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quinta-feira, 3 de novembro de 2016
An Oral History of 'Trainspotting', Twenty Years On
An Oral History of
'Trainspotting', Twenty Years On
By Daniel Dylan Wray
March 3, 2016
From the column 'VICE Long
Reads'
Robert
Carlyle, Jonny Lee Miller, Ewan McGregor and Ewen Bremner in 'Trainspotting'
I was far too young to
watch Trainspotting when it first came out.
Mind you, that didn't stop it from
penetrating the bubble of my pre-pubescent world.
It was the film my friends
and I would talk about in class; the film whose promotional posters we'd want
to buy with our Christmas HMV vouchers; the film we lied about seeing right up
until the point of actually seeing it.
In the late-90s,
pre-internet, in a small town in Yorkshire, Trainspotting provided us with a
lot of firsts.
It was a portal into an adult world we'd never seen before, in
real life or onscreen.
Tarantino had given us a glimpse at sex and drugs, but
under a heavy gloss of style. Trainspotting added the weight of reality to that
world, and in watching it – as a 12-year-old – it made you feel more grown up,
somehow more experienced. Or at least it did for me.
Last week marked the 20th
anniversary of the film, so to celebrate I spoke to three of the main players:
Ewan McGregor, who played Renton, Kelly MacDonald, who played Diane, and the
author of the original novel, Irvine Welsh, whose new book The Blade Artist –
out this April – continues the story of Trainspotting's Begbie.
Kelly
MacDonald and Ewan McGregor in 'Trainspotting'
THE BOOK
Kelly MacDonald: It was on
my radar, but I hadn't read it.
I bought it after the first audition, so I
didn't have much knowledge going in.
Ewan McGregor: Danny Boyle
gave me the script to read, and I'd never read anything like it. I mean, it
seemed to me to be the best role I may ever read.
I was aware of the novel and
the kudos it had already accrued, but I hadn't read it yet.
So I was sort of
blown away by it, and I made it my mission to persuade [Danny] that I was the
right guy for the job.
Then, when I read the novel, I loved it very much – I
found it incredibly moving.
Irvine Welsh is an incredible writer; he can take
you from the depths of filth and despair and human baseness to being incredibly
moved in the blink of an eye.
Being a Scottish guy and it being an
intrinsically Scottish novel, I felt I was very connected to it.
FROM BOOK TO FILM
Irvine Welsh: There was
loads of interest; everybody seemed to want to make a film of Trainspotting.
Initially I sold the rights to the wrong person – back then I was a bit of a
naive gunslinger who had sort of stumbled into this mad vortex of different
people having an interest in what I was doing.
I finally got a screener from
Danny [Boyle] of [his directorial debut] Shallow Grave, by which point I'd sold
the rights to the other producer.
I thought, 'Bastard, I've fucked this up big
time,' because that kind of energy and filmmaking with my characters would have
been a perfect match. I really had a sinking feeling thinking that I'd ruined
it, but fortunately we were able to resolve the situation.
To me, if you get a film
made of your book, it's a complete win-win situation.
If the film's shit you
just disassociate yourself from it and say, "They fucked up." It's
brilliant.
I talk to some writers who view it as their book being desecrated,
and it's not that at all – your book's not being touched.
Nobody is ripping out
pages or changing words; all they're doing is transferring your storytelling
into a different medium.
I was asked if I wanted to be involved [as a writer],
but I think the most important thing for me was not to fuck with the energy
that these two guys [Danny Boyle and Andrew Macdonald, the producer] had.
I
looked at John Hodge's screenplay for Shallow Grave and thought, 'There's
nothing I can teach this guy about screenwriting.'
I needed to keep a distance
from it and let people get on with it.
AUDITIONING
KM: I heard about the film
through these little yellow flyers; I was working in a restaurant in Glasgow
and they were being handed out.
I was beginning to wonder what I was going to
do with my life, and my interest was piqued as I was secretly thinking about
drama school.
I remember walking in and making eye contact with Danny, and that
felt quite momentous.
I don't know why, in retrospect.
I definitely felt
something.
I was so young when I got
the role.
I'd just turned 19 and was just totally unaware.
I was flipping
between the excitement of being around these boys I was hanging around with –
because they were all so cool and charismatic and had lots of stories – and
then being an absolute nervous wreck and hiding in the toilets.
THE MOST MEMORABLE SCENES
TO SHOOT
KM: The club scene, coming
out of it.
I think it was my first day filming.
That was a whole day and night
shoot.
All the boys were quite naughty and were drinking, so I was drinking.
It
was Shirley Henderson [who played Gail] who pointed out to me not to do that.
I'd been in the pub for hours with various people who weren't filming scenes,
and she was the one who said, "You might want to stop drinking."
She
was totally right.
I think I was actually hungover by the time I did the scene.
I didn't know how to stand on a marker, I was all over the place, I didn't know
how it all worked.
The sex scene was obviously quite nerve-racking.
I was very
sexually inexperienced at that stage and limited in that area, so it was all a
bit embarrassing.
I was so unthinking and so naive and young that that was the
day I invited my mum and my brother to the set.
EM: There were so many,
because the scenes were so well written and the other actors were so great.
I
remember the underwater sequences.
I loved that.
It's so un-busy and quiet, and
you work with the camera in a very different way.
I love that sequence – I love
the idea of it and the sereneness of it.
I loved all the scenes with Kelly.
I
loved the nightclub scene and outside the nightclub scene where [Renton's]
trying to get off with her and gets in cab and all of that stuff.
Snogging
Kelly MacDonald in the back of a taxi, that was fun – I liked working with her
very much.
Kelly wasn't really an actress at that point; this was her first
thing and she turned up and blew everyone away.
The withdrawal scene was an
incredible thing to shoot, with the extending room and Jimmy Cosmo playing my
dad.
The park scene with Jonny Lee Miller, shooting the dog – that was good
fun. We didn't really shoot a dog, though.
IW: The scene when
"Perfect Day" [by Lou Reed] is playing and he sinks into the ground –
I think that was a great way to have that overdose, the way that you're lulling
towards death.
The second half of that scene, there's a relentless energy of
it, and it's set piece after set piece.
It struck me, as I've seen the way
people can die not remotely dramatically on drugs, but just by slowly fading
away and going to sleep, essentially.
They can actually enjoy that sense of
being taken, in a way, and sometimes they pull out of it and sometimes they
don't.
That scene summed up both the horror and the appeal of heroin to me.
The
deathly caress of it.
I think that was a fantastic scene.
There are very few
visual directors around better than Danny Boyle; he knows how to tell a story
in pictures, and he knows how to say something visually in a set piece.
Jonny
Lee Miller, Ewan McGregor, Kevin McKidd and Ewen Bremner on set
THE FINISHED FILM
IW: They booked a
screening room in Soho, so I brought along people who really loved the book and
would be very, very critical of the film if it wasn't any good.
I brought along
Bobby Gillespie and Andrew Innes from Primal Scream; Jeff Barrett from Heavenly
Records; people who were friends who were really into the book, basically.
People who would say it was shit if it didn't capture the spirit of the book.
I
was watching them more than I was the screen, to be honest, and there were a
few comments like, "Is that meant to be Begbie? Is that meant to be Sick
Boy?" And then it just stopped.
Once the characters were embedded in their
heads it took over and they were transfixed. They were all stunned speechless
at the end of the movie.
When they did find their voice in the bar afterwards
it was fucking amazing – they were blown away and they thought it was fucking
brilliant. I knew then that it was going to be absolutely massive.
EM: I was completely
speechless.
I was bowled over by it, really.
I remember coming out into the
street afterwards and not quite being able to gather my thoughts about it.
It
was everything I'd imagined it would be and a hundred other things as well.
KM: What I recall most
about seeing the film for the first time is more Bobby Carlyle's reaction to
the film, because I was sat next to him.
He was almost crawling on the floor
with embarrassment.
Every time he came on screen he would dip lower in his
seat, which I thought was interesting.
That's how I feel too, though.
I think
it's fairly common. I didn't like watching myself.
I still don't.
THE MUSIC
IW: Where I think I came
into my own a bit with helping on the film was the soundtrack.
Because I knew a
lot of the musicians personally, I was able to put them in touch directly so
[the filmmakers] could circumvent the process of having to pay massive bucks
that they couldn't afford to get the music cleared.
The artists were so
enamoured with the movie and wanted to be involved so much that they were
coming in and saying to their record companies, "Can we let this [song]
go?"
That helped us secure the rights for a low cost, and sometimes no
cost.
There is no way we'd have been able to get such a soundtrack normally.
Danny had worked with Leftfield on Shallow Grave and I think he knew New Order
from Manchester as well.
There was such a great vibe about it that it spread to
these musicians too, who gave us a bunch of stuff that would have normally cost
us a fortune.
I reference most of the
artists in the book: Iggy, Lou Reed, Bowie and a lot of the house stuff I was
into at the time.
But what I didn't get was the Britpop thing.
Primal Scream
and Damon Albarn were friends, and I knew Jarvis Cocker, but I didn't really
see the Britpop involvement.
I didn't see how it would work, but I think it was
Danny who decided we needed that contemporary feel, which was a masterstroke,
because Britpop was kind of the last strand of British youth culture and it
helped to position the film as being the last movie of British youth culture.
Begbie
throwing his glass into a crowd of people.
REACTIONS TO THE FILM AND
ACCUSATIONS OF DRUG GLAMORISATION
IW: You had Bob Dole – the
presidential candidate in the US – criticising it, but he'd never seen the
film. Cinema does inherently glamorise everything: it has actors, there is a
stylisation there.
One of the things I loved about the vision that Danny had
for the film is that it wasn't going to be a pompous 1970s social realism film
that would shame the bourgeoisie and policy-makers into spending on the inner
cities and all this kind of crap, because that ship has sailed and it's never
going to happen.
If you can't shame policy-makers into spending money on
resources, all you're doing is making rich people feel better that they're not
poor people.
For me, I wanted it to capture the excitement and verve of being
young in quite a potentially hazardous environment, but still with that idea
that there are all sorts of possibilities ahead, even if your current
circumstances aren't particularly brilliant.
It was the first film that said
about drugs, "This can be really good fun, even though it can be really
dangerous."
I think you have to do that.
"Just say no" doesn't
work; you have to show both, the highs and the lows.
You have to show why
people get involved in that in the first place.
To me, it's self-evident why
people take drugs.
KM: I'd moved back home
with my mum after the film for a bit.
I'd been into town and I got back and
there were two Daily Mail or Daily Record journalists in the living room
talking with my mum, which was a bit weird.
I did a quick interview and got
them out.
Then, in the next few days, there was this front page story about a
Trainspotting star's drugs nightmare.
I thought: 'Oh man, who is it?' and it
was me, because they'd asked if I'd ever taken drugs, and I was a bit of a
naive plonker and said, "Yes, I took a hash yoghurt once and I was very ill."
The
trailer for 'Trainspotting 2'
THE SEQUEL
IW: John [Hodge] has
delivered this knockout script, which is absolutely fantastic.
It's based on
Porno [Welsh's sequel to Trainspotting], but it's also evolved.
We've had to
evolve past that, because the actors would have been ten years older when Porno
came out, and now they're 20 years older.
It has to take into account that
reality.
It's very much telling a story about Edinburgh as it currently is.
The
main element to the story is basically Renton, Begbie, Sick Boy and Spud
getting back together again, and it tells the story of them getting involved in
the vice industry in a very innovative way.
I think it has some
fantastic set pieces and great opportunities for the actors to knock it out of
the park, so I'm very excited.
I just know that Danny will come up with this
amazing visualisation.
I think it's going to be excellent.
The thing that's
going to be interesting is seeing how the young kids in the multiplex cinemas
get on with it now, because they're older guys – it's not going to be a youth
movie like Trainspotting was.
It could be like watching your uncle dance at a
wedding.
Hopefully it will be fun and crazy enough.
It's got the potential for
some great, incendiary performances from the actors.
EM: It's going to be
incredible.
It's a very beautiful, brilliant script – and it needed to be; I
don't think any of us would have wanted to be involved in something that wasn't
going to live up to the first film.
That's the danger with any sequel, but especially
this one and after such a long period of time.
KM: I'm in talks.
I've
read the script.
I don't know how much I can talk about it, to be honest.
It
would be so interesting to work with the same people, and everyone will have
changed, but I definitely know how to stand on a marker now.
Trainspotting was
my weird beginning, and I'm so grateful for it because that could have been it,
but it's not, and now I'm actually getting to do this job that I really love
and I'm not hiding in the toilets so much any more.
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