Danny Boyle famous quotes

To be a film-maker, you have to lead. You have to be psychotic in your desire to do something. People always like the easy route. You have to push very hard to get something unusual, something different.
-- Danny Boyle

#People #Desire #Different

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

#Holiday #Cities #Bored

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

#Expectations

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

#Cash

The sun is the most important thing in everybody's life, whether you're a plant, an animal or a fish, and we take it for granted.
-- Danny Boyle

#Animal #Important #Sun

Although I behave in a quite reserved way in my personal life, give me a stage and I'll be as flamboyant as I can.
-- Danny Boyle

#Giving #Way #Stage

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

#Guy #Being There #Not Sure

I don't want people to sit there and objectively watch the film. I want them to experience it as something that's under their skin, so you try to make the films really tactile.
-- Danny Boyle

#People #Skins #Trying

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.
-- Danny Boyle

#Teacher #Interesting #Decision

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.
-- Danny Boyle

#Trying #Directors #Looks

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.
-- Danny Boyle

#America #People #Laughing

The problem with being British... I don't know if it's me being British or being raised a strict Catholic, but you never really enjoy success.
-- Danny Boyle

#Catholic #Problem #British

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

#Book #Surface #Values

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

#India #Extraordinary Things #Extraordinary

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.
-- Danny Boyle

#Jobs #Dad #School

I don't want to make pompous, serious films.
-- Danny Boyle

#Want #Serious #Film

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

I tend to score with songs from Western pop music.
-- Danny Boyle

#Song #Score #Pops

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

#Beach #Cities #Suits

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.
-- Danny Boyle

#Book #Reading #Kids

I trained in the theatre.
-- Danny Boyle

#Theatre

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

#Art #People #Culture

I was brought up a very strict Catholic and I don't practice anymore or anything.
-- Danny Boyle

#Practice #Catholic #Strict

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.
-- Danny Boyle

#People #Way #Misery

I've always wanted to do a space movie.
-- Danny Boyle

#Space #Wanted

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

#People #Feelings #Cinema

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

#Want #Serious #Kind

Come a crisis, we want other people.
-- Danny Boyle

#People #Want #Crisis

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

#Black And White #Next #Celluloid

The great thing with film is that it doesn't have an ego. It's just a film. Everybody that makes them has an ego, and the problem with awards and stuff like that is that it always affects the egos, and everyone gets stained by it in some way. And that can be fine and very innocent, but it can be horrible as well.
-- Danny Boyle

#Awards #Ego #Stuff

You can't tell someone they are wrong about their own life.
-- Danny Boyle

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

#Destiny #Passive #Feels

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.
-- Danny Boyle

#Thinking #Waiting #World

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

#Guy #Arrogant #Brian

That survival instinct, that will to live, that need to get back to life again, is more powerful than any consideration of taste, decency, politeness, manners, civility. Anything. It's such a powerful force.
-- Danny Boyle

#Powerful #Survival #Taste

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

#Pride #People #Loud

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.
-- Danny Boyle

#Thinking #People #Stuff

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

#Three #Four #Minutes

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

#Beach

I kind of call myself an atheist, I suppose - although quite a spiritual atheist, I hope.
-- Danny Boyle

#Spiritual #Atheist #Kind

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

#Film #Extremes

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.
-- Danny Boyle

#Thinking #Cinema #Action

I mean suspense, twists are almost impossible these days.
-- Danny Boyle

#Mean #Twists #Suspense

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.
-- Danny Boyle

#Ideas #Different #Way

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.
-- Danny Boyle

#Two #Creating #Actors

I'm not a 'Star Wars' geek.
-- Danny Boyle

#Stars #War #Geek

One of Dickens' biggest influences was the growth of London as a Victorian city, and the extremes being created as it expanded.
-- Danny Boyle

#Cities #Growth #London

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

#Bigs #Pops #Pop Music

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.
-- Danny Boyle

#Jobs #Years #Two

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.
-- Danny Boyle

#Trying #Done #Way

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

#America #Film #Cop

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.
-- Danny Boyle

#Mean #People #Twists

Some of us are interested in directors, but really the vast majority of us are interested in actors. You experience the films through the actors, so they're all locked into your imagination in some kind of layer of fantasy or hatred or wherever they settle into your imagination.
-- Danny Boyle

#Imagination #Hatred #Majority

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.
-- Danny Boyle

#Hippie #Tolerance #Mumbai

I'd love to do a modern-day musical that's full of original music. To get your contemporaries to sing and dance without looking foolish and for it to be transformational and magical and all those things a musical is supposed to be.
-- Danny Boyle

#Dance #Musical #Foolish

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.
-- Danny Boyle

#Intelligent #Differences #Levels

My kids are too old to remember this now but, when they were much younger, I swore to them if this miracle ever happened, I would receive it in the spirit of Tigger from Winnie the Pooh, and thats what that was.
-- Danny Boyle

#Kids #Miracle #Tigger

Theres a certain truth that you do end up making the same film again and again so if you vary the genre you have a chance of breaking that cycle.
-- Danny Boyle

#Chance #Film #Ends

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.
-- Danny Boyle

#Boys #Eight #Way

Its easy to like the most popular films, but I have a great fondness for A Life Less Ordinary.
-- Danny Boyle

#Ordinary #Film #Easy

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.
-- Danny Boyle

#Powerful #World #Computer

I'm a big sports fan. Football. Cricket.
-- Danny Boyle

#Sports #Football #Fans