’ll do that scene then, then, and then.’ We had a read-through of it about eight weeks ago in London. We got them all together and they came and had a read through. And they’re all on top of it; character-wise, they’re still those guys. It was amazing hearing them around a table in a room like this. And it’s a lovely script.”
And what will this highly anticipated sequel actually be called? Porno or Trainspotting 2? “There are a few rights issues with that title that we have to resolve,” Danny Boyle smiles. “I’ll have to let you know…”
