London – In “Trainspotting,” Danny Boyle turned junkies into charismatic antiheroes. With “28 Days Later,” the British film director transformed typically lumbering zombies into sprinting killers. In his new movie, “Sunshine,” Boyle faced perhaps his greatest challenge yet: making weightless astronauts actually look … weightless.
Just a few days into production on the science-fiction film at London’s Three Mills Studios, Boyle was growing more exasperated by the minute. His film’s astronauts, sent 50 years into the future to reignite the dying sun, were supposed to be carefully maneuvering outside their spacecraft. But the crane on which the actors’ stunt doubles stood was jerking around like a ’57 Chevy.
Still, it was an improvement over Boyle’s first pass at a zero gravity, a few days earlier. “That would have looked better if I had just carried the person in my arms,” Boyle said of the subsequently discarded footage.
Production woes
As his effects team labored to reset the crane, the Shake
spearean theater director- turned independent film darling tried to console his actors, who had been pacing around the London soundstage all morning.
“My apologies,” Boyle said to his film’s co-stars, Cillian Murphy (“Batman Begins”) and Hiroyuki Sanada (“The Last Samurai”). “I guarantee you we will do your scenes first thing tomorrow.”
In the scheme of “Sunshine’s” difficult production, that one-day delay would prove minor. From that frustrating morning in September 2005, Boyle would spend more than another full year working on “Sunshine,” with Fox Searchlight having to reschedule the film’s release not once but twice.
While he could not have imagined on that September day two years ago how challenging the film’s special effects would be, Boyle seemed to sense the trouble ahead. A video team shooting interviews for the film’s website stopped by, asking “Sunshine’s” cast and crew what item they would bring into space. The 50-year-old Boyle had a succinct answer: “A noose.” Nearly two years later, “Sunshine” is finished – and Boyle didn’t quite kill himself making it (although he went about $5 million over budget).
If Boyle faced a difficult test in reproducing zero gravity, distributor Fox Searchlight now is confronted with an equally daunting trial. In a season filled with big-budget blockbusters on the high end and smaller, personal films on the low, the studio somehow must fit “Sunshine” in between.
Neither a glossy popcorn movie nor an intimate art film, “Sunshine” recently premiered as the closing film of the Los Angeles Film Festival and opens in theaters July 20. It occupies dangerous territory: It’s a thinking-person’s save-the-world film. Imagine “Armageddon” – with good reviews.
Like much of Boyle’s earlier work – the Manchester-born filmmaker burst onto the scene with 1994’s “Shallow Grave” and made “Trainspotting” two years later – “Sunshine” is visually stylish and narratively idiosyncratic. His new film embraces some of the familiar beats of science fiction and tries to reformulate others.
Where Boyle brought new urgency to the zombie genre with “28 Days Later,” he delivers contemplative patience to “Sunshine.” “I think fans of original science fiction will really appreciate it,” Steve Gilula, Fox Searchlight’s distribution president, said of “Sunshine.” “The question we had internally is, ‘Can you release a “2001” in 2007?’ We think there is an audience, but we don’t want to minimize the challenges.”
“Sunshine” marks a reunion between Boyle and novelist- screenwriter Alex Garland, the director’s collaborator on both his biggest hit – 2003’s “28 Days Later” – and his principal disappointment, 2000’s “The Beach.”
“I knew it was a mission to the sun,” Garland said of his initial “Sunshine” idea, “and that it was going to belong to the strand of science-fiction movies of the 1960s and ’70s – ‘2001,’ ‘Silent Running,’ the original ‘Solaris.”‘
“You go into deep space,” said Garland, whose novels include “The Tesseract” and “The Coma,” “and you encounter your subconscious.”
However poetic that notion, the movie still needed a plot. “The original trigger for the movie was an article about the long-term future of the sun,” Garland said.
“We completely rely on the sun for life. And it’s totally hostile. It’s beautiful, but if you look at it, it will blind you. I’m an atheist, but you can make a fair argument for the sun as God.
“It does a lot of God-like things, even though it’s not sentient. It’s a life giver and a death giver, in equal measure.”
Ebbing star
When “Sunshine” opens, we’re five decades into the future, and the sun is in its death throes. Instead of global warming, “Sunshine” presents the idea of a freezing planet.
The first mission to relight the sun with a massive nuclear device has failed, so a second crew sets off seven years later to try to finish the job.
After 16 months and 55 million miles of space flight, Icarus II approaches the center of our solar system. Cooped up together for far too long, its international crew of eight is starting to fray at the edges. When they find the remains of the original Icarus I spacecraft, let’s just say one of its crew members might have taken a God analogy a little too seriously.
The movie didn’t come together easily. Boyle’s longtime producer, Andrew Macdonald, had a deal with Fox Searchlight, which was initially nervous about “Sunshine’s” subject matter and its preliminary $40 million budget, much higher than Fox’s specialized film unit usually spends on a single film.
“Sunshine” wasn’t going to be an obvious, down-the-middle movie: It would be part suspenseful thriller, part existential meditation.
To get “Sunshine” rolling, Macdonald cobbled together money from British lottery funds, U.K. rebates and outside investor Ingenious Film Partners.
One of the things Boyle tried to do better was to create a believable “Sunshine” world. To that end, the film’s 2057 looks and feels a lot like 2007 – “Star Trek’s” skin-tight Lycra thankfully hasn’t replaced T-shirts.
“My problem with science fiction is when you try to invent too much,” Boyle said. “A phone looks like a banana and not a phone, and that doesn’t make any sense. You don’t have to have everything reinvented. Look around today. You can have an iPod on a Victorian desk.”
At the same time, the “Sunshine” production team wanted to make sure the film’s outer space looked severe and inhospitable, rather than Hollywood’s usual cool and beautiful depiction.
Producer Macdonald said one early scene needed to be reshot because it actually looked too nice.
What in the future for the movie director?
Boyle said his next movie will be far more manageable.
