Hey, Hey, We're The Junkies! - The Making Of Trainspotting
Choose a cult novel written in impenetrable Scots, choose to make a film about the demonised of all drugs, choose a cast made up of nobodies and the bloke who played Hamish Macbeth...
A movie that started people talking about a British film renaissance, lo-fi thriller Shallow Grave bestowed a degree of stardom upon its leading man Ewan McGregor and made director Danny Boyle, producer Andrew Macdonald and screenwriter John Hodge the hottest creative team of the age.
With such a sizeable hit under their belts questions began to be asked about what the chaps would do next. Something American with lots of special effects would have been the most financially sensible option. Aware that they were in a unique position as far as clout, kudos and budget were concerned. Boyle and friends instead chose to do something that trod the fine line between clever and stupid - they made a film about heroin.
Although it had sold over 400,000 copies in the UK, Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting did not have ‘film adaptation’ written all over it. For one thing, it was an episodic tale with no real story. For another it was written in a sort of bastard Scots that made Roddy Doyle’s formidable Barrytown vernacular seem like Dr Seuss. And more pertinently still, it detailed the lives of heroin-addicted, AIDS-riddled Edinburgh junkies. As unsexy as it seemed controversial, no one envied Boyle and his collaborators the task of bringing Trainspotting to the big screen.
Of course, looking at the finished film now, it’s hard to understand why anyone was so worried. Streamlined, accomplished, witty, wise, Trainspotting isn’t a great film in spite of its intravenous drug use, child neglect, pub violence and HIV - it’s brilliance lies in the fact that it addresses all of these subjects with the same mixture of style, seriousness and common sense.
And while Boyle liberally employs the film language of Martin Scorsese (the voiceover, the imaginative movement between scenes, the use of source music), this is a film that successes because of its very Britishness; the lack of sentimentality, the hungry-lion performances of Ewan McGregor, Ewen Bremner and Jonny Lee Miller, the beery majesty of Underworld’s Born Slippy.
A cross between a manic, mass-market art movie, the Thatcher-loathing cinema of Ken Loach and the very best of MTV, Trainspotting was a film that expanded minds just as it opened doors. Put another way, it’s all the proof you’ll ever need that, when Francois Truffaut’s claimed ‘British cinema’ was a contradiction in terms, he didn’t know what he was talking about.
Ewan McGregor (actor, Mark ‘Rent Boy’ Renton): Why Trainspotting? Well, heroin users mainline along their arms and iject up and down on the main vein. Station to station, they call it. And for addicts, everything narrows down to that goal. Maybe trainspotters are like that, obsessively taking down numbers.
Irvine Welsh (author/actor, Mikey Forrester): I wanted to create characters who speak for themselves, in their own conflict. I don’t want them to prove my ideas.
Danny Boyle (director): Reading Irvine’s book was an overwhelming experience. You felt like you’d been asleep for years and suddenly woken up. This landscape, which is normally just full of these terrible victims, was written with ferocious imagaination and drive for life - even when the drugs were draining the life away. And we thought, ‘That’s what we’ve gotta get. This had got to be the most energetic film you’eve ever seen - about something that ultimately ends up in purgatory, or worse.”
Irvine Welsh: My writing acknowledges that drugs are now unremarkable. As society changed under the Thatcher in the 1980s, drugs and drink became less recreational and more a way of life, because people had fuck all else to do.
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