That survival instinct, that will to live, that need to get back to life again, is more powerful than any consideration of taste, decency, politeness, manners, civility. Anything. It's such a powerful force.
Danny Boyle
It's a good place when all you have is hope and not expectations.
To be a film-maker, you have to lead. You have to be psychotic in your desire to do something. People always like the easy route. You have to push very hard to get something unusual, something different.
You can't tell someone they are wrong about their own life.
I mean suspense, twists are almost impossible these days.
Although computer chips now are thinner, they're more powerful, they're not as reliable. You'd harvest computer chips from the 1980s from all around the world because they're reliable.
If you take a loud pride in anything, people will rightly shoot you down.
I don't want people to sit there and objectively watch the film. I want them to experience it as something that's under their skin, so you try to make the films really tactile.
I want people to leave the cinema feeling that something's been confirmed for them about life.
I grew up in a city, I'm a city person - I go on holiday and I'm bored.
I'm not a 'Star Wars' geek.
The great thing with film is that it doesn't have an ego. It's just a film. Everybody that makes them has an ego, and the problem with awards and stuff like that is that it always affects the egos, and everyone gets stained by it in some way. And that can be fine and very innocent, but it can be horrible as well.
You experience the films through the actors, so they're all locked into your imagination in some kind of layer of fantasy or hatred or wherever they settle into your imagination.
I'm a big sports fan. Football. Cricket.
Some of us are interested in directors, but really the vast majority of us are interested in actors. You experience the films through the actors, so they're all locked into your imagination in some kind of layer of fantasy or hatred or wherever they settle into your imagination.
I tend to score with songs from Western pop music.
I like action movies, even though I think action movies are kind of derided now. But there is something extraordinary about action movies, which is absolutely linked to the invention of cinema and what cinema is and why we love it.
Always changing genres, making very different films is a good idea. It's a way of making yourself feel vulnerable again, getting back to that innocence. As is working within a circumspect budget.
Brian Cox is the nicest guy, but he's so arrogant.
I made this film 'The Beach,' which didn't take place in a city, and it didn't really suit me.
It's not so much what you learn about Mumbai, it's what you learn about yourself, really. It's a funny old hippie thing, but it's true as well. You find out a lot about yourself and your tolerance, and about your inclusiveness.
Both of my sisters have been teachers and they used to say you get asked between 300 and 600 questions every day which you have to answer. That's exactly what directing is. And the vast majority of those questions are not very interesting really, but they need somebody to make a decision - a good one or a bad one - and they follow it.
It's easy to like the most popular films, but I have a great fondness for 'A Life Less Ordinary'.
I find that people find a way out of misery through humor and it's humor that's often unacceptable to people who are not in quite such a state of misery.
For us, destiny always feels... if you obey, it's almost a passive thing.
Although I behave in a quite reserved way in my personal life, give me a stage and I'll be as flamboyant as I can.
As soon as you think you can do whatever you want and you have whatever great professional in the world waiting to work with you, then you are sunk.
When they're good, there is nothing like a big film.
The problem with being British... I don't know if it's me being British or being raised a strict Catholic, but you never really enjoy success.
The sun is the most important thing in everybody's life, whether you're a plant, an animal or a fish, and we take it for granted.
You can have great sequences with music, but if you don't have the acting you're bored after 15 minutes. Or not bored, but you're like, 'So what?'
I love that sense of change that you'd get in pop music every three minutes, every four minutes.
I've never done a film before where every single person in the audience knows the ending. I mean suspense, twists are almost impossible these days. People are blogging your endings from their cinema seats.
I was brought up a very strict Catholic and I don't practice anymore or anything.
Actors are steeped in a world of agents and where the next job is coming from and what are their expenses and what is the hotel like. You want to take them out of that world and dump them into another world, so that when you meet them on the screen they don't seem like the guy who was in two others movies that year.
If you love a book you tend not to follow its surface value, you follow the other things in it.
I haven't got anything against films that are about the minutia of relationships or customs, but I love extremes.
One of Dickens' biggest influences was the growth of London as a Victorian city, and the extremes being created as it expanded.
I learned with 'The Beach' that I'm a bit better lower down the radar.
Celluloid will be the next decade's black and white.
I love huge movies. Not sure I am the guy to make them, but you can rely on me being there watching them.
I've always wanted to do a space movie.
I kind of call myself an atheist, I suppose - although quite a spiritual atheist, I hope.
My dad was a labourer and my mum had exactly the same job as Noel Gallagher's mum - she was a dinner lady at our local school. Everyone comes over from Ireland and they get the same jobs.
I've sort of escaped my background, as people often do, through art and culture.
I don't want to make pompous, serious films; I like films that have a kind of vivacity about them.
I like films that have a kind of vivacity about them.
I am a sci-fi fan.
Actors want to impress at the beginning, so you take advantage of that by suddenly saying, 'Right, you're here for two weeks.' What you're doing is creating a siege mentality.
I trained in the theatre.
