Quotes By Danny Boyle

I am a sci-fi fan.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

I'm not a 'Star Wars' geek.

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.

I always think, when there's stuff that people don't like, I always say that if I have another success, I'll enjoy it more, but you don't really.

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

I love huge movies. Not sure I am the guy to make them, but you can rely on me being there watching them.

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

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'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.

I kind of call myself an atheist, I suppose - although quite a spiritual atheist, I hope.

I tend to score with songs from Western pop music.

People say you never remember anybody who dies in movies, and it's true, you don't. You don't even remember people who disappear.

Always changing genres, making very different films is a good idea. It's a way of making yourself feel vulnerable again, getting back to that innocence. As is working within a circumspect budget.