Danny Boyle quotes:

That survival instinct, that will to live, that need to get back to life again, is more powerful than any consideration of taste, decency, politeness, manners, civility. Anything. It's such a powerful force.

My dad was a labourer and my mum had exactly the same job as Noel Gallagher's mum - she was a dinner lady at our local school. Everyone comes over from Ireland and they get the same jobs.

A lot of film directors are quite scared of actors. They are a bit of a nightmare sometimes, but I like them. It looks like cunning, but you try to get extra things from them all the time, by stealth, by making them feel confident, so they trust you and you can push a bit.

I'm a big sports fan. Football. Cricket.

It's not so much what you learn about Mumbai, it's what you learn about yourself, really. It's a funny old hippie thing, but it's true as well. You find out a lot about yourself and your tolerance, and about your inclusiveness.

I've sort of escaped my background, as people often do, through art and culture.

Its easy to like the most popular films, but I have a great fondness for A Life Less Ordinary.

I've just been to the Taj Mahal which I'd never been to and I'm not a very romantic kind of guy but it is the most romantic thing I've ever seen.

Always changing genres, making very different films is a good idea. It's a way of making yourself feel vulnerable again, getting back to that innocence. As is working within a circumspect budget.

I don't want to make pompous, serious films; I like films that have a kind of vivacity about them.

The great thing with film is that it doesn't have an ego. It's just a film. Everybody that makes them has an ego, and the problem with awards and stuff like that is that it always affects the egos, and everyone gets stained by it in some way. And that can be fine and very innocent, but it can be horrible as well.

People say you never remember anybody who dies in movies, and it's true, you don't. You don't even remember people who disappear.

The problem with being British... I don't know if it's me being British or being raised a strict Catholic, but you never really enjoy success.

I love watching the Bond movies obviously and I grew up reading the books as a kid. I've always loved them because of that.

Even though one of them is about an Edinburgh junkie and ones a little boy of eight in Manchester, you want them to always portray their world in such a vivid way that the audience can disappear inside the story.

One of Dickens' biggest influences was the growth of London as a Victorian city, and the extremes being created as it expanded.

I have this theory that your first film is always your best film in some way. I always try to get back to that moment when you're not relying on things you've done before.

Originally I'm a big pop-music aficionado, that's my love.

Celluloid will be the next decade's black and white.

Both of my sisters have been teachers and they used to say you get asked between 300 and 600 questions every day which you have to answer. That's exactly what directing is. And the vast majority of those questions are not very interesting really, but they need somebody to make a decision - a good one or a bad one - and they follow it.

I love that sense of change that you'd get in pop music every three minutes, every four minutes.

I want people to leave the cinema feeling that something's been confirmed for them about life.

The great thing about space films generally, with the exception of Apollo 13, is that big stars tend not to work in space and I think that's because space is an equaliser. It makes everyone the same really and suits an ensemble cast and actors who are prepared to work with each other.

Although I behave in a quite reserved way in my personal life, give me a stage and I'll be as flamboyant as I can.

Actors want to impress at the beginning, so you take advantage of that by suddenly saying, 'Right, you're here for two weeks.' What you're doing is creating a siege mentality.

We want to see drama told in a cathartic way, with power, with emotion where you empathize and then you're frightened. All those feelings charge up in you and you feel for the story.

The sun is the most important thing in everybody's life, whether you're a plant, an animal or a fish, and we take it for granted.

I haven't got anything against films that are about the minutia of relationships or customs, but I love extremes.

I like action movies, even though I think action movies are kind of derided now. But there is something extraordinary about action movies, which is absolutely linked to the invention of cinema and what cinema is and why we love it.

I don't want to make pompous, serious films.

To be a film-maker, you have to lead. You have to be psychotic in your desire to do something. People always like the easy route. You have to push very hard to get something unusual, something different.

You can do anything you like - really - but this [Sci-Fi] is absolutely disciplined, it's Zen, you have to be absolutely focused in an area. You have to zone into an area and you then you can achieve when you get there. It's really weird!

I like films that have a kind of vivacity about them.

I don't want people to sit there and objectively watch the film. I want them to experience it as something that's under their skin, so you try to make the films really tactile.

As soon as you think you can do whatever you want and you have whatever great professional in the world waiting to work with you, then you are sunk.

Movies about space raise those questions of what we're doing here, and that inevitably introduces a spiritual dimension.

I've never done a film before where every single person in the audience knows the ending. I mean suspense, twists are almost impossible these days. People are blogging your endings from their cinema seats.

There are three huge, titanic, space movies which if you ever make a film [about space] you cannot avoid. You may want to avoid them but you cannot. I've never known a genre like it where you are dictated to by these films, 2001, Alien, and Tarkovsky's Solaris.

I've always wanted to do a space movie.

My kids are too old to remember this now but, when they were much younger, I swore to them if this miracle ever happened, I would receive it in the spirit of Tigger from Winnie the Pooh, and thats what that was.

I mean suspense, twists are almost impossible these days.

When you're in zero gravity everything moves at the same speed and nothing stops it. If you throw something it travels forever but it still travels at the speed you threw it at. To make it plausible, movies have chosen to show it in slow motion.

Brian Cox is the nicest guy, but he's so arrogant.

I'd love to do a modern-day musical that's full of original music. To get your contemporaries to sing and dance without looking foolish and for it to be transformational and magical and all those things a musical is supposed to be.

Actors are steeped in a world of agents and where the next job is coming from and what are their expenses and what is the hotel like. You want to take them out of that world and dump them into another world, so that when you meet them on the screen they don't seem like the guy who was in two others movies that year.

It's a good place when all you have is hope and not expectations.

It's easy to like the most popular films, but I have a great fondness for 'A Life Less Ordinary'.

I grew up in a city, I'm a city person - I go on holiday and I'm bored.

I am a sci-fi fan.

I love huge movies. Not sure I am the guy to make them, but you can rely on me being there watching them.

Good storytelling for me is not so much technical expertise, which I know is applauded often; it's actually freshness of approach. It does mean you sometimes stumble and fall and make a horrible mess of things in seeking that freshness, but you should always keep trying to do that.

There's lots of things that can be solved with cash.

People say you never remember anybody who dies in movies, and it's true, you don't. You don't even remember people who disappear. Although the moment that it happens might be terribly sad and moving, five minutes later, if you're asked to remember that person, you go, "Oh right, yeah, yeah!" 'Cause you're just moving forward.

There is a Steve [Jobs] that Apple would like to actually present to the public. They have a character, Steve, and they want to keep that story going. And it's very important that writers challenge that occasionally and not just trust their parent companies to tell them.

If you have to be persuaded about something, you shouldn't do it.

The awards season gives a chance for independent films to have a bit of longevity in the press and the media.

I learned with 'The Beach' that I'm a bit better lower down the radar.

Directing is a mixture of compromise and perfectionism. When you lose the judgment of which is more important at any particular moment, you're time is over. They find you out and send you packing.

The individual will to survive is often seen as just that, an individual thing. In fact, it's sort of a gene we all carry and like a network of computers it all contributes in some way to when it's individually needed.

Some of us are interested in directors, but really the vast majority of us are interested in actors. You experience the films through the actors, so they're all locked into your imagination in some kind of layer of fantasy or hatred or wherever they settle into your imagination.

I dont see much difference between it and the other films though I can see on a rational and intelligent level there is a big difference.

Theres a certain truth that you do end up making the same film again and again so if you vary the genre you have a chance of breaking that cycle.

One of the things in the Mary Shelley [Frankenstein] is that the creature tells his story, so this begins with the creature's point of view. So, it literally starts with the creature opening his eyes and is born - but is obviously in his 30s. But because they're the creator and the created we thought it would be really interesting if they could look at each other every other night and play each other's roles.

Although computer chips now are thinner, they're more powerful, they're not as reliable. You'd harvest computer chips from the 1980s from all around the world because they're reliable.

I find it difficult enough being called "Mr. Boyle," which as I age I'm increasingly called.

You can't tell someone they are wrong about their own life.

For us, destiny always feels... if you obey, it's almost a passive thing.

It just seduces you when you read a story and your brain relates to it. You recognize or connect with it. You identify with it; you're bound to.

If you take a loud pride in anything, people will rightly shoot you down.

I always think, when there's stuff that people don't like, I always say that if I have another success, I'll enjoy it more, but you don't really.

Come a crisis, we want other people.

I'm not a 'Star Wars' geek.

Everybody expects you to be qualified to talk about your films, but in a way, you're the least qualified person to talk about them. When you're finished, you don't watch them at all.

I'd love to do a cop film in America. That's a genre I absolutely adore.

Your first film is always your best film, in a way. There's something about your first film that you never ever get back to, but you should always try. It's that slight sense of not knowing what you're doing, because the technical skills you learn - especially if you have a film that works, that has some kind of success - are beguiling. The temptation is to use them again, and they're not necessarily good storytelling techniques.

I kind of call myself an atheist, I suppose - although quite a spiritual atheist, I hope.

I'm always after putting people in extreme circumstances. I'm always after not knowing what I'm doing in those extreme circumstances.

I trained in the theatre.

To force yourself out of the comfort zone, the main ingredient is trying to work in a world where you haven't been before, that you don't know the rules of. And that involves a lot of research, so you begin to see where the other people have been, but you are starting from as vulnerable and as low a point as possible.

I made this film 'The Beach,' which didn't take place in a city, and it didn't really suit me.

I tend to score with songs from Western pop music.

I was brought up a very strict Catholic and I don't practice anymore or anything.

Film industry is a pretty brutal business. If you fall too far behind, all of the perfectionism in the world won't save you.

I find that people find a way out of misery through humor and it's humor that's often unacceptable to people who are not in quite such a state of misery.

The extraordinary thing about India is that it's such a family place. It's full of families everywhere.

I always say to anybody who's going over to America for the first time, 'Whatever you do, go and see a popular mainstream film with a big audience.' Because people shout out. You never get that in Britain. Everybody's so quiet, scared to laugh. It's like being in church.

I say to first time filmmakers that when they're asked, they should go to America as you're far more likely to get a chance.

If you love a book you tend not to follow its surface value, you follow the other things in it.

If I was American, I think I'd live in New York, because I like that East Coast mentality. There's nothing wrong with Hollywood. If you want to be a big time filmmaker, you should go to Hollywood.

I haven't got anything against films that are about the minutia of relationships or customs, but I love extremes. I love taking a bunch of characters and it usually is a bunch of characters, and you throw something at them that's usually extreme, like a bag of money, or you send them out to explode a nuclear device on the surface of the sun. And those extremes are wonderful for drama.

But interestingly its [Star City's] technology is all 1970s - still. In fact, it's alarming because you think, "You're not going to send someone up into space in something that old, are you?" But it works and it always has worked and it doesn't fail and it's incredibly reliable.

Basically, actors arrive in a bubble. They have a little sealed bubble around them and it's basically [comprised of] their agents, their last film, their next film, their press agent, and their per diems - all these things, they cocoon themselves with and you have to puncture that bubble on each of them to make them be in your film.

To create the reality of space with this sense of suspension: nothing's happening, it's endless; we're traveling at 28,000 kilometers an hour but nothing's happening. Nothing! And you have to do that! There are all these rules you have to follow, I've never known anything like it.

You live your life and it ends quite quickly and all you can do with it is pass it on decently to someone else. Whether directly or indirectly, behave decently to other people.

Normally, I'm a very controlling director. Directors ARE controlling. It's part of the job, but there's various degrees of it and the constructs I normally work on are very controlling constructs.

It's interesting, the worse things get in cities, the tougher that cities get, the more brutal the humor is. The tougher [things] people face, the darker the sense of humor gets and I find that incredibly optimistic.

The perfect equation is form equals content. The style of the film reflects the story, and that's what you're always aiming for. You're not always necessarily successful at it, but that's the ambition that you're trying to do.

You use elements of noir, but you don't want it to be too noir-ish. You don't want it to be advertised as though you're asking people to go and watch an updated noir. I don't think they'll go do that. They want to see a modern story.

Clearly, you can think back and see that a character has had enormous odds stacked against him and has to overcome them. It's usually a guy, I'm afraid. But then you're setting up a new movie you have amnesia about these meetings, when you've discussed it more analytically.

What you do is take the power [popularity] gives you - which is very temporary and minor but significant - and use it. The danger is that you use it on a vanity project that no one wants to watch.

I always wanted to make this film or another film. I thought the worst thing you could do was to react to Slumdog's success in some way. I thought it would be really foolish.

There's lots of things that can be solved with cash. And there's occasional things that can't be solved with cash, which become a bureaucratic nightmare for some reason, and there's no distinction between the two.

Everybody knows Aaron Sorkin's scripts. There's a huge amount of lines. There's a huge amount of interchange. You gotta do a lot of learning to be able to get it up to pace.

We're trying to learn from [Olympic] Beijing, which could be very intimidating. We've learned to expect it's power, it majesty and that it completes a cycle of certain types of shows... I don't think any nation could do anything on that scale. We haven't got that money, and I don't think anybody would have the appetite for that kind of expenditure and that kind of control, so we're going to try and do something a bit more intimate and try and start again... start a new cycle for these kind of ceremonies.

The most important thing about Olympics, of course, is the games and not the opening ceremony. It's weird the way it gets inverted sometimes.

If the American taxpayer knew how much they paid per person to put Neil Armstrong on the moon they would never have paid it. It was hidden from them deliberately because the costs were astronomical.

It's a nice way to put the focus back on this simple act... if someone creates you.