Danny Boyle came to the attention of most audiences with his adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s novel Trainspotting, the drugs/music/friendship/caper movie that still stands as a defining moment of ’90s cinema.
The logical idea is to leave well enough alone, but Irvine Welsh wrote a sequel, Porno, and Boyle would like to film it with Trainspotting‘s original cast. More to the point, since the second book takes place years later, he’d like to wait long enough for all the actors to be appropriately aged. That would be…about now. Or soon, as Boyle has it.
But Boyle and Ewan McGregor had a famous falling out and the project has always seemed like it would never happen. Probably for the best, as the source material is inferior to the original. But Boyle persists.
“We’ve had this plan for awhile now to make a film that’s generational,” he tells Cinematical.
“How they would be guys now who were clearly and visibly middle aged.
Well, what’s just happened in Britain is that they’re preparing to
release a new DVD of [Trainspotting], and they’ve done a
series of interviews for the special features on the DVD … and good
news is all the actors have come back to participate in these
interviews. So I think that’s a sign that if we do get them looking
right, they’ll be prepared to do it — that they’re getting to a point
where they’re thinking, ‘Yeah, that could be interesting.’ Because
everyone will have to be in the right frame of mind in order to do it;
they need to age a bit still. I want them to feel different … and
older.”
That being the case, there are big issues. Getting a solid script is one (my understanding is that Trainspotting writer John Hodge is still the man on the job) and shackling McGregor to the project is another. If someone could come back from the future and tell me that Porno (a) happened and (b) was a worthy, if very different, follow-up, great. As is, this one is hard to put much faith in. I’d rather see Boyle take his well-earned Slumdog cred and make something else.