Quotes By Danny Boyle

Come a crisis, we want other people.

I have this theory that your first film is always your best film in some way. I always try to get back to that moment when you're not relying on things you've done before.

If you take a loud pride in anything, people will rightly shoot you down.

A lot of film directors are quite scared of actors. They are a bit of a nightmare sometimes, but I like them. It looks like cunning, but you try to get extra things from them all the time, by stealth, by making them feel confident, so they trust you and you can push a bit.

I love that sense of change that you'd get in pop music every three minutes, every four minutes.

My dad was a labourer and my mum had exactly the same job as Noel Gallagher's mum - she was a dinner lady at our local school. Everyone comes over from Ireland and they get the same jobs.

I am a sci-fi fan.

I grew up in a city, I'm a city person - I go on holiday and I'm bored.

Some of us are interested in directors, but really the vast majority of us are interested in actors. You experience the films through the actors, so they're all locked into your imagination in some kind of layer of fantasy or hatred or wherever they settle into your imagination.

I always say to anybody who's going over to America for the first time, 'Whatever you do, go and see a popular mainstream film with a big audience.' Because people shout out. You never get that in Britain. Everybody's so quiet, scared to laugh. It's like being in church.

Both of my sisters have been teachers and they used to say you get asked between 300 and 600 questions every day which you have to answer. That's exactly what directing is. And the vast majority of those questions are not very interesting really, but they need somebody to make a decision - a good one or a bad one - and they follow it.

I was brought up a very strict Catholic and I don't practice anymore or anything.

I'm a big sports fan. Football. Cricket.

I learned with 'The Beach' that I'm a bit better lower down the radar.

I love watching the Bond movies obviously and I grew up reading the books as a kid. I've always loved them because of that.

You can't tell someone they are wrong about their own life.

I'm not a 'Star Wars' geek.

You know what actors are like; they moisturize every night. They're frozen in time.

It's not so much what you learn about Mumbai, it's what you learn about yourself, really. It's a funny old hippie thing, but it's true as well. You find out a lot about yourself and your tolerance, and about your inclusiveness.

When they're good, there is nothing like a big film.

I mean suspense, twists are almost impossible these days.

That survival instinct, that will to live, that need to get back to life again, is more powerful than any consideration of taste, decency, politeness, manners, civility. Anything. It's such a powerful force.

As soon as you think you can do whatever you want and you have whatever great professional in the world waiting to work with you, then you are sunk.

I don't want to make pompous, serious films; I like films that have a kind of vivacity about them.

You can have great sequences with music, but if you don't have the acting you're bored after 15 minutes. Or not bored, but you're like, 'So what?'

If you have to be persuaded about something, you shouldn't do it.

Movies about space raise those questions of what we're doing here, and that inevitably introduces a spiritual dimension.

I've never done a film before where every single person in the audience knows the ending. I mean suspense, twists are almost impossible these days. People are blogging your endings from their cinema seats.

One of Dickens' biggest influences was the growth of London as a Victorian city, and the extremes being created as it expanded.

Although computer chips now are thinner, they're more powerful, they're not as reliable. You'd harvest computer chips from the 1980s from all around the world because they're reliable.