SCOTS-BORN DIRECTOR DANNY BOYLE’S PROTEAN IMAGINATION TENDS TO THE TACTILE, THE IMMEDIATE, THE BLOOD-RUSHING, THE TRIPPY: think Trainspotting, Millions, 28 Days Later and its sequel, 28 Weeks Later, which he supervised. His latest, Sunshine, is no different. [Sunshine is now available on Region 1 DVD.]
A crew of astronauts, some fifty years in the future, is headed toward the sun. “Set the controls for the heart of the sun,” goes a 1968 Pink Floyd title. A vast bomb is being ferried as the heart of the solar system seems in danger of expiring. But they’re the second crew: Icarus II is following the path of an earlier Icarus, lost, presumed destroyed. Shipboard or in space for almost the entire duration of the film, Sunshine puts a physicist (Cillian Murphy) at the center of its story, appropriate for a production that counts a particle physicist among its consultants. A psychological officer is also on board, mediating the battles that grow in intensity as they near their destination: can they not know that there’s little likelihood they’ll return, even if they save mankind? Hardly a gram of philosophy is spoken: they’re practical, pragmatic, all in thrall to the nearing fire, fire with the character of viscous fluid, heavy sultry water.
“The biggest problem of psychology is just surviving long-term space travel. Everything is designed to kill them,” the 50-year-old writer-director tells me. “Everything! Like a in a battle zone. Everything is waiting to kill them. There’s a wonderful book if you’ve never read it, by a British journalist named Andrew Smith. He had this idea that I think has been copied in a documentary, of going and talking to the remaining Apollo astronauts. He got to talk to some of them, there are only like twelve left. They were all marked by the distance and especially the dark side of the moon, when they lose radio contact with earth. Especially the guy who’s left alone when the other two went down to the surface. That guy represents the most alone you can get. It’s only forty-five minutes around the dark side, but… They were also pretty confident they would get them there but it was only fifty-fifty they’d ever get them back. And they knew that, the astronauts. It’s astonishing they got them all back.”
Sunshine unfolds fifty years from now, but it doesn’t traffic in futurism, but a variation on today, which is what the canniest designers most often work from. Would the pinch-and-squeeze function of the iPhone have looked ridiculous in a film five years ago? “The problem with futurism is that it becomes the be-all, end-all of the whole film, then, the design, your impression of what things will be like in a hundred years time, becomes more important than the film itself,” Boyle says. “The designer [Mark Tildesley] had this rule, the ‘red bus rule’ to connect with the past. In London fifty years ago, there were red buses. There’re still red buses, they’re a bit different, but they’re basically the same! That’s the way the future comes on you, y’know. You evolve into it.”
Boyle admires how personal, and how drawn from the past, Ridley Scott’s future landscapes are, such as in Blade Runner.

“A lot of that, you know, is based on where he’s from, a place called South Shield in Newcastle. It’s like there are oil refineries like those buildings there in the distance—” he indicates several miles west from our vantage— “Oil refineries burning excess. It comes from an industrial landscape he knew; you can see that in Alien as well, it’s Victorian industrial landscape inside that ship. That’s what’s genius about him, it is the future but he is absolutely using the past. I think of industrial landscapes from Britain in the 1960s and 1970s, the screens weren’t there, but the feeling.”
One hopes to be as engaging and curious at 50 as Boyle: every zag of conversation holds a gleeful zig in turn. But in the movie, larger metaphors, say of the spaceship as an ark, as civilization, as the human heart, seem to emerge on their own. “If they’re there, you try to heavily disguise them!” A burst of laughter. “Things evolve, don’t they? The great thing about space movies, you shouldn’t be too prescriptive about it, I think people like to use space as an experiment, who knows what they’ll find?”
Boyle describes one of the unsettling ideas he used to make his actors think in a more tactile fashion about the story: the table, the glass, the chair they sat in, themselves: shattered stardust, re-formed, where we came from, where we’ll all go. It’s a noble and oddly Eastern destination for the narrative. Toward the climax, there’s an extended sequence that in real time would take less than a breath, and Boyle stretches it majestically.
“What is literally happening…” Boyle starts, jumps up, the bright Chicago sky to the west bursting through forty-fourth floor windows, “What’s happening is that behind him, when he gets inside the bomb, the bomb is detonating. That’s a billionth of a second, if it’s that. But nobody knows, if you’re pulled into the sun, the gravity of the sun, the speed would be so colossal, no one knows what would happen. Would you flatten? Would you stop?” He laughs. “No one knows what would happen to perception, if there’s any perception left. So you’ve got to try and fine find a way, of visually, of announcing that all. When he puts his hand up like that, that’s that capsule we sent off into deep space, there’s a woman and a man naked, and his hand is up like that. Somebody’ll notice that!” [Photo © 2007 Ray Pride.]

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