Danny Boyle Quotes

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.

One of the things in the Mary Shelley [Frankenstein] is that the creature tells his story, so this begins with the creature's point of view. So, it literally starts with the creature opening his eyes and is born - but is obviously in his 30s. But because they're the creator and the created we thought it would be really interesting if they could look at each other every other night and play each other's roles.

The extraordinary thing about India is that it's such a family place. It's full of families everywhere.

I made this film 'The Beach,' which didn't take place in a city, and it didn't really suit me.

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?'

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

People say you never remember anybody who dies in movies, and it's true, you don't. You don't even remember people who disappear.

I've always wanted to do a space movie.

I've sort of escaped my background, as people often do, through art and culture.

For us, destiny always feels ... if you obey, it's almost a passive thing.

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.

Everybody knows Aaron Sorkin's scripts. There's a huge amount of lines. There's a huge amount of interchange. You gotta do a lot of learning to be able to get it up to pace.

I dont see much difference between it and the other films though I can see on a rational and intelligent level there is a big difference.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Originally I'm a big pop-music aficionado, that's my love.

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.

I grew up in a city, I'm a city person - I go on holiday and I'm bored.

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.

There's lots of things that can be solved with cash.

I don't want to make pompous, serious films; I like films that have a kind of vivacity about them.

I learned with 'The Beach' that I'm a bit better lower down the radar.

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.

You can do anything you like - really - but this [Sci-Fi] is absolutely disciplined, it's Zen, you have to be absolutely focused in an area. You have to zone into an area and you then you can achieve when you get there. It's really weird!

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.

Your first film is always your best film, in a way. There's something about your first film that you never ever get back to, but you should always try. It's that slight sense of not knowing what you're doing, because the technical skills you learn - especially if you have a film that works, that has some kind of success - are beguiling. The temptation is to use them again, and they're not necessarily good storytelling techniques.

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.

I tend to score with songs from Western pop music.

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.

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.

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.

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

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'm always after putting people in extreme circumstances. I'm always after not knowing what I'm doing in those extreme circumstances.

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.

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

It's interesting, the worse things get in cities, the tougher that cities get, the more brutal the humor is. The tougher [things] people face, the darker the sense of humor gets and I find that incredibly optimistic.

I have this theory that your first film is always your best film in some way. I always try to get back to that moment when you're not relying on things you've done before.

When you're in zero gravity everything moves at the same speed and nothing stops it. If you throw something it travels forever but it still travels at the speed you threw it at. To make it plausible, movies have chosen to show it in slow motion.

You don't realize it, but often people are frightened of the director.

I always say to anybody who's going over to America for the first time, 'Whatever you do, go and see a popular mainstream film with a big audience.' Because people shout out. You never get that in Britain. Everybody's so quiet, scared to laugh. It's like being in church.

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.

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.

If you have to be persuaded about something, you shouldn't do it.

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

Good storytelling for me is not so much technical expertise, which I know is applauded often; it's actually freshness of approach. It does mean you sometimes stumble and fall and make a horrible mess of things in seeking that freshness, but you should always keep trying to do that.

You know what actors are like; they moisturize every night. They're frozen in time.

I love watching the Bond movies obviously and I grew up reading the books as a kid. I've always loved them because of that.

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

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.

If the American taxpayer knew how much they paid per person to put Neil Armstrong on the moon they would never have paid it. It was hidden from them deliberately because the costs were astronomical.

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.

I find it difficult enough being called "Mr. Boyle," which as I age I'm increasingly called.

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

I love that sense of change that you'd get in pop music every three minutes, every four minutes.

It's a nice way to put the focus back on this simple act ... if someone creates you.

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.

I love huge movies. Not sure I am the guy to make them, but you can rely on me being there watching them.

I mean suspense, twists are almost impossible these days.

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

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

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.

It's easy to like the most popular films, but I have a great fondness for 'A Life Less Ordinary'.

I say to first time filmmakers that when they're asked, they should go to America as you're far more likely to get a chance.

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

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