Danny Boyle Quotes

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.

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.

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

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

I've just been to the Taj Mahal which I'd never been to and I'm not a very romantic kind of guy but it is the most romantic thing I've ever seen.

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

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.

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.

People say you never remember anybody who dies in movies, and it's true, you don't. You don't even remember people who disappear. Although the moment that it happens might be terribly sad and moving, five minutes later, if you're asked to remember that person, you go, "Oh right, yeah, yeah!" 'Cause you're just moving forward.

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.

Good storytelling for me is not so much technical expertise, which I know is applauded often; it's actually freshness of approach. It does mean you sometimes stumble and fall and make a horrible mess of things in seeking that freshness, but you should always keep trying to do that.

When you have children your own hypocrisy becomes more apparent because you're telling them how to behave, and you're not behaving like that yourself. So it obliges one to really go in and try to look at why there is a huge gulf between how one knows one wants to behave and how one actually does behave.

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

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

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.

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

There is a Steve [Jobs] that Apple would like to actually present to the public. They have a character, Steve, and they want to keep that story going. And it's very important that writers challenge that occasionally and not just trust their parent companies to tell them.

I mean suspense, twists are almost impossible these days.

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

The perfect equation is form equals content. The style of the film reflects the story, and that's what you're always aiming for. You're not always necessarily successful at it, but that's the ambition that you're trying to do.

The awards season gives a chance for independent films to have a bit of longevity in the press and the media.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

There are three huge, titanic, space movies which if you ever make a film [about space] you cannot avoid. You may want to avoid them but you cannot. I've never known a genre like it where you are dictated to by these films, 2001, Alien, and Tarkovsky's Solaris.

I think women assess time passage much better than men - because of their biological clocks - and they are much more realistic about measuring out time, whereas men tend to hang onto things. Women acknowledge the biology of their time, and dance through the beat of that drum...whereas men just drum.

Directing is a mixture of compromise and perfectionism. When you lose the judgment of which is more important at any particular moment, you're time is over. They find you out and send you packing.

We want to see drama told in a cathartic way, with power, with emotion where you empathize and then you're frightened. All those feelings charge up in you and you feel for the story.

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.

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

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

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.

I'm not a 'Star Wars' geek.

I'm a big sports fan. Football. Cricket.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

I've always wanted to do a space movie.

I tend to score with songs from Western pop music.

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.

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