Danny Boyle on Depicting Murdoch, AI, Bond, and ‘28 Years Later’

Matt Belloni (0:05)

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Matt Belloni (1:11)

I'm Blair.

Our guest today really doesn't need an introduction. He's one of the lions of British filmmaking. I first got into his work probably 28 days later, train spotting that era, but he's an Oscar-winning filmmaker. He directed one of my favorite films of all time, Slumdog Millionaire, which is an amazing business story as much as a creative story considering that film was left for dead and then resurrected and grossed hundreds of millions of dollars in one best picture, which is still one of the best stories in Hollywood history. He has directed many, many films that you love, including a new film called Ink, which I very much enjoyed and I think you will too if you haven't seen it. It's especially topical these days, which of course I love. So please welcome Danny Boyle. So I want to start with a question because we'll get into the film. We'll get into Ink and what drew you to that. But one of the themes of the film is this notion of a disruptor and an outsider who comes into the media world, Rupert Murdoch in the 60s and 70s in the Fleet Street, sort of old media, kind of very hoity-toity British media and disrupts it.

And I kept thinking to myself while watching it and having followed your career, this is in some ways the Danny Boyle story. Do you consider yourself a disruptor in the same kind of way? And do you still to this day, all these years later, consider yourself a disruptor?

Danny Boyle (2:42)

That's a very glamorous sort of thing.

And I'm sure, maybe Murdoch saw himself that way. He certainly says in the film, he implies that in the film, about the way that Australians are viewed by the establishment coming to London in the 60s. But my point of reference was the other guy, Larry Lamb. So I saw the stage play, which was a wonderful event. But it was very, very much dominated by Murdoch and by Bertie Carvel's extraordinary performance of Murdoch. We're very lucky because we got, I had this very difficult job to tell Bertie that we were going to make a film. Because he got a Tony for his performance and an Olivier, I think, and I had to ring him up and say, I can't give you this part because I want a real Australian to play it. And but would you be in the film anyway? And bless him, he is, and he's wonderful in the film. He plays Hugh Cuddlet, the editor of The Daily Mirror, which was a great, the very dominant paper at the time.

When I saw his performance, I kept seeing the other guy and thought, it's that other guy's story. And I did, to be honest, identify with Larry Lam. He's from the North, like I'm from, and he has a bit of a chip on his shoulder about the way he's been treated by the South. And I, a lot of people from the North who mix it up in London and come to work in the establishment, have that.

It's one of the energies that drives you forward, really, and influences your own behaviour. And you could call that disrupter. You're not really conscious of it as a disrupter. You think of yourself more as a... I think of myself in punk terms like that. And punks are disrupters. But I like the energy of it more than anything else. I'm quite happy to do a film that... I love to do a film that connects everyone in the same place. I love that about cinema, that we all gather to celebrate something together. So I'm not...