Danny Boyle Quotes

It's a good place when all you have is hope and not expectations.

To create the reality of space with this sense of suspension: nothing's happening, it's endless; we're traveling at 28,000 kilometers an hour but nothing's happening. Nothing! And you have to do that! There are all these rules you have to follow, I've never known anything like it.

Celluloid will be the next decade's black and white.

Even though one of them is about an Edinburgh junkie and ones a little boy of eight in Manchester, you want them to always portray their world in such a vivid way that the audience can disappear inside the story.

If you love a book you tend not to follow its surface value, you follow the other things in it.

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.

You use elements of noir, but you don't want it to be too noir-ish. You don't want it to be advertised as though you're asking people to go and watch an updated noir. I don't think they'll go do that. They want to see a modern story.

Film industry is a pretty brutal business. If you fall too far behind, all of the perfectionism in the world won't save you.

I've just been to the Taj Mahal which I'd never been to and I'm not a very romantic kind of guy but it is the most romantic thing I've ever seen.

I'd love to do a modern-day musical that's full of original music. To get your contemporaries to sing and dance without looking foolish and for it to be transformational and magical and all those things a musical is supposed to be.

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.

I kind of call myself an atheist, I suppose - although quite a spiritual atheist, I hope.

The most important thing about Olympics, of course, is the games and not the opening ceremony. It's weird the way it gets inverted sometimes.

I want people to leave the cinema feeling that something's been confirmed for them about life.

I tend to score with songs from Western pop music.

I think women assess time passage much better than men - because of their biological clocks - and they are much more realistic about measuring out time, whereas men tend to hang onto things. Women acknowledge the biology of their time, and dance through the beat of that drum...whereas men just drum.

A lot of film directors are quite scared of actors. They are a bit of a nightmare sometimes, but I like them. It looks like cunning, but you try to get extra things from them all the time, by stealth, by making them feel confident, so they trust you and you can push a bit.

Brian Cox is the nicest guy, but he's so arrogant.

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.

There are three huge, titanic, space movies which if you ever make a film [about space] you cannot avoid. You may want to avoid them but you cannot. I've never known a genre like it where you are dictated to by these films, 2001, Alien, and Tarkovsky's Solaris.

I haven't got anything against films that are about the minutia of relationships or customs, but I love extremes.

If you take a loud pride in anything, people will rightly shoot you down.

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 find my own pain and others' difficult to tolerate, so I always want to try to shift things so they'll be better. But in doing that, if I am coming from a place of ego, I often cause harm. So it's a struggle for me to set my ego outside and find a softer and more compassionate way of approaching things.

I'd love to do a cop film in America. That's a genre I absolutely adore.

Normally, I'm a very controlling director. Directors are controlling. It's part of the job, but there's various degrees of it and the constructs I normally work on are very controlling constructs.

The great thing about space films generally, with the exception of Apollo 13, is that big stars tend not to work in space and I think that's because space is an equaliser. It makes everyone the same really and suits an ensemble cast and actors who are prepared to work with each other.

Everybody expects you to be qualified to talk about your films, but in a way, you're the least qualified person to talk about them. When you're finished, you don't watch them at all.

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.

If I am acting out in any particular way that is harmful to myself - without a shadow of doubt, there is a feeling suppressed under wanting that second candy bar. Often, it is that little voice I haven't paid attention to. It's generally not the adult voice. If I take a moment to address that and figure out what that is, the desire for the candy bar seems to dissipate.

One of the traditions of film acting is a sort of mumbled realism. Be minimal, and do less. 'Even less than that.'

The individual will to survive is often seen as just that, an individual thing. In fact, it's sort of a gene we all carry and like a network of computers it all contributes in some way to when it's individually needed.

We're trying to learn from [Olympic] Beijing, which could be very intimidating. We've learned to expect it's power, it majesty and that it completes a cycle of certain types of shows... I don't think any nation could do anything on that scale. We haven't got that money, and I don't think anybody would have the appetite for that kind of expenditure and that kind of control, so we're going to try and do something a bit more intimate and try and start again... start a new cycle for these kind of ceremonies.

I always wanted to make this film or another film. I thought the worst thing you could do was to react to Slumdog's success in some way. I thought it would be really foolish.

You can't tell someone they are wrong about their own life.

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.

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.

When you have children your own hypocrisy becomes more apparent because you're telling them how to behave, and you're not behaving like that yourself. So it obliges one to really go in and try to look at why there is a huge gulf between how one knows one wants to behave and how one actually does behave.

Most films that I do, whether successful or not, just fade away. They have their moment in the sun, then they are gone. 'Trainspotting' did not, and especially with journalists. So whenever I launched a new film, I'd end up talking about 'Trainspotting.'

If I was American, I think I'd live in New York, because I like that East Coast mentality. There's nothing wrong with Hollywood. If you want to be a big time filmmaker, you should go to Hollywood.

But interestingly Star City's technology is all 1970s - still. In fact, it's alarming because you think, "You're not going to send someone up into space in something that old, are you?" But it works and it always has worked and it doesn't fail and it's incredibly reliable.

I'm a big sports fan. Football. Cricket.

There is a Steve [Jobs] that Apple would like to actually present to the public. They have a character, Steve, and they want to keep that story going. And it's very important that writers challenge that occasionally and not just trust their parent companies to tell them.

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.

I always felt it is not good if you feel like you would know how to do something. I've made mistakes of telling people: I know how to do this. And it should feel dangerous. That is the only way to stay alert, to keep the adrenaline running.

I'm not a 'Star Wars' geek.

I always think, when there's stuff that people don't like, I always say that if I have another success, I'll enjoy it more, but you don't really.

I don't want to make pompous, serious films.