- 19/06/2025
From Young Fathers to Oasis to The Clash to Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Danny Boyle and Alex Garland's movies are stuffed with outstanding tunes. They take NME on a journey through 20 years of soundtracks, spilling some secrets on the way...
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MusicTranscript
00:00Hi, I'm Alex from NME, and today I'm joined by one of the country's most
00:12acclaimed filmmaking duos, a proper filmmaking duo. It's Alex Garland and Danny Boyle. How we doing?
00:18Hey, how you doing? Yeah. I wanted to start by getting you in the headspace of when the last
00:24film came out. So I've got a picture here of a certain two filmmakers at Sundance 2003.
00:30Oh God, yes. Take a look at that. No, I've absorbed that.
00:35I remember that t-shirt. I remember that t-shirt. I actually remember, I remember that.
00:39I just remember the whole thing. So yeah, absorb that, and I want you to tell me a lesson each
00:45that you think you've learned in the intervening time about making movies.
00:50The people don't want to come. Nothing will stop them. That's very true.
00:56It's a miracle that you make some things that you think are the best thing you've ever done,
01:02and nobody's interested. And you make something else, and suddenly you can't. So we made this,
01:07yeah, I made this film Slumdog Millionaire. You couldn't stop people coming to see it. It was just,
01:12you could have tried to kind of stage atrocities outside cinemas. And then other ones you make
01:18with an equal affection and love, we made this film together, Sunshine. So proud of the film,
01:23nobody went to see it. So it's a weird one, that one. That is something, I say that, it's not a,
01:29it's a slightly crafty answer to avoid detail, but it is true.
01:33It's true. It's true. It's absolutely true.
01:35Yeah. What about your audience?
01:36Well, this will embarrass Danny, but that's one of the good things about doing these interviews.
01:41The only reason. But it is true. So 28 days later was the first film I ever worked on,
01:48and I learned a lot about filmmaking in a super accelerated way during the making of that film.
01:56Then more than two decades pass, work on a lot of films, some of them I work on as a director,
02:01as well as a writer, and so accumulate a whole bunch more knowledge. And I did learn,
02:09as one does, you never stop learning. It just never stops. There's a good phrase,
02:13here's a phrase, the larger the searchlight, the larger the circumference of the unknown.
02:17So the more you learn, the more you understand that you don't know. That's absolutely true.
02:21Have you got a list of those written down somewhere?
02:23Yeah, we did. We just Googled them before you came in. But in this film, I would have thought,
02:30in anticipation, in fact, I did think in anticipation, I had learned enough to be able to
02:38anticipate Danny and the way he would work and where certain decisions would lead. But actually,
02:44it was incredibly similar to the first experience. And there were things that, in effect, in a good
02:54way, not in an alarming way, made no sense to me, that then made enormous sense later on. One of them
03:02you were just talking about, which is shooting in a way that bakes in a kind of unreliability and relying on the unreliability.
03:10It's pretty advanced to be able to do that. And so my thing is to do with being behind a gradient and
03:20discovering that I'm still, not 28 years later, but close, still behind the gradient. But that's a good thing.
03:26Like, it is a good thing, but it would be that. Tell me about working with young fathers again.
03:31How do you brief someone to score the apocalypse? You don't really, you kind of, you send them the
03:37script, get them to read the script. You just don't know what's in people's minds when everybody reads
03:41scripts differently. That's one of the extraordinary things about them. So you don't know whether you
03:46share even that, but you read the script together, then you talk a bit, then you send them some tunes,
03:51which you're using to edit the film, you know, just so that they've got, so that there's music
03:56we can talk about rather than ideas. You just talk about music and, and then music is very
04:01difficult to talk about, but it communicates. What tunes did you send them? Oh, the whole,
04:06you know, we, John, the editor, John Harris, the editor, and I, we have loads of tunes that we just,
04:11and then we try out different things. And some of them are silly and some of them are,
04:14and then they just begin to send you stuff back. And, and then you begin to, you begin this dialogue,
04:21which is not spoken, but is using music backward and forward like that. You send them bits back
04:25with their music on and then, and they develop it. And they wrote, I mean, as you'd expect,
04:31if you know their music, they're fantastic. They're kind of like the Beach Boys, but on steroids or
04:39hardcore or, but they use vocal harmonies and vocal expression, as well as these beats. And I thought,
04:46what a wonderful idea of giving them this horror film and see what they make of it. And, um,
04:52lots of it is, if you're a Young Fathers fan, you'd say, yeah, that's them, that's them. But they wrote this
04:56tune for the scene at the, the big scene at the Bond temple with Isla. They wrote this tune called
05:01Remember that will surprise people. Very beautiful bit of writing. It's like, it's so good.
05:07Yeah, they're, they're, they're, I love them. They're a real inspiration and they come from
05:12the same estates that Trainspotting drew its original characters from some pretty tough places
05:18in Edinburgh. Um, so it was good. And they work in a dump. They won't mind me saying that.
05:23I went up to see them and they're in this literally, it's not even a garage. It's a shed,
05:29basically, that they all cram into and they have one kettle and you kind of have to wear a coat
05:34because there's not much by the way of heating and it's in Edinburgh in the winter. Anyway,
05:38but they're worth it always. They don't even do biscuits. I had to bring the biscuits.
05:43And at the moment at enemy HQ, we're all like the main thing we're talking about. I think you
05:57can probably guess is the Oasis reunion next month in July. And, um, it's very soon. Yeah,
06:02Danny, you recently, uh, exec produced creation stories. Oh yeah. Yeah. Alan McGee,
06:07who obviously signed Oasis first. So I thought, are you going to take Alex and sneak into one of the
06:12those shows next month? I'm away next month. Just so you don't know how to answer that question.
06:20It's going to be interesting, isn't it? Um, are they playing in Heaton Park? Are they playing
06:24in Heaton Park? They definitely are. I think they'll be playing in Heaton Park. There's stories. I
06:27remember going to see the Pope in Heaton Park on his visit to Britain. Yeah, that's my memory. And
06:32I used to play there when I was a kid in Heaton Park. So it's got lots of memories lined up in it.
06:36Um, did you say the Pope? Yeah, the Pope came to Heaton Park in Manchester. Oh, what?
06:40Yeah, no, he was in Heaton Park. You've got to keep that, huh?
06:45Yeah, there's a lobby. I thought you meant that was in the Pope. Anyway, listen, listen,
06:49all I hope is that they play... More Britpop. All I hope is that they play Hindu times,
06:55because that's the greatest, for me, that's one of the great five Pritar riffs of all time. Yeah.
07:00Well, uh, Noel Gallagher famously in an interview said that he was, uh, Oasis was the only Britpop band
07:05that you didn't get on the Trainspotting soundtrack. I know. I know. But Adam, we did it.
07:10This is an example where we started talking about films that nobody wants to see. Everybody wanted
07:17to see Trainspotting, which Oasis weren't featured in. Nobody went to see Lifeless Ordinary, which
07:22featured Ewan McGregor singing Round Our Way by Oasis. So there you go. Yes. Hard justice. My final
07:29question, uh, we always ask this, um, is, is there an album that you always go back to? You have to pick one.
07:36London Calling. Why that one? Clash. They were it for me, just in terms of punk,
07:42not just as energy, but as what you could do with it in terms of ambition. It wasn't just an energy
07:48and an attitude. It was an ambition beyond that as well. So that's it for me. What about you, Alex?
07:53Um, it's a, uh, it's a compilation album from, uh, some point in the nineties. It was like a Japanese
08:01import of can of just random can tracks. Oh, the Germans. Yeah. Yeah. I was a big can fan.
08:07And I sort of discovered them in the eighties on cassette on like sort of bootleg or whatever you
08:12call it. I bet a can would be great to get in a movie. I have a couple of times put a can track
08:17in and then had to take it out for one reason or another, but, um, uh, yeah, big fan. I've been
08:22watching all of your films together to research for this film, for this interview. Both of them.
08:28Well, I count the beach as well. Cause yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Cause I mean, without you,
08:34that wouldn't exist. So what's your favorite music moment in a film that you've worked together?
08:38Oh, mine is our first one. The very first track is Godspeed you black emperor at the beginning of
08:4528 days later. I remember we, cause we shot that, we shot the opening sequence a couple of months
08:51before we did the rest of the film and we put it together and put that song track, that track on it.
08:56And you just thought there's, it's very rarely that you feel, Oh God, that works. That works. I don't
09:03care what anybody says about it. It works very rarely. You, you feel that. And when,
09:08so we've used it at the end of 28 years later in a, in a sort of homage to that moment,
09:13that'd be it for me. I'd say the same. And I don't know if you remember this cause I don't,
09:19sometimes people remember things in different ways, but I thought I heard you in an interview
09:25saying, talking about trying stuff out and coming across Godspeed for 28, but for what it's worth,
09:31you had them in mind while we were in the development stage. Cause you said,
09:35you've got to listen to this band for this. Did I? You did. And I bought the one lift your
09:41skinny fist to heaven. Is that what it's called? Yeah. That, that, that, that track isn't on that
09:44one. It's on the one before fuck. Right. It's called FU some, it's all asterisks.
09:50It's had a sort of like brown paper cover. It looked like. Yeah. Lift your skinny
09:54fist to heaven. And so I used to listen to that while I was doing rewrites. Did you? Yeah. So,
09:58so you had it in your mind from, which is usually not the case with films. Cause you usually discover
10:04the needle drops while you're working on it. Best usually when you're working on it. Yeah.
10:09But that was there. Yeah. That was a landscape. It was quite hard to get them for the original
10:13film. Yeah. Cause they distrusted understandably Rupert Murdoch and the fact that it was Fox and all
10:20this kind of stuff. And they, they eventually agreed. I remember going up to, you flew somewhere. We went,
10:24Andrew and I went up to Newcastle to kind of watch them in concert. And then, um,
10:29and then we went out for dinner with them afterwards, I think. And they were like wary as
10:33anything about us. Um, but then they saw the film or the bit of the film we were going to put it on.
10:39And they reluctantly agreed. They didn't want it on the soundtrack. Cause that was a,
10:44they didn't want to kind of let people accessing their music through Fox. Um,
10:48Were they not aware of you and any of the films at that time? Yeah.
10:52They probably were, but, but they were wary and that, but then when we approached them on this
10:56one, it came back like instantly. So I thought, Oh, we, we did all right. They obviously were okay.
11:01Um, they appreciated sort of the uptick in their sales after that.
11:04Totally. Yeah. Anyway, they're worth it. They're a very excellent band. Yeah.
11:09I could listen to you guys talk about music forever, but I've got to stop there,
11:12but thanks so much for saying to us. Okay, cool.
11:14Let's all discard in the world.
11:177, 6, 11, 5, 4, 17, 32, the day before.
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