The director who made Danny Boyle want to retire: “Whoa, that guy can really do it”
A common problem for professionals working in an industry they grew up loving is that they develop a very different perspective than when they were simply fans. For example, many film directors have noted over the years that they can’t watch movies the same way after making their own, because they can’t turn off their director brain. Fascinatingly, Danny Boyle experienced a particularly devastating form of this phenomenon in 2016, and it had a profound effect on him.
In truth, it is perhaps not that surprising that a director is unable to watch films in the same way once they’ve experienced how they’re made. Before entering the industry, they will have watched movies and been swept up in the storytelling or bamboozled by spectacular scenes that made them think, “How did they do that?!” They may have theorised about how certain shots were achieved or certain editing choices were made, but they didn’t know for sure, so it retained a sense of mystery.
However, fast-forward to a time after a director has a handful of movies under their belt and has worked in the movie industry for several years, and their natural inclination will be to watch a film with this experience in mind. They know how the sausage is made, so to speak, so for every storytelling choice or spectacular scene, they’ll be thinking, “Oh, that’s interesting, but I would have done it this way,” instead of simply watching the movie to be entertained or moved.
While that is a sad state of affairs for someone who was once a die-hard cinema junkie, it’s not impossible to overcome – it just requires the director intentionally trying to suppress that pesky director’s voice in their head. It must also be said that not every professional has the same reaction, and these lucky souls are able to separate their fan brain from their director brain.
Spare a thought for Danny Boyle, the director of seminal British classics like Trainspotting and 28 Days Later, though. His version of failing to turn his director brain off while watching a pulse-pounding 2016 horror thriller didn’t ruin the movie for him, but instead, it did something much worse: it made him contemplate retirement.
After Boyle watched Uruguayan filmmaker Fede Álvarez’s Don’t Breathe, an excruciatingly tense thriller about three home invaders who find themselves trapped and hunted by the blind man they came to rob, his director brain told him this was extremely high-level work. “When you’re a director and you watch movies, sometimes you see a director’s work and you go, ‘Whoa,’ that guy can really do it,” Boyle gushed to PBS. “Because you sort of understand how films are made. Don’t Breathe was one of them. You get that shudder moment of thinking, ‘Whoa, I should retire!'”
Obviously, Boyle was being ever-so-slightly facetious about Álvarez’s film encouraging him to hang up his camera for good. What he was really doing was paying a huge compliment to a young director who, at that point, had only made the 2013 Evil Dead remake and Don’t Breathe. Álvarez’s innate skill with tension, buildup and payoff, and an ability to put the camera in unexpected places impressed Boyle as a man who knows how difficult it is to execute these things on-screen. He was so impressed, in fact, that he felt he had to up his own game to keep up with the young whippersnapper.
Indeed, is it out of the realm of possibility that Boyle watched Álvarez’s work and felt the urge to return to horror/thriller territory? It may have taken him eight years or so, but the esteemed Brit filmmaker is about to return to scares with a new trilogy: 28 Years Later, which he directed; 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, which he produced; and a third, as yet untitled, trilogy capper that will see him return to the director’s chair. Perhaps audiences have the Alien: Romulus director to thank for all the screaming they are about to do.
