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How Danny Boyle’s Millions turned into a feast of colour and light
A fter tackling everything from druggies (Trainspotting) to zombies (28 Days Later),
director Danny Boyle con- tinues to demonstrate his versatility with a breezy, single-parent family fanta- sy. Millions is the story of
10-year-old Anthony (Lewis McGibbon) and his younger brother Damian (Alex Etel), who suddenly stumble across a quarter of a million pound haul from an audacious robbery.
For various reasons, spanning the moral divide, they decide to keep the cash for themselves. The only prob- lem is that Britain is about to join the Euro, so they only have seven days in which to enjoy the loot.
Co-starring James Nesbitt, as their widower dad, and sometime TV pre-
senter Daisy Donovan, Millions is from the prolific pen of Frank Cottrell Boyce, whose more recent credits include Code 46, 24 Hour Party People, The Claim and Hilary And Jackie.
Boyle was keen to explore an area of Britain known and inhabited by many yet rarely seen on the screen. Since Cottrell Boyce is from Liverpool and Boyle is from Manchester, they decided to settle on a place in between.
“Normally in Britain, we either make films about the upper classes, in period dramas, or we make them about the working classes,” explained Boyle.
“But actually the vast majority of people live in places like the one we tried to make this film about, on a new estate. That’s where a lot of peo- ple live and I thought that was where the movie should be honed. I didn’t
want to set it in Manchester or Liverpool, I wanted it to feel like one of those satellite areas that so many, many, many people live in and are yet ignored. Films usually aren’t made about them.
“So we went from town to town between Liverpool and Manchester, and finally we found the perfect estate in Widnes,” added Boyle.
“The challenge was to make the film full of colour and light,” said Boyle. “It’s easy to slip into a different kind of real- ism of the north because I think the colour and light are to do with the spirit of the people, because the humour of the people of the north is really special.”
To transform the images in his head into moving pictures, Boyle turned again to cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle BSC DFF, with
whom he collaborated on the visually groundbreaking, transatlantic box- office hit, 28 Days Later, which was shot on high-definition video.
Boyle and Dod Mantle, perhaps best known for his Dogme film collab- orations like Festen, Mifune and Dogville, took a similar approach to Millions and constantly convened to discuss fresh ways to photograph the film at every stage.
The fact that the events of Boyle’s film occur in the run-up to Christmas posed something of a problem for Dod Mantle.
“It’s kind of schizophrenic because it’s a winter film, but we’ve shot in summer doing sixty per cent of the film in exterior day sunshine. We also shot a small percentage of the film in the studio.”
Photo main: A saintly fantasy in Millions; Right l-r: Pearce Quigley and James Nesbitt; Lewis McGibbon
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