Cool.  Panicked.  Intense.  Desperate.  Alive.  Sensitive?  One doesn’t think of British director Danny Boyle when imagining a small, hushed story of a boy coming to terms with the loss of a parent under the watchful eye of the Catholic saints in the whimsical new comedy Millions.  Mr. Boyle, who has rocked us with the seductive undertow of greed (Shallow Grave), the shuddering plateaus and pitfalls of drugs (Trainspotting) and the primal paranoia of zombies—and man—run amuck (28 Days Later), knows a thing or two about moving our adrenaline.  But with Millions, the tale of an eccentric motherless boy who reluctantly happens upon a hefty suitcase of cash, Boyle tries something new: tickling the funny bone enroute to the heart. 

Lee Shoquist, ReelMovieCritic.com:  I was quite taken aback by Millions.  Actually, I’m always taken aback by your films but in a different way.  I didn’t expect this film from you.  I kept waiting for something violent or crazy to happen, and didn’t.   

Danny Boyle:  This was a real surprise!  The main thing you feel, and this will sound even more perverse, is the weird thing that you feel when you’re making films—you always worry that you’re making the same ones over and over again.  I’m not quite sure why that is.  In this case I suppose because it’s got a bag of money in it—like Shallow Grave.  So in fact you feel the opposite when you see this one.  But I suppose the tone of it, yeah, is heartwarming or generous really. 

I wanted the film to feel generous about lots of things; obviously the idea about the kid and the money.  But I grew up in the northwest of England, and although I appreciate the way it’s portrayed in certain classic films in the 60s, it’s not something that I kind of share, really.  I’ve always felt it should be portrayed much more like I experienced it; It’s a very vivid place. 

LS:  So when you say it’s portrayed- are you talking about the “kitchen sink” films of that era? 

DB:  Yes.  They were fantastic, but they’ve become a kind of albatross around its neck.  And every film about it has to be like that.  It’s grim, and…

LS:  Like a Ken Loach film.

DB:  He’s a genius filmmaker.  But I’ve also felt it should also be portrayed- just the life of the place, really.  If you look at the music that the northwest has produced in the last twenty or thirty years, there’s virtually nowhere on the planet that kind of comes near it.  There’s a great film that covered that, 24 Hour Party People, that was written by the same guy who wrote this.  So I wanted the film to look like that.  So the film, although it’s set at Christmastime, looks like the Mediterranean.  The skies are blue, the colors are popping and it’s the way the kid sees the world.  The way he sees himself.  

LS:  When you talk about this idea of a kid’s perspective on the film, I guess Millions is a film that deals with children, but to my eye, it’s not a “children’s film,” really. 

DB:  Yes, it’s not ‘knockabout.’  If you want to make a kids’ film, and I’ve watched a lot of them—I’ve brought up three kids so I’ve sat in the movies and watched endless… It’s not knockabout enough for that, really.  It’s a bit more mature, although it’s not trying to make them too mature.  It’s actually quite sophisticated about being a kid. 

There’s a great quote that I had in my mind all the way through it, which is from the great writer, Graham Greene.  He said there’s a moment in childhood where a door opens onto adult life.   You can never close it.  I always thought of the film as looking back through that doorway.  I think that’s how kids often work in adult’s movies—we’re looking back at ourselves and what we’ve made of ourselves, from where we came, all of those kind of feelings.  Yet I didn’t want it to be a period film.  I didn’t want to get locked into that period feeling in the northwest.  It’s not autobiographical, in that sense, although I was brought up a very strict Catholic like he obviously has been and my kind of iconography of that age were statutes all around the house and that sort of thing.

LS:  So it actually is autobiographical in some senses. 

DB:  Yes, it was one of the things that attracted me to it at first.  There were so many connections that I had.  And it’s sort of a letter of love really to my mom and dad, because I was a very imaginative kid and it’s really that which got me out of my background really.  I come from a background which wouldn’t normally produce filmmakers.  It was that imagination that got me out of there.  I’ve always been grateful to it and I’ve always tried to remain loyal to it.  We had tagline for the film at one point which was on the poster.  It was a picture of a kid and a donkey and it was, ‘Keep it unreal.’  That was the tagline.  I always cherished that because I think there’s as much to learn from that as from realism or documentarism or whatever.

LS:  There’s something I can always recognize in your films and I’m not sure how I can say this.  It’s a sort of technical control or specific precision.  I would call them director’s films from a technical standpoint.  Maybe that’s what you’re getting at when you say you almost make the same film every time.  You seem to be, even in this very gentle movie, in a remarkable control.  Can you talk about your hand in the technical construction of your movies?  

DB:   I started work in the theater.  In a funny kind of way I feel there’s more connection with film than there first appears.  In theater you’re trapped, and you can’t keep cutting like you do in film.  The way I used to do it is you have to make big, bold statements, because you only get to change it three or four times in an evening.  So each scene had to be a very vivid picture. 

I’ve always worked that way through the films as well.  We create this book of photographs on each film so that we have a visual picture to work with as well as the script, because often communication on a film is extraordinary in how inaccurate it is.  You are constantly chasing your tail because you’re saying things to people and they get the wrong idea.  So we have this book of pictures, and I try to make sure that we’re all working very visually as much as possible—that it’s a very strong component in the film.  I think that British films tend to be the opposite.  They tend to be literary-based. 

LS:  Like a Mike Leigh film?

DB:  Lots of films, really.  Although he, really, it’s a shame he doesn’t do other films other than the ones he does, because I think as a director he has a real eye.  You don’t get much chance to experience it in his films, really, because his focus is very different.  But the focus of these films is to create something that will transfix you.  The whole idea, and I always try and start with something that’s going to kind of declare the ambition of the film visually, so it’s just something that actually says there’s going to be plenty to look at here, and try and catch people in the headlights of the film and just hold them there for a time.  I don’t want people objective about the films.  I don’t want them to kind of sit back and be objective.  I want them to feel that they are ‘there.’  That’s what I always say to the actors and that’s what I’m after in the acting style.  I’m not really after cool, iconic acting; being defensive or cool or whatever. 

LS:  It’s shrewd the way you’ve bridged this gap between the art film and the commercial film, and they’ve become internationally popular.

DB:  Try to!  That’s always been one of my ambitions, to kind of ride those two horses a bit, really.  Right from the beginning, my idea has always been to try and make popular films.  They’ve got to be as interesting as possible.  But the idea never has been to exclude anyone from the films, even though people find that funny because you think lots of people are excluded from ever appreciating something like Trainspotting or 28 Days Later.  

I didn’t want to make intellectual, high-art films.  The idea was to have a thrust, a drive, an energy in them that could connect with the mainstream.  But having said that, they are on the fringes of the mainstream and never right down the center of the mainstream.  That’s the idea.  I’m sure it’s partly to do with truthfulness and honesty and the way you work, rather than following fashion.