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Danny Boyle Surprises with Millions
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MM: How much work did you and Boyce do on the script prior to shooting?
DB: Frank had sent it to me a long while back, and the story was very different than what you see on the screen. We worked on the shooting script for about a year, playing around with different elements and the whole concept of this fake E-Day—the moment when England would get rid of the pound and switch to the Euro. The structure was there; it was just a matter of getting all the ingredients right.
There were a lot of similarities between my upbringing and how Frank was brought up. That’s not to say it was autobiographical, but as we were working on the script together, we found ourselves adding a lot of bits and pieces we remembered from our own childhoods—the details about the saints, in particular. Even though I’m not particularly religious now, I was raised as a Roman Catholic, so there’s a lot of resonance there for me. There’s something in that kind of background that spurs on the imagination; all these fantastic tales of saints and miracles. But that’s putting an adult context on it. The story is about the kids, so you have to makes those bases the kids’ bases, not yours specifically.
MM: Is that the hardest thing about working in this genre? Just keeping the focus on the kids’ perspectives?
MM: Yes.
DB: I found that while I was preparing Millions, I kept going back to that movie. It’s not a proper kid’s film, obviously, and it’s a very sad, very dark film. But that was a good template for me to look at for directing kids. Watch all the youngsters in the background of the scenes; they’re all natural, and yet they’re all totally there—really acting in the moment. They’re all very much in the same movie, you know what I mean? Those are some of my favorite kids’ performances in any film.
MM: Can you talk about how you and your cinematographer, Anthony Dod Mantle, came up with the look of Millions? Considering he’s such an authority on digital video, it almost seems odd that you guys chose film.
DB: Anthony is a genius at working with digital video, which is why his work on 28 Days Later is considered groundbreaking by so many folks. But we both realized very early on that we wanted to shoot this on film—that we wanted that look that film gives you in terms of the super-saturated vibrancy of colors.
There was a lot of talk between the lot of us about how children view the world and what we remembered as kids. I grew up in Manchester, and there were plenty of gray days growing up there. But when I think back to being a kid there, my memories don’t involve dismal weather… It was always ‘Oh man, where am I going to go play football? What’s playing at the Saturday matinee?’ You’re dreaming and reaching for the future when you’re a kid, which is the feel we wanted with the visuals. The colors would burst, the sky would be as blue as you can imagine… It may be the northern part of England, but to these kids, it looks like the bloody Mediterranean in their imagination! (laughs) Both Anthony and I were on the same page with that, and he was instrumental in that surreal look that we got in the scenes with the saints, the halos around their heads, all that. He just has an endless source of anything-goes creativity.
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This story was published in the Spring 2005 MovieMaker Magazine. The headline was:
In the Money / The always surprising Danny Boyle cashes in his chips to direct Millions, an intelligent kid's flick
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