Firstly, what does auteur theory mean?

Firstly, what does auteur theory mean? It compares the film director to the author of a book, it attributes artistic control to the director and proposes that the film is the artistic project of the director primarily. His or her vision, creativity, and design determine the end result, the finished film. Basically, it means that if the director is an auteur, the film will be completely their ideas and visions and they have complete control of it. I believe Danny Boyle uses this control to make his films.

Danny Boyle was born in Manchester in 1956. He started a career in theatre at the age of 18 and by the time he left the Royal Court Theatre in 1987 he was the deputy director. He also did some television direction in the 80s including Mr Wroe’s Virgins and episodes of Inspector Morse.

Shallow Grave, released in 1994, was Danny Boyle’s first film. It took 30 days to film and had a budget of £1,000,000. £150,000 was from Glasgow Film Fund and the remaining £850,000 came from Channel Four. Although the film was set in Edinburgh, the money from Glasgow meant that a lot of the film was made there. The film’s scriptwriter John Hodge was very clear minded about how to get the film made for “virtually nothing”, for instance the majority of the film is filmed inside a flat. Danny Boyle said the film has “fascinating character development” but not in the “traditional” way because “audiences are not there primarily to watch a character being drawn...they want the excitement and speed of the journey that cinema can provide”. He described the film as “intelligent entertainment”, meaning that it doesn’t patronise audiences and there’s an agenda behind the film if they want to look for one. He, John Hodge and producer Andrew MacDonald all wanted the film to be a partnership of 3 performers. They didn’t approach one major star because they thought the audiences would all be concentrating on that one person. To prepare for the film, Boyle lived in a flat for a week with the three actors.

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Trainspotting, released in 1996, was the second film from the team of Danny Boyle, Andrew MacDonald and John Hodge. The screenplay was adapted from the Irvine Welsh novel of the same name. John Hodge took some persuading to make the film – he described the novel as having “no story” and Welsh’s prose as “dialogue-driven”. Again, it took 30 days to shoot. The film cost £1.6 million, financed by Channel 4 who was able to pre-sell it on the back of the success of Shallow Grave. The film went on to take £13 million worldwide and is the second highest grossing British film of all time – after Four Weddings and a Funeral. Danny Boyle thoroughly researched heroin addiction for the film – he met a lot of addicts and got them to talk to the actors and held “cookery classes” where the actors learnt how to cook up. Ewan McGregor also read all the books he could find on the subject. Ewan McGregor was the only advance casting the team made – all the other actors had to audition. Robert Carlyle expects to play the lead in a film but he accepted playing a part under McGregor so the team “knew [they] were getting thoroughbreds all the way down”. The film was criticised for its “neutral attitude” to drugs but Boyle said that patronising and preaching to today’s youth was pointless and in today’s culture you need to speak directly to them. So, the film shows the dangers drugs can provide but also the pleasures. Danny Boyle used the soundtrack in this film to move the narrative along quickly – it moves through time, but also to attract audiences.

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The team rejected Alien 4 in 1997 to make A Life Less Ordinary. Danny Boyle said of the Alien film “I don’t do storyboards”. He was worried he would not have the creative freedom he liked and he would become swamped in high pressure film-making. The film was bigger than their previous two – it took 50 days to shoot and had a budget of £7.5 million, financed by Twentieth Century Fox. Despite this and the fact it was a romantic comedy shot in Utah, Danny Boyle still considers it a British film, albeit partly so. He said he wanted to combine the two cultures as much as possible but the film wasn’t developed in America, was made by the three of them and starred Ewan McGregor. He shot the film in America and brought it home to edit. The film uses the same surrealism that sometimes appears in Trainspotting.

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The Beach, released in 2000, was the first film made by the team that didn’t star Ewan McGregor. It is a Hollywood film with a budget of £25 million financed by Twenty-first Century Fox. Before the team even approached the studio, they bought the rights to the book, adapted the screenplay and travelled to Thailand to research so that when they did contact the studio, they had a script, photos of locations and knew what the budget would need to be. In Alex Garland’s original book, Leonardo DiCaprio’s character Richard is English. Boyle felt this would not have worldwide appeal so he chose to make him American and chose Leo to play him. In the film, Richard lies to his girlfriend about sleeping with another woman and later splits up with her. The studio tried to get Boyle to change these things but he retained his creative control. This film is a perfect example of how he lures audiences into his films then shocks them. This film has all elements to make a film popular – big Hollywood star, soundtrack, adventure, romance – but the story soon changes to a much darker one than an average Hollywood blockbuster. There were reports of Boyle being disrespectful to Thailand authorities and damaging land but he made every effort not to and he is proud of his end result, as this quote shows.

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