Danny Boyle hit an all-time high when he directed the Queen in the Olympic opening ceremony. But he’s equally happy with the more run-of-the-mill stars in his latest thriller Trance, he tells Steve Pratt

OSCAR-WINNING director Danny Boyle has made his Bond film and won’t be making another. It would, I suppose, be difficult to top an 007 movie in which Daniel Craig’s Bond girl was the Queen.

But Boyle isn’t about to use that Bond minimovie he made for the London 2012 opening ceremony to sit in the director’s chair on the next movie in the franchise.

“I love watching them, but they’re not my strength really. They’re a much bigger budget and much bigger organisation. It’s much more difficult to get more evangelical with a big organisation like that, which is how those films are made,” he says. “So I’ll carry on watching them is what I’ll do.”

What he likes is making movies developed by his own company (with producer Christian Colson) for under $20m, a price that enables him to keep control over what’s happening.

He never saw staging the Olympic opening ceremony – a global success with audiences and critics alike – as part of any career plan, but acknowledges that it may colour people’s perceptions and opinions of his future work, including his latest film, psychological thriller Trance, starring James McAvoy, Vincent Cassel and Rosario Dawson.

“We always thought of it as a separate thing,” he says – the “we” emphasising the communal nature of his projects which have included such films as Slumdog Millionaire, Trainspotting, Shallow Grave, 28 Days Later and 127 Hours.

“I was really proud to do it,” he says. “We’d set it up in the right way and carried it on in the right way. You have to be very careful in my job – people lead you to believe you can control everything.

You can’t. Eventually you have to let the film go and then critics, fans, audiences assess it.”

The story influences the style, but he insists on certain things. “I like most of the films to be visceral, I like the films to burst in the door at the beginning. You know, there’s no apology for them arriving. It’s like wow, here you go, boom, boom. I don’t want you to do too much work at the beginning because I like to go ‘whoop, this is a film’ and then gradually you’re asked to do a bit more work.

“I try to work in a communal way. I set the story up on a voyage we’re all going on – and I’m evangelical about that. I try to sell the film to people, I ask them to take less money than they might be able to get elsewhere. I tell them how much the film is costing and that I want to keep it below that.

“Because then we keep control of its deviousness, the risks it takes with storytelling, either with character – like in Trance where people turn out to be not what they seem and it’s difficult to pick the character that classically you should root for. That is a classic studio totem that there must be somebody to root for.

“I’m evangelical about setting up the project originally and that’s something I’ve tried to do in all of the films I do.”

So do the above rules apply when directing the Queen in that Bond mini-movie shot for the opening of the Olympics? “I said yeah, we’re all in this together, you’re part of the volunteers story,” he jokes.

“I didn’t bother to go into it with her, she’s far too busy, but I tried to approach her the same way I’d approach anyone. I’m a big believer in that. You’re interested in my relationship with stars like the Queen or starry actors, but I believe you should treat them exactly the same way as you treat everyone on a film set. That does work in the end because everybody’s equally respected. I don’t like people being treated badly at whatever level they’re at.

‘IF there’s a nude scene, I expect the crew to be on absolute tip-top behaviour because obviously an actor is very vulnerable at that moment. Likewise, if an actor starts abusing an AD (assistant director) and shouting at them or something like that, I sort that out because I’m not going to have that either.

“So the Queen, yeah, it was fine. It didn’t last very long so there was no chance for problems to develop or emerge. It was over quite easy.”

It emerges that Her Majesty cast herself. Out of courtesy, Boyle’s team applied for permission to cast a double for the Queen in the film that ended with her parachuting into the stadium.

“We were astonished when they came back and said not only do we approve of this idea, but she wants to be in it as well. The only criteria was that we would, as we wanted as well, keep it a secret. So she didn’t tell any of her immediate family. She wanted it to be a surprise for them as well. I also think she knows, through experience, that if you really want to keep a secret the way is to tell virtually no-one.

“They let us film at Buckingham Palace in the greeting room where she sees PMs. But she has another room along the way which is much more full of newspapers and tea trays, what you’d expect really. It’s a really lived-in room.

“So we went in there and she said I’ve been at the dentist all morning so I’m not in a very good mood, tell me what you want. So I did. I didn’t have to tell her anything. There’s the moment she had to turn round, which is the classic moment actors forget to pause and then turn round.

She didn’t need telling twice, she’s as sharp as anything.

‘ITHINK she had a great day. It’s interesting to think that someone who’s a head of state is doing something for her people.

Her team had a lovely day out with Daniel Craig as well. I think that’s one of the reasons she did it. She made sure all the staff got their photo with Daniel. We had a nice time and they were very, very helpful to us.

“It reflected the feeling of the whole show, which was communal, that we’re all in this together literally, it’s for everyone, and she played a part that showed her as accessible and fun.”

Among the movie projects on which Boyle is working now is a long-held ambition to make sequel to Trainspotting, which celebrates its 20- year anniversary in 2016, and brings back the actors to play their original characters.

“It would be nice to do that because it’s like that 7Up,14Up, 21Up. They’re riveting those ideas because it’s just ways of looking at yourself.

It’s an absolute mirror, especially with those characters everyone still knows. That’s very unusual on a film. You remember actors who’ve been in films but very rarely who they played. Okay, John McClane in Die Hard but Trainspotting has a gallery of characters – everybody knows Begby, Renton, Sick Boy, Spud. Some even remember Tommy who died.

“It’s weird to have that kind of resonance. It will be a very useful mirror if we can pull it off.

Obviously the quality threshold that all the actors will apply, like we will, is that it will have to be good for us to go ahead. The danger is you disappoint people, but it will have its own integrity, rather than feeling it’s a sequel.

  • Trance (15) opens in cinemas on Wednesday.