The film Ewan McGregor called “the Oasis of the movie world”
There’s no getting around it, the 1990s were a pretty special time. Rather like parents banging on about the ‘60s as though they were a utopian love-in where nobody ever got upset or angry, those of us who grew up in that decade definitely romanticise the pre-internet simplicity of it, the music and the movies, the complete lack of responsibility (although that only really applies if you weren’t an adult yet.)
One man who definitely looks back on the ‘90s with that kind of fondness is Ewan McGregor, although when you consider the fact he was probably the hottest young movie star in the world in 1997, that’s not particularly surprising.
Although the Guildhall drama school graduate had worked with director Danny Boyle on 1994’s black comedy Shallow Grave, it was undoubtedly their second film that catapulted him into worldwide fame: the decade-defining tale of heroin, music, sex and friendship named Trainspotting.
At the risk of repeating the rather over-nostalgic opening, you had to be there at the time to understand just what a big deal the movie was when it was released on February 23rd 1996. It was a film that everybody went to see, it had a soundtrack that everybody bought on CD. It had a truly iconic poster that literally everyone under the age of 21 had on one of the walls of their house. The trailer was a work of art in itself, the young cast running full tilt through the streets of Edinburgh, McGregor reciting Irvine Welsh’s “Choose life” monologue while Iggy Pop’s ‘Lust for Life’ plays in the background.
Indeed, music was a pivotal part of Trainspotting and what it stood for; dance band Underworld lent their song ‘Born Slippy’ to the soundtrack, and the refrain of “lager, lager, lager” became synonymous with the UK at the time. It was the summer of the Euro 96 football tournament at Wembley, Charles and Diana divorcing, legalised Ketamine and Damien Hirst cutting animals in half for art. A time of Oasis performing two giant concerts at Knebworth House in Hertfordshire, one of the largest outdoor gigs in history and almost ten percent of the entire population scrambling for tickets.
Oasis were nothing less than a phenomenon at the time, by far the biggest band in Europe, a cultural obsession, the band that would often appear as the main story on the nine o’clock news above any other world development. And it’s that band McGregor – who turned his newfound fame into a role in the biggest ever movie franchise when he landed the Star Wars reboot three years later – referenced when he remembered the decade in a conversation with Esquire.
He said: “Have you seen that Oasis documentary, Supersonic? I wanted to cut my throat. I did! I was fucking bawling at the end. Just take me back, take me back, I want to be in the ’90s again. Because it was a great time to be… well, me! It was! Fucking amazing. If you think about it, the Trainspotting team were the Oasis of the movie world, weren’t we? And it felt good. Really, really good, yeah. Which I think was down to Danny [Boyle]. Because we made a change in British cinema, we made people go, ‘Fuck, we can do it!’ as opposed to all the cool shit just coming out of America. You know?”
On release, Trainspotting became the fourth highest-grossing film in British movie history. Dark, funny, upsetting, riotous, it is a film that people watched again and again, and that rewards repeated views even now as a perfectly-judged time capsule of a young generation thirty years ago. It showed both sides of drug-taking in equal measure; the highs and the lows, pleasure and pain.
There was a sequel which reunited the original cast, writer and director in 2017, called T2 Trainspotting, and although it was a commercial and critical success, many people have forgotten it even exists. Maybe it’s because the original movie was so good the first time around. Maybe because everything was back then.
