“Pretty much lifted”: the movie Danny Boyle admits was inspired by ‘Goodfellas’
As the great American author Mark Twain once wrote, “There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope”. Such has given permission to the likes of Christopher Nolan to steal from Stanley Kubrick, Danny Boyle to pinch from Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino to nibble ideas from pretty much everyone from literature, television and cinema.
Indeed, even the seemingly most original pieces of independent film from British director Danny Boyle have been inspired by a range of other sources. His viral 2002 horror flick 28 Days Later would have certainly not existed without the zombie classics of George Romero, and his underrated 2007 sci-fi Sunshine wouldn’t have had legs without Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 film Solaris. Yet, the inspirations behind Trainspotting are a little more unpredictable.
Winning the Bafta for ‘Best Film’ and receiving an Oscar nomination for ‘Best Adapted Screenplay’, Boyle’s indie movie, based on the book of the same name by Irvine Welsh, enjoyed unprecedented success for a Scottish film of the same size. A gritty, vibrant piece of cinema, Boyle’s film told the story of Renton, a heroin addict, and his experience living in the Edinburgh drug community.
A visionary piece of cinema starring some of the industry’s most burgeoning stars, including Ewan McGregor, Robert Carlyle and Jonny Lee Miller, Trainspotting demonstrated a new vision for British film at the turn of the new millennium. No surprise, then, that Boyle was directly inspired by another piece of quintessential American crime cinema in the 1990s, Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas.
“Trainspotters was pretty much lifted from Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas,” Boyle stated in an interview with Time, forgetting for a brief moment what his 1996 hit was even called. Clearly, on a mission of candour, Boyle added: “The Beach certainly references Apocalypse Now, playing with Hollywood’s image of the Vietnam War. It’s also got a lot of Deliverance about it, the 1972 John Boorman film. I consciously took from that.”
Considering the film as a British version of Goodfellas is a rather insightful way to observe Boyle’s movie, with the suave and suited gangsters of Scorsese’s flick being replaced by manic, bedraggled addicts. Indeed, the closer you look, the more similarities between the two films are present, too, with both protagonists loving their subversive lives initially before being desperate to get out of the lives they had created for themselves.
Yet, both McGregor’s Renton and Ray Liotta’s Henry Hill are surrounded by ‘friends’ who are focused on keeping them within the troubling webs they have created. Both films tell the story through voiceover, and both end with the protagonists leaving their old lives behind to the detriment of one of their friends, who ends up in jail. As sly reimaginings go, Boyle’s film is a true classic.
