When you’ve been away, you see difficulty. Just difficulty. People who are dealing with things that are really hard. And then it’s back in London and… it’s kind of basic, the idea. It’s very trite in a way, but that’s where it came from.
Was “The Beach,” in some ways, was your film school?
Definitely not. I didn’t go to film school. “The Beach” was not my film school because I was not involved in making that film.
I simply observed it, and really, observed it from a distance. I had three points of contact with it. I wrote a script, I visited the set in Thailand before principal photography. Then, towards the very end of the edit process, when the film was effectively locked, I then saw it. That’s not participation, by any means.
But the rest of your films, where you were much more participant, no?
Oh yeah, way more. It’s a whole polar opposite. Then I’m a novelist that gets into making films, and arrive with a kind of novelist sensibility. As much as I can see what I consider to be an important role that a writer does, and some of the themes, the characters. I arrive in it in a slightly anti-auteur theory state, I guess.
“It would be completely wrong for me to either state or discreetly imply that the issues in ‘Sunshine’ that exist rest at Danny’s feet. That’s not how I see it.”
Putting all that stuff aside, the film school thing, which is way more interesting, anyway, begins for me and continues with this guy, Andrew Macdonald, who is the producer I work with. He produced “The Beach” too, but I was personally only involved with the next six movies including “Dredd” and “Ex Machina.”
Andrew was a line producer before he was a regular producer. So he understands what every single person does on the set. It still amazes me how many people work in film, but do not understand how a set functions. What Andrew did is he taught me how films are made on a practical level. There would be someone standing there, and I would be thinking, “What is that person doing? I don’t understand,” and he would explain it. A writer’s principal relationship, in may respects, is with a producer, because they often start the project.
It was often a combative relationship, but it was a hell of a learning curve. In truth, it doesn’t stop. I just was in a breakfast meeting with Andrew this morning. And he was still saying stuff about film, and I was sort of thinking, “I need to remember that. Okay, that’s good to know.” That was the start of film school, and film school categorically hasn’t stopped.
What’s your relationship with the past films? How do you feel about them?
Ambivalent.
Really? How so?
On all of them, what I can do is point to something — and this is a personal thing — that’s a massive compromise. That’s what I can do.
How do you feel about the end of “Sunshine”? Because I know a lot of people have problems with that film.
I do, yeah.
Is that a writing compromise, or—
No, it’s holistic. Sometimes when I’m talking about collaboration with collaborators before we work together, I say, “Don’t get this wrong.” When I say collaboration, I’m not saying you’re going to do it all, I’m saying we’re going to collaborate. It will be a partnership, and that’s the beauty of the collaboration. They make it better, and ideally, you also help in making it better. It’s people working together, not working totally separately.
That’s also true when things go wrong. When things are elevated, it’s because of a group of people working together, and when things start to fall down, it’s for the same reason. What I can see in “Sunshine,” is I can see unresolved tensions. I can see different movies being made simultaneously. And I can see things that simply could have … It’s so dangerous for me to talk about this.
Then I guess I have to ask you, because you haven’t mentioned his name: Danny Boyle. You guys have made some great films together and I would love to see you make more.
I don’t think we will.
Really?
No. But I learned an enormous amount from Danny and I respect him hugely. He’s a real director. He’s a real film director. Not all directors are real film directors. He is. He has stunning strengths and abilities. We’re not always completely compatible, because ultimately, what I want to do is put an agenda first. Everything is in service of an agenda. And Danny has a terrific instinct toward viscerality and compulsion.
Of course, viscerality and compulsion, if you’re making ‘28 Days,’ then you’re both in a perfect sync and perfectly riffing off each other as collaborators. “Sunshine,” in my mind, was closer to “Ex Machina,” tonally in it had a more reflective quality.
“If I was being very honest about it, ’28 Days Later’ was a reaction to “’The Beach’ in some ways because I felt it lacked aggression.”
Ok, I see then where you might be at odds.
And sometimes viscerality and reflection were fighting for space on that movie. It was like a balance issue. But what I really want to underscore strongly, is the most significant failings in “Sunshine,” from my point of view, were not in Danny’s direction, they were in the script. They predated the shoot or editing, and what we were never able to do was to fix the problems in the script. Because we had a different methodology in terms of how that fix might happen. And, it would be completely wrong for me to either state or discreetly imply that the issues in “Sunshine” that exist rest at Danny’s feet. That’s not how I see it. The difficulty was more in agreeing on what the problem was, but disagreeing on the solution.
Well, if you’re talking about reflective qualities, you certainly had that in “Never Let Me Go” which is very plaintive and introspective. How do you feel about that movie?
I think it’s the only auteur movie I’ve ever worked on, actually. If we’re going to talk about auteurism, the only one I can make a case for is “Never Let Me Go,” and the auteur is the author Kazuo Ishiguro, the novelist. I think if you’re going to talk about auteurism, I think what you need to talk about is one person’s sensibility permeating everything. Sensibility that permeates everything is categorically Ishiguro. We had the book, we’d return to the book, we’d have questions, I’d telephone him from the set. I’d call him up and say, “Here’s the thing, we’ve got these options. What do you think.” The palette comes from him, the tone and the themes come from him.
Talk about educational, because look at the failings of “Sunshine.” If I’m going to define what the failings of “Sunshine” are, what I’m going to say is this: it lost track with itself. It veered away sometimes. It had a meaning, and it had an argument, and it would separate from that to create a quick sort of hit of something. Then it would try to pull itself back. The more it tried to do that, the more the elastic started to stretch.
OK, I can see that.
I look at “Never Let Me Go,” now look at what this guy’s done. It’s got a story, its got feeling, it’s got an argument, it’s got a thesis. And however many times I pick that thing up and I turn it, and I say, “Why does this character exist? Why is the scene going? How does the scene inform the themes?” It stands up every single time. It starts to kind of blow my mind at a certain point. Because I’m getting an object lesson in the kind of writing that I have failed to do. I like viscerality. I try to be visceral. I think it’s a good thing, but I haven’t done anything as capable as what this Ishiguro’s done. I find that really fascinating because I’ve got enough technical knowledge to understand what he’s doing and also see what I’m not doing.
But you weren’t entirely happy with it?
In the end, if we’re going to talk about that funny compromise thing, what I get is a film that takes that lesson on, tries hard to learn it, execute it, and is faithful to the author’s vision in some fundamental ways, but is also bound by it. The thing that I see in “Never Let Me Go” is this kind of monotone, this oppressive monotone. And in a funny kind of way, a lack of cinema sometimes. And a lack of the viscerality that I actually, in truth, love as much as Danny. The reason I love Danny is because I love the visceral.
Being faithful to the text is not always enough.
Certainly, yeah. I think I was over-awed by it. I was so stunned by what [Ishiguro had] done that I was then locked within it, because I thought, “I can’t unpick this, because the house of cards would collapse.” It’s not my construction, it’s his.
I worked hard on that movie, I worked as a filmmaker. But I didn’t really work on it as writer, he was the writer. I was like a translator. It was Greek to English or something. I don’t know. The writing was almost a technical exercise. The other stuff was the filmmaking. There’s a huge lesson in the object lesson, but also at the end, thinking…I knew there should be move violence, whether it’s—I don’t necessarily mean physical. It just needed more fucking agitation. Just agitation. Mixing it up a bit more. I knew it, but …
So “Never Let Me Go” and “Dredd,” you were more involved in those than the others?
Yes. After “Sunshine,” I did think to myself, “I can’t work exactly like this again.” I love Danny. I actually loved the film. Whatever I say about “Sunshine,” and its problems. I actually loved “Sunshine.” In fact, I love all these films.
But you’re ambivalent about them as well.
Yeah, you can be ambivalent and love them. Actually, often, it’s the flaws that you feel most bonded to in some strange way. Because of what was involved in them. But I did think, “I can’t be in a position again, where if there’s something I feel very strongly about, I can’t … I can’t have … [long pause]”
Control?
No. It’s not exactly control. It’s not control, because you never fully— control implies something total. It’s not total, it’s influence. And of course, I always had influence with Danny, because Danny’s very open. Danny doesn’t close people out, but if something was happening that I felt really strongly shouldn’t happen, I needed to be able to stop it. That’s really what I’m saying.
“I talk about the sequels, but the reality of making them … If I ever actually entertained that, I’d feel like I was falling off a cliff.”
So is that the impetus for you directing?
No, because that situation existed on “Never Let Me Go” and “Dredd.” That was a product of a conversation between me and Andrew saying we need to restructure a theoretical way of how we’re making these films. We looked at television, that’s basically what we did. We looked at American television as a discussion point. To a film guy, like you, that’s going to sound like an attack on directors. Maybe. To some it is.
No. I think your thoughts on auteur theory are refreshing, personally. It’s a collaborative medium after all.
Well, that’s good to hear. I know sometimes that I’m sitting opposite of people when I’m talking about it and I can feel how strongly they disagree with me, but they’re too polite, maybe, to express it. Again, the key to this is that these are new auteur positions. It’s not to remove the importance of the director. It’s not to say the director is of no importance. It’s just to re-calibrate it so that we’re all writer, producer, director, director of photography, with strong voices working together. We’re not going to affect a belief in the pyramid structure, which anyway, doesn’t actually exist.
Because a huge amount of effort gets involved in the pretense of something that isn’t even there. You suddenly discover a quarter of your day is involved in a bit of… sort of like play acting. It’s a head fuck and a waste of time.