During a recent interview for Sunshine, the subject of humanity’s self-destructive impulse — a steady thread through many of his movies — came up with filmmaker Danny Boyle, and in asserting his personal optimism, he made an interesting connection to the rest of his canon, and how maybe his experience on The Beach has informed his work since. “Yeah, I think [issues of man grappling with self] are certainly there, and I think that’s why a lot of my scenarios are almost apocalyptical. I love those set-ups. But I think you
do battle against it. I am
optimistic and positive, and I want that to be in all the films. The only
one I think it’s not in, in a funny sort of way, is The Beach, which is a very depressing film in the end, a very
negative film in many ways. It surprised me why it came out like that.
Because normally, even in the bleakest scenarios, I kind of dig out
some spirit and hope.”

“The Beach was a
big film, but it wasn’t a big film — it just was big, though it shouldn’t have
been. It became,” continues Boyle. “It wasn’t Leo, who was fantastic. But it’s a big movie star,
and a big studio, and it suddenly becomes a gross, inflated thing. Suddenly
there’s 400 people working on the film everyday, and you think, ‘I don’t need
400 people to make this film, it’s a film about a bunch of hippies in a jungle!
I need only maybe 30 people.’ And it just grows like that. So [Sunshine] was big,
yet we controlled it. We kept sealing it — I didn’t want money, I didn’t want
loads of extras. I wouldn’t have got it anyway, because we didn’t have any big
stars in it. But I didn’t want money, I didn’t want a big star in it… I wanted
to try to make it with restraints, real disciplines that we had to work around
and be creative about how we got round them, and to make it feel like $150
million, but not force it.”