I chatted with Danny Boyle recently about Sunshine,
and confirmed what I probably already knew in my gut — that the guy is
whipsmart, intellectually curious and therefore predisposed to make the sort of
movies that, to whatever degrees they individually fail or succeed, still have
an involvement, strong visual sense, momentary hold or some other element that
leaves them kicking around in your head for a bit, unlike so much cookie cutter
studio product.

I certainly had problems with the latter-act narrative bends
and turns of Sunshine,
but one thing it most certainly has going for it is a legitimate sense of
uncertainty and ambiguity with respect to who’s getting out of any given
situation. “What’s lovely about an ensemble in space is that you don’t really
know who’s going to dominate in the end, and you can also kill them in any
order that you want,” says Boyle. “And there are some great deaths available in
space; because it’s so hostile, you can kill people in interesting ways.
That was one of the joys — getting all these actors together and then killing
them.”

Great actors, indeed; Boyle and his casting director put
together an interesting and disparate group that includes Rose Byrne, Cliff Curtis, Chris Evans,
Troy Garity, Cillian Murphy, Hiroyuki Sanada, Mark Strong, Benedict Wong and
Michelle Yeoh, but it’s not just a collection skewed toward international
commercial viability, as you see with some movies. “The original script doesn’t
define their gender even, and it certainly doesn’t define their nationality or
race,” notes Boyle. “It’s interesting, because space movies tend to quite
colorless like that — it’s just a group of people, and you can identify with
any of them, because they don’t have any social conventions that they’re
obeying on Earth. But for me, I felt that it should be an American-Asian
mission, because all the advice was that in 50 years time the only economies that
would be able to pay for this sort of staggering cost of space travel would be
the American economy, maybe still, but certainly the Asian economies that are
emerging. And (people we talked to) said probably India
and Brazil too,
but we sort of ignored that a bit, because it was getting too disparate. So we
made the movie mostly American and Asian, and then I just started to search for
my favorite bunch of actors to create an interesting mix. Michelle was the
first to be cast, and I remember saying to her, ‘You can play any part you
want.’ And she picked Corazon, which is actually a Mexican name.”