Danny Boyle on new film festival Shuffle: I’m proud to be an East End boy

Olympic opening ceremony genius, Oscar-winning director and now film festival curator and local hero — is there anything that Danny Boyle can’t do, asks Nick Curtis
Shuffle: Danny Boyle and Kate Mactiernan curate a film festival on the site
6 August 2013

Oh, the glamour. Danny Boyle — film director, Oscar-winner, and greatest living Briton since he staged the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics — is sitting in a rain-moistened former mental facility in Bow, clutching a plastic pint glass. It’s Monday night, three days before the start of the film festival Shuffle, which the 56-year-old has curated at the derelict St Clement’s Hospital. It’s part of a wider programme of events, mostly organised by volunteers, marking a pioneering partnership between the Mayor of London and the UK’s first Community Land Trust. Commercial homes will fund affordable housing on the site, which will also hopefully become a hub for locals. Boyle has a vested interest: he is one.

“I’m from Manchester but I’m proud to be an adopted East End boy,” says Boyle. “I’ve lived around here for 30 years. I used to live in that tower block, Ennerdale House” — he waves a hand in the direction of a nearby ex-council high-rise — “and used to watch the hospital at work from my bedroom on the 17th floor.” Since it closed in 2005, St Clement’s has been shuttered up, presenting a brutal frontage to the brutal Bow Road, but it always had potential. “I live just over the road now and I always thought I’d love to film here,” Boyle continues. “My elder daughter Grace [he has two adult girls and a boy with former girlfriend Gail Stevens] has broken in here a couple of times. You know, the modern generation look for places for pop-up experiences and they never wait for permission.”

The person who got Boyle — and Grace too, incidentally — actively involved in the rebirth of St Clement’s is Kate MacTiernan, a 28-year-old Australian architect with impeccable connections; she’s married to Rohan Silva, the No 10 special adviser turned techpreneur. She sits between Boyle and a slab of electronics that is belching warmth into the makeshift cinema created inside the theatre and social club built for the patients in the 1950s. “I’m protecting you from the heat,” she tells Boyle, which is possibly not a metaphor.

“Kate introduced me to this wonderful idea of a Community Land Trust,” he says. “What right-minded person wouldn’t approve of that as a way of maintaining a community’s sense of itself rather than being forced out through house prices?” More importantly, he says, he came to St Clement’s to see volunteers planting gardens and hosting activities. It echoed the spirit of the 2012 opening ceremony, which was focused on volunteers, and he wondered how he could contribute.

“I’m completely useless at everything, but I can provide films free because I can bully people,” Boyle says. “Unfortunately they have to be my films, but I can guarantee that I will turn up for a Q&A because I live locally.” As well as his own works Shallow Grave, Trainspotting and Trance, he’s showing The Long Good Friday, which illustrates how much the East End and Docklands have changed; Withnail and I because it’s a cracking festival film; and screenings of the Olympics opening ceremony and his National Theatre production of Frankenstein. Composer A R Rahman is co-hosting a showing of their collaboration, Slumdog Millionaire, for which Boyle won his Oscar. “There’s also a film of mine that nobody’s seen,” Boyle adds, tantalisingly.

Why is the East End so special to him? “I come from a working-class background — that is a long time ago, and I am certainly not that now, but I have always felt very comfortable here,” he says. “I have always loved the diversity of the area: the problems and the dynamics of it give me a feeling of adrenaline.” He shot bits of his zombie drama 28 Days Later here, loves working at Three Mills Studios down the road, and felt immediately enthused when former mayor Ken Livingstone suggested the Olympics could regenerate Hackney Wick. “It will work,” says Boyle. “You get a vision of the Olympic Park in 20 years’ time as a place that ordinary families can come and enjoy.” Scrupulously, he adds that is “wonderful” that Boris Johnson is considering creating a second Community Land Trust in the Olympic Park.

Boyle is, in that wonderfully old-fashioned phrase, a “man of the Left”. He directed the Queen in the spoof James Bond portion of the opening ceremony, but turned down her subsequent offer of a knighthood because he preferred to be “an equal citizen” rather than a preferred subject. He’s chuffed, though, that Doreen Lawrence, who carried the Olympic flag in the opening ceremony, is now a Labour baroness: “She represents something that all right-minded people believe is really important — that an ordinary person can speak out about something that is wrong, and be proved right.”

How on earth did he cope, working with Dave and Boris to find something emblematically British? “Well, I’m a democrat first and foremost, so I will work with a democratically elected government and a democratically elected mayor,” he says. “But a job like that is timeless, and the responsibility is much broader than to any political persuasion, or whatever government happens to be in power at that moment.”

Did he never take the chance to bend Cameron’s ear about arts subsidy and film funding? “Ha ha ha, no, I use your [the media’s] good offices to encourage investment in the arts,” he says “For me, state subsidy of the arts is important, to protect its breadth, its diversity and the intrigue that it can throw up.” He was quoted recently as saying that the Olympic feelgood legacy had already been killed by the harsh economic climate but insists now that it lives on in projects such as St Clement’s, and in the hearts of the volunteer performers, who keep in touch on social media and whom he bumps into all the time.

Boyle is hoping to start work soon on an adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s Porno, which revisits the characters from the two men’s unlikely, heroin-fuelled hit Trainspotting, two decades on. “It is a serious proposition with an interesting idea behind it that is more than it being a sequel with commercial interest for people,” says Boyle. Meanwhile, he is casting a mystery project. “Not a film, something different,” he says. A play? “Something different.”

Don’t cuts to drama school grants mean that all our actors, like all our politicians, are toffs now? “I know that’s a perception,” he replies. “I can only tell you I had a day today casting actors from all sorts of backgrounds, which is very encouraging about the quality that is out there. I think we are pretty good at it, acting. I think there is something in our spine, to do with theatre, that gives us a confidence that even the Americans find intimidating.”

This is the fourth or fifth time I have met Boyle. He is slightly thinner of hair but otherwise as boyish and exuberant as ever (“Every litter needs a runt,” he told me when he was given a British Film Institute fellowship in 2010). He says he suffered no deflation after the opening ceremony was over, because it wasn’t down to him, but to everyone involved, and anyway he had a film, Trance, to be getting on with. He won’t talk about his brief romance with Trance’s leading lady, Rosario Dawson, so I ask if he went to the Anniversary Games in the Olympic Park two weeks ago. “No, I went to New York to see my daughter, then to Mexico,” he says, slightly sheepishly. “But I kept an eye on them. It was great to see that stadium full again.”

For more details, shufflefestival.com.

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