Quotes By Danny Boyle

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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 am a sci-fi fan.

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

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

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

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'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.

I tend to score with songs from Western pop music.

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.

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.

The extraordinary thing about India is that it's such a family place. It's full of families everywhere.

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

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

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.

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.