Half a decade before launching his own franchise with “28 Days Later,” Danny Boyle rejected the chance to take on one of the biggest sci-fi film series of all time.
The director, who is now promoting his franchise installment “28 Years Later,” told THR that he turned down directing the fourth “Alien” film, 1997’s “Alien: Resurrection,” due to how much CG would be involved.
Boyle was the producers’ first choice to direct the film after his breakout success with “Shallow Grave” and “Trainspotting.” However, Jean-Pierre Jeunet directed “Alien: Resurrection” instead.
“I met Sigourney Weaver and Winona Ryder, who were attached to it,” Boyle said of the early talks. “So obviously it was pretty serious. They were wonderful. But it was the early days of the CG crossover. That moment where it was transitioning. And I couldn’t handle the CG.”
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Boyle continued of the Ridley Scott-created franchise, “I was very passionate about it, because I loved the ‘Alien’ idea. I just suddenly had a rare moment of clarity, thinking, ‘You are not the right guy for this.’ I went off to make ‘A Life Less Ordinary’ instead. That was 20th Century folks as well. I didn’t do ‘Alien’ and I went and made this flop for them instead! But it’s water under the bridge.”
Boyle, though, would go on to work more closely with computer-generated effects on films like “Sunshine” from 2007 and “127 Hours” from 2010, the latter arriving after he won Best Picture for “Slumdog Millionaire.”
“You’re quite arrogant after the Oscars, which you can put to good use or bad use,” Boyle said. “I think we put it to good use, because [‘127 Hours’] was a film that wouldn’t have got made. But [writer Simon Beaufoy and I] had a very clear idea of how to make it work, a narrow, focused way that we’d never get out of the canyon. Or if we did, it was just through his hallucinations. And [James] Franco was amazing in it. There’s a very disturbing sequence where he cuts his arm off, which is technically, brilliantly done in terms of prosthetics. But if you look at the shot on him, he’s just acting. We had quite a few cases of people fainting.”
So many people fainted, in fact, that medical professionals were waiting outside of screenings. “I turned up for what I thought was going to be a great day out at Pixar,” Boyle said of one screening of the film. “There were ambulances outside the theater.”
He added of the reactions to the gruesome effects, “Everybody says, ‘yeah, that’s because you can see the nerve being torn.’ And actually, I think it’s because you can see Franco’s eyes at that moment.”
Read the IndieWire interview with Boyle about his latest feature, “28 Years Later,” here.
