For more than 30 years, in flashy, generally two-hour-long increments, Danny Boyle has made Britain seem like the coolest place in the world. His Britain is one of beautiful movie stars, pop-music montages and frenetic style. Think Ewan McGregor sliding out of a grotty Edinburgh toilet in Trainspotting. Or Cillian Murphy wandering barren London streets in 28 Days Later. It’s The Beach, weird pills, casual sex and “Born Slippy”. In this week’s 28 Years Later, his brutal and genre-shifting sequel to the 2002 zombie smash, innards splatter across a late-Nineties television set as it broadcasts Teletubbies. Children scream in terror. The choral, hip-hop din of Young Fathers blares on the soundtrack. Tinky-Winky does a curtsy. It’s enough to make you want to stand up and sing the bloody national anthem.
Sitting across from him – and his frequent collaborator Alex Garland – in a London hotel suite, I’ve just told him about this Boyle cool; this ability of his to present Britain as a bit less grey, naff and enraging than it often is. He gently chides me. “I’m loosely on the left,” he says. “And I think the only problem with the left is that we like to denigrate what we want to improve. Part of the danger of that is you don’t value what’s good about what we have.” Which is to say: yes, we sometimes stink, but good god are we capable of brilliance.
