The Man of the Hour? Danny Boyle

It may seem early days yet, but the British movie hit of 1995 has already arrived.

And it’s fair to say it’s quite unlike any other British film you’ve seen.

“Shallow Grave,” a low-budget thriller that cost just $1.55 million, had the sort of opening weekend recently filmmakers only dream about. With a limited release on 23 screens in England and Scotland, it grossed $235,600. At four of the eight London theaters in which it opened, “Shallow Grave” broke house records.

The buzz about the movie, which played at the Sundance Film Festival this week and opens in the United States Feb. 10, has been deafening for months in and around Wardour Street, the epicenter of the British film industry. “Shallow Grave” has already won awards at a couple of minor European film festivals, and was warmly received at Cannes and Edinburgh.

It was at last year’s Sundance festival that another British film, “Four Weddings and a Funeral,” began its inexorable drive to international success. Now Danny Boyle, the director of “Shallow Grave” and the man British film critics are calling “the British Quentin Tarantino,” is already receiving offers to make big-budget Hollywood films.

“There’s been such a lot of anticipation in the industry about ‘Shallow Grave,’ perhaps too much,” Boyle, 38, says with a sigh. “I’m glad it’s out at last and people are actually getting a chance to see it.”

If Boyle is about to be rich and famous, he shows no sign of it yet. We meet at the office of “Shallow Grave” producer Andrew MacDonald, a scruffy apartment over a hardware store in central London. Boyle bounces in eagerly, dressed in leather jacket and jeans, his hair an unruly post-punk thatch. He leans forward earnestly in his chair to talk, sometimes hugging himself with intensity. The word boyish springs unavoidably to mind.

“Shallow Grave” itself is rather hard to categorize. It is not a cheery comedy about weddings and funerals, with most of the men in top hats and tails and the women in floral-print frocks; it is also not a lustrous-looking period piece, an adaptation of an Edwardian novel about class, set in a series of grand country houses with rolling lawns, and extras with parasols and cream suits.

Nor is it a gritty slab of social realism a la Ken Loach or Mike Leigh, aiming to show the effects of Margaret Thatcher’s policies among the British underclass.

“Shallow Grave” is instead a stylish, fast-paced, hard-edged, vi olent roller-coaster of a film, with a great opening sequence, as the camera weaves and veers at a wild, breathless pace around the streets and squares of Edinburgh, Scotland’s capital city.

It is about two men and a woman--a journalist, an accountant and a doctor--who share a large, highly attractive apartment in Edinburgh’s central New Town district. These three yuppies--virtual unknowns Kerry Fox, who starred in Jane Campion’s “An Angel at My Table”; Ewan McGregor, from Dennis Potter’s TV miniseries “Lipstick on Your Collar,” and Christopher Eccleston, who played a detective in the highly rated British TV series “Cracker”--hold auditions to find an occupant for the apartment’s fourth bedroom, but reject most applicants, who cannot keep pace with their brittle, callous, in-crowd humor.

Finally they agree on a man, whom they find dead in his room shortly after he moves in; a huge case stuffed with money is beneath his bed. The trio ponder their plight, then decide to keep the money and cut up and dispose of the body, at which point they start to fall out among themselves.

There are decidedly moments in all of this when many in the audience will wish to shield their gaze.

“I suppose ‘Shallow Grave’ is a cruel film,” Boyle says, “but then life can be cruel and cold. There are other sides of life, of course, but ‘Shallow Grave’ doesn’t choose to look at them.”

Ultimately the film is a parable about greed. It implicitly asks the audience: Here’s all this money; no one need know how you came by it. What would you do?

The timing of its release is fortunate, for greed is a topic that preoccupies the British these days. A national lottery has recently been launched here, and when a factory worker won 17 million (more than $25 million) there was much anguished debate in the media about a single individual getting that sort of money. There has been controversy over massive salary increases for the bosses of utility companies, which have now entered the private sector. And several British soccer personalities have been accused of receiving cash payments illegally.

“When we made the film, there was no awareness of the national lottery or the problems it might cause,” Boyle says. “But that debate has made the film quite relevant, and so has all this controversy in (soccer). So I think the film has resonance, even though we weren’t seeking it at the time.”

The country’s film critics agree, and have given it an almost unanimous thumbs-up. “It brings a new, American-style energy to British filmmaking,” said the Independent. “A good piece of storytelling, admirably acted, thoughtfully designed, skillfully designed and modest in its ambitions,” raved the Observer. “Highly accomplished . . . funny, scary and intriguing,” added the Guardian.

Many critics have pointed out that “Shallow Grave” is an atypical British film, neither laboring beneath the weight of its own production values, nor encumbered with turgid subtexts about the state of British society. This delights the troika behind the film--Boyle, producer MacDonald and screenwriter John Hodge, who have all sought to distance themselves from most British films, in which, they say, characters are usually portrayed as victims.

’ ‘Shallow Grave’ is not about class or society, or people being crushed by forces they can’t control,” says Boyle. “There are no victims in the story. Everyone takes responsibility for their decisions, which I think people do in real life anyway.”

Boyle came to “Shallow Grave” fairly late, by which time it already had a decidedly Scottish flavor. Hodge, a doctor in Edinburgh taking a sabbatical to try his hand at screenwriting, met MacDonald in 1991 with an idea for the story. They developed it together for a couple of years, with money from the Scottish Film Production fund, then Britain’s Channel 4 television gave the script the go-ahead early in 1993. They also received funding from the Glasgow Film Fund, which encourages filmmaking in that Scottish city. Thus the apartment where most of the action occurs was actually built, slightly larger than life-size, in a Glasgow warehouse.

MacDonald, 28, already had filmmaking in his genes. He is a grandson of Emeric Pressburger, the Hungarian-born director, producer and screenwriter who col laborated with English director Michael Powell on such films as “The Red Shoes.” Armed with Hodge’s script, he now looked for the right director, someone who had yet to make a name in films.

Danny Boyle had directed for five years at London’s Royal Court Theatre before making films for the BBC in Northern Ireland. On reading Hodge’s script, which he now describes as “the most cinematic I’d seen in ages,” Boyle compared it to the Coen brothers’ “Blood Simple.”

Though Boyle has already been lured by Hollywood, he has no plans to move or even work there. Instead he, Hodge and MacDonald are ensconced under the banner of MacDonald’s Figment Films. This sense of partnership stems from MacDonald, who admired his grandfather’s style of working with Powell.

“We’re all going to try and stick together,” says Boyle, “though there’s been a lot of pressure to break us up. The tendency of the Americans is to pick you off one by one, but our strength is working together.”

True to their word, the team will now turn their attention to adapting “Trainspotting,” a novel by Irvine Welsh about junkies in Edinburgh. Hodge has also written a script called “A Life Less Ordinary”: “It’s partly a romantic comedy, if you can imagine that from the man who wrote ‘Shallow Grave,’ ” says Boyle.

Success over the next year might catapult his career way beyond offices above a hardware store--but for now Boyle is gleeful that a film like “Shallow Grave”--an undeniably handsome piece of work--could be made so cheaply.

“The trick,” says Boyle, “is getting as much of your budget up on the screen as possible. But look, I was a theater director. At the Royal Court, we had $750,000 and had to put on 18 plays with it.”

Though the team has tried to stay at arm’s length from more earnest British movies, there was no doubt about the target audience for “Shallow Grave.”

“Our instinct was to do it for Britain,” Boyle says. “The idea was not to try and ape an American film. Personally I don’t care if it makes any money in the U.S. But if it just does good business in Britain, I’ll be delighted.”