Choice Boyce « Making the Movie

25Mar/050

Choice Boyce

Roger Ebert has an interview with Frank Cottrell Boyce, writer of the recent Millions (I didn't like it) as well as Hilary and Jackie and the brilliant 24 Hour Party People.

Perhaps you haven't heard of those movies, except "Hilary and Jackie." But I gave them an average review of 3.62 stars.

It's always nice when critics recognize that screenwriters can create as enduring a voice and body of work as directors. Ironically, Millions is being marketed as "from the mind of Danny Boyle" even though the screenplay is apparently based on a book written by Boyce.

Anyway, nice interview.

Ebert: In the film, your young hero has perfectly reasonable conversations with several saints, and is an expert on their lives and histories. How did the saints make their way into a movie about a two small boys who find the loot from a train robbery?

Boyce: You already know the answer and you're being coy! I read an interview that you did with Martin Scorsese in which Scorsese said he'd been influenced by a book called "The Six O'clock Saints," about the lives of the saints. People think of saints as vaguely nice and virtuous but in fact they were often difficult, mad, driven by a different energy. Bunuel made a film about "Simon of the Desert," who avoided temptation by living on top of a marble column. Even St. Francis -- who was one of the two or three greatest human beings ever to walk the earth -- could be a bit weird. Your interview with Scorsese sent me scuttling back to a dictionary of saints I'd had as a child and opening it up was like opening my own mysterious bag of cash -- endless mad, gigantic stories. Narrative cash. The thing about the saints is that for nearly 2,000 years they were the popular culture. Those gory, erotic statues you see in old churches are like early cinema, aren't they?