Quotes By Danny Boyle

For us, destiny always feels... if you obey, it's almost a passive thing.

The great thing with film is that it doesn't have an ego. It's just a film. Everybody that makes them has an ego, and the problem with awards and stuff like that is that it always affects the egos, and everyone gets stained by it in some way. And that can be fine and very innocent, but it can be horrible as well.

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.

If you love a book you tend not to follow its surface value, you follow the other things in it.

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?'

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

Although I behave in a quite reserved way in my personal life, give me a stage and I'll be as flamboyant as I can.

Celluloid will be the next decade's black and white.

It's easy to like the most popular films, but I have a great fondness for 'A Life Less Ordinary'.

The problem with being British... I don't know if it's me being British or being raised a strict Catholic, but you never really enjoy success.

Brian Cox is the nicest guy, but he's so arrogant.

I've always wanted to do a space movie.

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.

Actors are steeped in a world of agents and where the next job is coming from and what are their expenses and what is the hotel like. You want to take them out of that world and dump them into another world, so that when you meet them on the screen they don't seem like the guy who was in two others movies that year.

I find that people find a way out of misery through humor and it's humor that's often unacceptable to people who are not in quite such a state of misery.

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

I am a sci-fi fan.

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

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'd love to do a modern-day musical that's full of original music. To get your contemporaries to sing and dance without looking foolish and for it to be transformational and magical and all those things a musical is supposed to be.

I like action movies, even though I think action movies are kind of derided now. But there is something extraordinary about action movies, which is absolutely linked to the invention of cinema and what cinema is and why we love it.

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

I don't want people to sit there and objectively watch the film. I want them to experience it as something that's under their skin, so you try to make the films really tactile.

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

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

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

I'm not a 'Star Wars' geek.