Warning: Some Trance spoilers follow...
Trainspotting and 28 Days Later director Danny Boyle's is set to release his new mind-bending thriller Trance in U.S. theaters this weekend after premiering it in the U.K. last week. The film stars James McAvoy as Simon, a Londoner working at a renowned auction house. After loosing his memories following an injury sustained during an attempt to steal a Goya from an auction, Simon realizes he has inadvertently double-crossed violent and dangerous crime boss Franck (Vincent Cassel). Simon, an accomplice in the robbery, has taken the painting, and can't remember where he's left it. Franck and his team agree to allow Simon to see powerful hypnotherapist Elizabeth (Rosario Dawson) to isolate the location of the lost work of art. The further Elizabeth probes into Simon's subconscious, the more layered and intricate the mystery of the missing painting and Simon's lost memories becomes.
We had the opportunity to sit down with Boyle recently to talk about the film, the appeal of this genre and what he learned about the creation of a thriller. We do talk about some of the finer, more spoilery points of the film. In fact, a fairly big twist is openly discussed. So if you haven't seen Trance, and don't want to have they mystery ruined for you, you may want to go watch it and then head back here to read the interview once you have.
IGN: When I think about your work, one of the things that strikes me is that you're always trying to stretch, take on new genres and new ideas. Was there a specific aspect of the thriller that you wanted to tackle?
Danny Boyle: I mean I love thrillers, personally I don't think that there are enough of them. I think there should be way more. Within that, I like to make films that slightly confound the type, the genre. So there are elements in Trance of the art heist; but it's not really about a stolen painting. You're lead to believe it is, but it isn't really. It's about something else that's stolen, which are his memories. It's about stolen memories, really. There's an amnesia trope in it as well. But a character says, "amnesia is bullox.” I love that. It's actually about Simon choosing to forget rather than it being an amnesia thriller. It's also got elements in it of noir, both in the crime portion and she [Rosario Dawson] behaves for a time very much like a femme fatal. She's manipulating men with her allure, her beauty and her sensuality. And yet her story is not the classic femme fatal because it's actually a story with real damage in it. And she is, understandably, working and using all of her skills to protect her life, really. Because the violence threatens her life. So it has a heart to it, surprisingly. A noir thriller wouldn't normally have a heart. We often say that you use the genre as kind of a mothership to kind of feed you into the mainstream, but then you're vigorously redecorating the mothership all the time so that it's not quite what it seems. That's what we try to do.
IGN: Also, you know if the film is about things being stolen and regained, for her, her dignity has been stolen, in a way. And the whole underlying current in the film is about her getting that back to some degree.
Boyle: Yes, it is. Why she programs him to steal the painting is a really interesting question. You could argue that it's revenge for what he's done to her. You could argue that it’s desire for money, for a beautiful work of art. Or you could argue that it's actually to destroy him; because if you're involved in stealing a painting from your own profession, then that's the end of you. You'll probably get caught. So it could be all of those things, really. It's a really interesting question.
IGN: One thing about thrillers is that so much attention is given to the turn or the twist. Maybe starting in the '40s with the pulp novels, or in film Double Indemnity and so forth. These days it's a real challenge to “trick” the audience. People are so savvy. Is that something you thought about going into this? What the twist would mean and how people would respond to it?
Boyle: Yes, it is. And it's a key factor the whole time you're making the film. When you shoot the film you tend to be over protective of the secret. So actually, your first cut of the film is often completely baffling. The audience would not have a clue what's going on, because you’ve been oversensitive [to giving things away]. You're going, ‘If that character suddenly looks at that other character then the whole audience will know the secret and go, oh, I get it!' And the truth is you have to lay in clues. You have to relax and make sure there are clues. Because although you hope an audience doesn't assemble the clues live, in retrospect they have to believe that there have been clues along the way. Otherwise they feel like, ‘Oh it's just a revelation of nothing!’ And that's one of the techniques of it. It was interesting to me; I've never done a film like that before. So for instance, I don't know if you remember, there's a lovely bit in it which is used as a motif throughout, which is James McAvoy kind of knocking on glass, "tap, tap, tap." In the original cut of the film that only happened once, right at the end. We realized when we watched it that we should lace it throughout the film as a motif. So that his character obviously knows something is wrong and he's trying to figure out, ‘What is this surface?’ Or later, when he see's Franck with the half head, it's Simon's subconscious telling him that something's wrong. He can't really see it, but he can feel that something is going on. And obviously that works for an audience as well, they're thinking, 'Oh there's something else going on here.'
IGN: I also kind of read that 'tap, tap, tap' as his unconscious saying to him, "Wake up, wake up, wake up - remember!"
Boyle: Yes, it is. In fact, we didn't call it his unconscious. James [McAvoy] had a very useful phrase for it. He called it the executive part of his brain. Which supposedly controls automatic things like breathing. We don't think about breathing, we just do it because the executive is running that part of our body on our behalf at all times. It's telling your body, 'Breath. Just keep breathing or you'll die.' And it was like part of the executive was suddenly alarming him. It didn't quite know how to put it into words for him, but it was an alarm system that if only he could figure it out he would be able to unravel it. He would be able to figure out what's happening to him.
Danny Boyle on the set of Trance.
IGN: Circling back to the idea of the twist a little bit. This is adapted from a previous TV movie, but when you read the script did you want to work at it at all and make sure that you felt like, 'Okay, this is really tight, this is really clear, this is something new that will surprise us and delight us?' Or was it there for you on the page and so it was more about how to execute it?
Boyle: The delight of a film like this is that you have three lead characters. So you get three lead actors, and the dynamic of the film depends partly on their own contribution to it. You know the strength of their performances. And the film flexes and changes, it does in the editing because you feature more of them or less of them at a particular moment. You know you could do a different cut of the film and change it, emphasize another character in a different way. So it feels very live, it doesn't feel preset. Obviously it is with the script to a degree. But the emphasis within that is very much to do with your lead performances, and how they balance against each other.
IGN: One other thing I notice in your work is that there are often these visual representations of the inner workings of a character's psyche. But this is quite literally delving into a visual representation of Simon’s unconscious. I love how it was executed. What was the process for you in deciding how to design that?
Boyle: How do you manifest that, visually? Yeah. Well it's a very obvious thing, but that's the reason it works so well. You use multiple reflective surfaces. Mirrors and reflective glass are a part of our natural environment, but you overemphasize them so that when you see a character you're seeing two or three versions of that character. And that does work on the audiences’ executive or subconscious mind, and it's telling you there isn't just one story here. You know he appears to be like this, but there's another side to it. You know there's another side to this guy, or three sides. You try and use reflective surfaces like that. That lead us to what is in the modern sense the most acute reflective surface, which is the iPad; because it's highly reflective and yet we trust it. A young modern professional like James McAvoy in his job would actually trust the iPad because he places his life there. You know the details of our lives, secrets, they all go in there. And yet when she tells him in a trance that the memories are locked inside this iPad it comforts him as well, because you can control it. You can stop it, start it, rewind it, fast-forward it. So you can use it as a plot device, but also it's also a psychological tool that reassures him and it also moves forward some of the drama of the film. When we talked about using the iPad the concern was that using a fashionable piece of technology in a movie dates it very quickly, because these things progress so quickly. But I'm really glad we did. It’s interesting, like just this week Samsung launched a new phone...I don't know whether you've seen this, but it actually watches your eyeballs as you're working on the phone. And if you look away from it, it switches off. So these devices are actually watching you. Who knows where they're going to go in their next iteration. The bond we have with them is going to become stronger and stronger and more and more telling, really.
IGN: That's creepy. You should do a sci-fi film about it.
Boyle: Yeah, it's going to get that way. Yeah.
Stay tuned for an update on Boyle’s upcoming Trainspotting sequel.
Trance opens in U.S. theatres this Friday, April 5.
Roth Cornet is an Entertainment Editor for IGN. You can follow her on Twitter at @RothCornet and IGN at Roth-IGN.
Source : ign[dot]com
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