Danny Boyle’s favourite shots from his favourite movie: “It’s just endless”
For most movie lovers, there’s a moment when you watch a film and realise that cinema holds more possibilities than you ever thought imaginable. Maybe it was a childhood viewing of something like The Wizard of Oz, with its vivid Technicolor illuminating your impressionable young mind and revealing that cinema really can be magic. Perhaps your cinematic turning point came a little later, which was the case for Danny Boyle, who discovered his love for filmmaking when he was 21.
The director is now one of Britain’s finest cinematic exports, making his mark on the industry in the 1990s when funding and opportunities for up-and-coming filmmakers in the country increased. He emerged with Shallow Grave in 1994, which captured the zeitgeist of the time – it’s punchy and outrageous, signalling an era of bold and unabashed filmmaking in Britain, which Boyle continued with his next feature, Trainspotting.
The movie tapped into the troubles facing young people at the time, exploring the disillusionment, excessive drug use, poverty, and the hopes of a better life. He entered the heart of darkness, taking his characters to the lowest depths imaginable – literally taking protagonist Renton into the deepest, grimiest depths of shit by forcing him down a toilet – and the result was one of Britain’s most indelible and enduring pieces of cinema.
Since then, Boyle has done everything from horror in the form of 28 Days Later to biopics like Steve Jobs, but none of this would have been possible if he hadn’t seen Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now when he was in the early stages of adulthood. He realised that cinema truly had the potential to have the same impact as a classic novel or a breathtaking painting, leading him to become a filmmaker himself.
When asked to pick his favourite scene from Coppola’s chilling war film, an epic statement on the horrors that come from human greed and violence, Boyle couldn’t just select one. At over two-and-a-half-hours in length, there are many excellent scenes woven into the movie, which come together to create a seamless web of cinematic poetry.
Talking to CineFix, Boyle explained his love for Coppola, stating, “The 70s produced some amazing directors in America, truly amazing, who moved cinema forward in ways that I think history will appreciate even more than we do, but to have produced films like The Godfather and to have produced Apocalypse Now marks him out as a true prophet.”
He praised Coppola’s “relentless ambition,” explaining that the movie is incredibly “focused.” Boyle continued, “Just to pick one shot would just diminish it.. [there’s] so many, you know, the ride of the Valkyrie, [Martin] Sheen at the beginning, you know [Marlon] Brando at the end, it’s just endless shots that you can you use.”
Apocalypse Now is widely regarded as one of the greatest movies ever made – something that Boyle is certainly in agreement with. The sheer scope of the movie is a cinematic feat, and while the production was marred with complications, even leading some people to believe that the set was cursed, the film turned out perfectly, inspiring countless filmmakers in its wake.
