'Millions' - Frank Cottrell Boyce Q&A

Chris Tilly discusses the evils of money and the merits of 'The Princess Bride' with the 'Millions' writer.

May 27 2005

Frank Cottrell Boyce is best known for his collaborations with Michael Winterbottom, writing the scripts for 'Weclome to Sarajevo', 'The Claim', '24 Hour Party People' and 'Code 46' among others.

His latest effort, 'Millions', is a distinct departure, however, seeing him team up with Danny Boyle to make far more family-friendly fare. Time Out caught up with him to discuss saints, sinners and the merits of making a movie about money.

Where did the inspiration for 'Millions' come from?

The film that made me fall in love with cinema was 'The Princess Bride'. That was the first time I saw a film and was completely blown away by it. And being at the cinema watching it felt like a huge party – I loved it. That's the film I've always wanted to make, and it's what I've been working towards in my head. If cinema's anything, it's a pubic event, and the more people that are there, the better.

Speaking as someone who helps run a cinema, it's a desperately miserable place if there are only 20 people in there, but it's the most magical place on earth if you've got 470 packing it out. And we're hoping that 'Millions' is the kind of film that will put 470 people in there. We just wanted to make a film that is like a party, not a film that people would come up to you afterwards and say, 'I love your work – it really spoke to me', I want my film to make people go 'Fuck man, yeah!'

So once you'd had the initial idea, how did it change and develop over the years?

I spent years developing it just with the producer, and it never really found its feet, but it always had that little spark. And then Danny [Boyle] saw the script, which he liked the first 25 pages of, and we worked on it for a year or so and that was when it really started to come together. I think with stuff like this, the more ideas you throw into it, the better.

There seems to be this concept in the film industry that you've got to strip things down and simplify them, and I don't know why that is. To me, if something is really bursting with ideas, it's great. Like if you watch an episode of 'Malcolm in the Middle', it's like 60 episodes in the one, it's bulging with ideas. So the good thing about the fact that 'Millions' spent some time in development was that it kind of accrued all these different layers on top of the initial plot, like the saints, and the euro.

What did Danny bring to it when he came on board?

Modernity. Because when you write about childhood you tend to write about your own childhood and he was really brutal and pushed it into the present. And that's where things like the euro came from. And courage – he thought I was holding back on the saint element of the story, and now they're all over it.

Was it always such a spiritual story?

No, I think it's become more spiritual. I mean, I am Catholic, but saints are not part of an official religion, although they are made by the Vatican. Saints come out of popular culture, because people admire somebody, or they come out of folklore or legend. They're sort of part of the magic of ordinary life; it's not dogma, you're not talking about evangelical religion in that way, you're talking about a popular way of thinking about the transcendence.

To me, having those images from El Greco and Michelangelo mainlined into housing estate in Widness, it's fantastically potent, though for people who are not from that background it might really seem odd and surreal. But if you've been bought up around there as a Catholic, you live on a council estate and then every Sunday morning you open that church door and there's incense, brass, weird music, saints, stained glass. You open this door to the infinite and then you close it again - that's just part of growing up to me.

Someone says halfway through the film: 'Money just makes everything worse!' Do you believe that?

I'm uncomfortable about saying it on a personal level, because obviously there are people out there with very little money, and to them it will sound like a really stupid thing to say, but I just think that, as a society, everything is too cheap. You see stuff in shops and you can afford to buy hundreds of them. Take teddy bears – you can buy hundreds of them for your kids, because they are made in the southern hemisphere by people who are paid nothing, but there are so many around that none of them will really be loved. And, frankly, if you take your kids to school two or three hundred yards away, then the petrol is too cheap as well. I think we've got too much as a society, and I think it's unsustainable.

'Millions' hits cinemas today, and to read our exclusive interview with director Danny Boyle, simply click here

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