Before I share my experience of reading the book, Danny Boyle: In His Own Words by Amy Raphael, I must confess to one thing. Although I had pretty much seen every cult film by this iconic director, it wasn’t till his Oscar-winning Slumdog Millionaire made the headlines worldwide did I realise that it was him whose movies I had enjoyed all along. But it doesn’t change the fact that Danny has plenty genius rolled up in his sleeves. Manohla Dargis wrote of Boyle in a review that in him, …the milk of human kindness often seems to curdle rather than flow… and it was quite the statement that would sum up this person.
His contribution to English cinema is monumental and when we count the directors who put Britain on the world visual entertainment map, Danny Boyle surely will be far from ignored. The book is in the form of a series of interviews revolving around his various releases, pacey and inter-weaving his movies from one question to the next, and yet somewhere related, all recorded at different points on the time line. Sometimes the discussions and questions get rather too specific and unless you are an absolute film buff you may find yourself a bit impatient to flip on to something a tad easier to relate with. But the book does a good job of sharing the pain and pathos of putting together a film. It explains why a script is nothing unless handled sensitively by a director, who not only understands the underlying emotions but manages to convey them to the viewer.
To conclude, Mr Boyle has done some very commendable stuff in his still-ripe career, I, personally, am a bigger fan of certain other directors, working certain other genres. The book is a good comfortable read, it is the kind of book to sit back in the recliner and dive into, sometimes I found myself lacking the precise enthusiastic curiosity to know what would happen next, a requisite in helping people finish a book at Blitzkrieg speed. I realised that I know stuff about the man that I may never actually repeat in any social gathering, not because it is unspeakable but because everybody would have to be excused for not being interested at all and I would risk losing even the few superficial friends that I have strived to acquire.
Magandeep is the author of Wine Wisdom