'Sunshine' set visit

Mark Salisbury visits the set of Danny Boyle's new sci-fi horror, plus details of a special preview screening.

Mar 29 2007

‘There are three titans that tower over you when you start thinking about doing a film like this,’ says 'Sunshine' director Danny Boyle of the perils involved in making a space movie. ‘They are 'Alien', '2001' and 'Solaris'. You can’t avoid them. Inevitably, to your doom or credit, you’re going to cross paths with them – which is wonderful on one level, awful on another.’

Still, having successfully reinvented the zombie movie with their 2002 film '28 Days Later', Boyle and writer Alex Garland can claim to be more than capable of taking a well-worn genre and putting a fresh, invigorating spin on it. Set just 50 years from now, 'Sunshine' is a science fiction thriller that revolves around a last-ditch mission to the dying sun, as the eight-strong crew of the Icarus II – Cillian Murphy, Michelle Yeoh and Rose Byrne among them – attempt to reignite our nearest star by detonating a massive bomb, thereby saving mankind from a chilly extinction. En route, they encounter the remnants of a previous mission and experience encounters of both the spiritual and bloody kind. It’s an enclosed affair: the entire film – bar a brief coda – takes place in and around a giant spaceship that’s protected from the sun’s rays by a reflective shield made of gold.

Boyle says that he was attracted to Garland’s script for both its ambition (‘it’s very rare you get that in British work’) and its counterintuitive concept. ‘We are all concerned about global warming, yet he turns that on its head: it’s the sun that’s dying. We’re freezing to death.’
And given the sun’s essential place in all our lives, it’s a wonder that no one’s made a film about it before. ‘The amazing thing about the sun, its presence, in all cultures, is always to do with our dreams, our delights, our hopes, and its absence is where our fears lie. Alex’s script is to do with a villain who’s based on light. That’s quite a challenge because the way you generate fear in cinema is darkness.’

Given, too, the script’s overtly spiritual underpinnings – ‘it’s about the effects on the crew of meeting their creator, which for some is God and for others is the star’ – Boyle was determined to make the film as much of a psychological journey as possible, with the crew unravelling mentally, physically, existentially, and experiencing deep crises of faith. Indeed, 'Sunshine' posits the kind of debate you’re unlikely to find in your standard blockbuster. ‘It’s a science versus God argument, as a guy who explodes his bomb – and literally stands inside it – defiantly argues that he can change the universe, whereas God argues, “You can’t, this is my universe.”’
As with '28 Days Later', Boyle’s approach was to treat the material as seriously as possible, the mantra being more NASA than 'Star Wars'.

‘It’s closer to us than those films, certainly in terms of technology,' he says when Time Out visits him on set at Three Mills Studios in east London back in the autumn of 2005. As well as consulting futurists, scientists and astronauts, and visiting a submarine, Boyle and producer Andrew Macdonald hired a physicist as a consultant to shore up the science – which he says was ‘very sound’ to begin with. From there, making space his own was a matter of imagination for Boyle. ‘You either have enough original ideas or you don’t, and if you don’t, then don’t do it,’ he says. ‘One of the things that is different about the film, and this is rather geeky but it’s a fucking massive part of doing a space movie, is the helmet. For all directors on space movies it’s one of the big, big moments. It’s the Beecher’s Brook of space movies.’

Since the crew of the Icarus would be exposed to enormous amounts of radiation, Boyle opted for a reflective gold spacesuit and a helmet that echoes the hood worn by Kenny in 'South Park', with just a slit for visibility instead of a full-face visor. ‘Not everybody thought that was going to work but there are times when you have to make a difference, as space is basically the same in all films,’ says Boyle, who was keen to avoid the usual star field backgrounds (you can’t, apparently, see stars in space) but soon realised they were unavoidable. ‘I wanted space to be pitch black. We tried it and it doesn’t work. In some films, the star fields are there for prettiness, but in all films they’re there to give you a sense of movement. We had to compromise, but they’re very subtle.’

Filming, too, was anything but simple. ‘Everything is so technical, it’s a crawl,’ a weary Boyle explains. ‘It’s very difficult to get a dash on. There’s the seven circles of hell, I call it, filming these things. The spacesuits, that’s one of the circles; dealing with weightlessness. Another is gobbledygook, space technology information; they have to sound like they’re astronauts, and a lot of it is bullshit, but Alex is brilliant at inventing these phrases that they use.’

By late February 2007, after more than a year of post-production and special effects work, 'Sunshine' was finished. It’s a bold, ambitious and thought-provoking film, stunningly shot by Alwin Kuchler, with some breathtaking imagery and nervy tension. And while the finale may be more slasher movie than, say, 'Solaris', it remains a mainstream film with something to say. ‘Space movies are a way of looking at the mind,’ says Boyle. ‘They’re a way of putting a mirror to our minds.’

'Sunshine' opens on April 6. A special preview screening will take place at The Ritzy, Brixton on Wednesday, April 4 at 6.45pm, followed by a Q&A with Danny Boyle. The interview will also be beamed live by satellite to the Clapham Picturehouse, the Greenwich Picturehouse, the Stratford-upon-Avon Picturehouse, the Liverpool Picturehouse at FACT, the York City Screen Picturehouse, the Edinburgh Cameo Picturehouse and the Aberdeen Belmont Picturehouse. To submit a question email marc.a@picturehouses.co.uk and to buy tickets head to www.picturehouses.co.uk.

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