Danny Boyle Quotes

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

One of the traditions of film acting is a sort of mumbled realism. Be minimal, and do less. 'Even less than that.'

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.

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.

Come a crisis, we want other people.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.