In a Beverly Hills hotel suite, filmmaker Danny Boyle is scarfing down
a sandwich and sipping on tea while also holding forth on some of the
particulars of theoretical physics, notably non-topological solitons
and the self-reinforcing pulse waves that maintain their own perfect
shape while traveling through space at constant speeds. “These Q-balls,
as they’re called, are enormous forces of matter that just fly around
the universe,” Boyle explains.
“The only thing that stops them are incredibly dense stars. They just
pass through planets. When you go into this stuff, it’s mind-boggling
what you don’t understand.” Another quick bite, and he dives back into
his explanation. “If they hit something as dense as a star, though,
they stick,” he adds, smacking his palms together for effect. “And then
they start to eat the star from the inside out. That could happen, and
if it does the sun would begin to die.”

Boyle’s doomsday offerings are intimately sketched out for good reason. Scripted by frequent collaborator Alex Garland and shot largely at London’s famed Three Mills Studios, Sunshine — which arrives Tuesday, January 8 on DVD — stars an intriguing
international cast, including Rose Byrne, Michelle Yeoh, Chris Evans,
Troy Garity, Cillian Murphy, Cliff Curtis and Hiroyuki Sanada. Set in
the year 2057, the movie concerns the dying sun, as loosely described
above. The spacecraft Icarus II, with an eight-person crew aboard, sets
out with a nuclear device in hopes of resuscitating the fading heat
source, seven years after the disappearance of Icarus I while on a
similar mission.
Though it made $28.2 million overseas, Sunshine scrounged up only $3.7 million stateside when it opened in July. The movie was essentially eclipsed by the likes of Transformers, the latest Harry Potter, Hairspray and The Simpsons Movie,
which opened a week later.

While Boyle’s roots in theater and own
intellectual curiosity have fed an admirably diverse filmography, this
genre wasn’t one that, on the surface, he was looking to tackle. “I
didn’t realize quite how much a fan of sci-fi I was until I looked at
my track record and I realized I’d watched everything, and that makes
me a bit of a geek,” says Boyle, whose previous film credits include 28 Days Later and Trainspotting. “But I love them, and so the chance to make one with an original idea was fantastic.”

“I tend to make high-energy pictures that disrupt things with odd
camera angles and things like that,” Boyle offers. “Sci-fi tends to be
much more classical, and this kind of sci-fi — which is classic,
serious, ’70s sci-fi, which [is rooted in] philosophical ideas — isn’t
like a playground, it’s very serious. It’s much slower, it’s the
slowest film I’ve ever made in terms of the first half hour. But you
can’t speed it up. I tried, and you have to go at that pace. It’s
something about the eternity of the distances involved. That was a big
difference for me, how elegant that first part of the film has to be to
convince you that they are weightless in space, and traveling.”

Naturally, pictures set chiefly in outer space have their own notable
big screen ancestors, and for Boyle it was a matter of embracing rather
than fleeing from those influences. “There are three in particular that
are there at every turn,” he says. “Every time you think you’re being
original, they’re there waiting for you, and they are 2001, the first Alien film and (Andrei) Tarkovsky’s Solaris,
for different reasons with each of them. But they’re all there, and in
the end you have to either stop filming and give it up or you have to
acknowledge, ‘OK, nope, this is borrowed from Alien.’” For the full interview feature, from FilmStew, click here.