Three Edinburgh flatmates find their new lodger dead with a suitcase of money under the bed (1994)
Shallow Grave — his debut, with Ewan McGregor and Kerry Fox.
Film · British & Irish
Danny Boyle
born 1956 · British
British post-Trainspotting energy — kinetic, pop-scored, digitally restless
Danny Boyle came from theatre and television to make three films in the 1990s that reset the pace of British cinema: a flat-share murder comedy, a Leith heroin picaresque and a rage-virus horror shot on consumer video. He works fast, loud and in colour, with a pop soundtrack and cameras where cameras are not meant to go. He won the Best Director Oscar for a film shot largely in Mumbai, and in 2012 staged the largest piece of theatre in British history in an Olympic stadium.
How to spot them
- ▸Wide lenses, saturated colour, canted frames and hard cuts on the beat of the music
- ▸A curated pop and electronic soundtrack that carries the narration — Underworld, Iggy Pop, A. R. Rahman
- ▸New formats grabbed early: DV cameras, iPhones, digital stills rigs
- ▸Screenwriters John Hodge and Alex Garland; the producer Andrew Macdonald
- ▸He has launched careers — Ewan McGregor, Cillian Murphy, Dev Patel
Key films
A Leith heroin user dives into the worst toilet in Scotland, and later delivers a monologue about choosing life (1996)
Trainspotting — from Irvine Welsh's novel, scored with Iggy Pop and Underworld.
A bicycle courier wakes in an empty hospital and walks out into a deserted London, past Piccadilly Circus (2002)
28 Days Later — shot on DV; Cillian Murphy's breakthrough.
A Mumbai chai-wallah is tortured by police because he keeps answering a television quiz correctly (2008)
Slumdog Millionaire — eight Oscars including Best Picture and Best Director, scored by A. R. Rahman.
A canyoneer pinned by a boulder in a Utah slot canyon films his own goodbye, then frees himself (2010)
127 Hours — the real Aron Ralston, played by James Franco.
Three product launches, in 1984, 1988 and 1998, each shown entirely backstage in the minutes before curtain (2015)
Steve Jobs — Aaron Sorkin's script, with Michael Fassbender.
Smokestacks rise out of a pastoral meadow in a stadium, and a sovereign appears to parachute in (2012)
Isles of Wonder — the London Olympic opening ceremony, watched by around a billion people.
A boy raised on a quarantined Northumbrian tidal island crosses to the mainland with his sick mother (2025)
28 Years Later — the first of a new trilogy written with Alex Garland.
Key ideas
- Momentum as a moral: characters who keep moving survive, characters who settle do not
- Music as the film's second script, chosen before shooting rather than laid on afterwards
- Populism without condescension — genre pleasures delivered at full volume
Quick-fire facts
- •Born in Radcliffe, near Bury, on 20 October 1956, to a Catholic Irish family; he considered the priesthood
- •He ran the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs before moving to BBC television, where he directed Mr Wroe's Virgins
- •Slumdog Millionaire (2008) won eight Academy Awards, including Best Director for Boyle
- •He turned down a knighthood after the 2012 Olympics, saying it did not fit a ceremony made by so many volunteers
- •His Olympic ceremony featured the monarch and a fictional secret agent in a filmed helicopter sequence, and a live NHS tribute
- •He directed a National Theatre Frankenstein in 2011 in which Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller alternated the two leading roles
- •Yesterday (2019) imagines a world in which almost no one remembers the Beatles
- •He left Bond 25 over creative differences in 2018, and the film was made by Cary Joji Fukunaga
- •28 Years Later (2025) was shot partly on iPhone rigs; its sequel The Bone Temple opened in January 2026 under Nia DaCosta, and Boyle hopes to shoot the third part in 2027
Drill it — 8 cards
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Sources
- Festival de Cannes — Danny Boyle at the Festival de Cannes
- Deadline — Danny Boyle Hopes To Film '28 Years Later III' Next Year