Sweating it out on a sci-fi set

IN “Trainspotting,” Danny Boyle turned junkies into charismatic antiheroes. With “28 Days Later,” the British director transformed typically lumbering zombies into sprinting killers. In his new movie, “Sunshine,” Boyle faced perhaps his greatest challenge yet: making weightless astronauts actually look ... weightless.

Just a few days into production on the science-fiction film at London’s Three Mills Studios, Boyle was growing more exasperated by the minute. His film’s astronauts, sent 50 years into the future to reignite the dying sun, were supposed to be carefully maneuvering outside their spacecraft. But the crane on which the actors’ stunt doubles stood was jerking around like a ’57 Chevy.

Still, it was an improvement over Boyle’s first pass at a zero gravity a few days earlier. “That would have looked better if I had just carried the person in my arms,” Boyle said of the subsequently discarded footage.

As his effects team labored to reset the crane, the Shakespearean theater director turned independent film darling tried to console his actors, who had been pacing around the London soundstage all morning. “My apologies,” Boyle said to his film’s costars, Cillian Murphy (“Batman Begins”) and Hiroyuki Sanada (“The Last Samurai”). “I guarantee you we will do your scenes first thing tomorrow.”

In the scheme of “Sunshine’s” difficult production, that one-day delay would prove minor. From that frustrating morning in September 2005, Boyle would spend more than another full year working on “Sunshine,” with Fox Searchlight having to reschedule the film’s release not once but twice.

While he could not have imagined on that September day two years ago how challenging the film’s special effects would be, Boyle seemed to sense the trouble ahead. A video team shooting interviews for the film’s website stopped by, asking “Sunshine’s” cast and crew what item they would bring into space. The 50-year-old Boyle had a succinct answer: “A noose.”

Nearly two years later, “Sunshine” is finally finished -- and Boyle didn’t quite kill himself making it (though he went about $5 million over budget).

If Boyle faced a difficult test in reproducing zero gravity, distributor Fox Searchlight now is confronted with an equally daunting trial. In a season filled with big-budget blockbusters on the high end and smaller, personal films on the low, the studio somehow must fit “Sunshine” in between.

Neither a glossy popcorn movie nor an intimate art film, “Sunshine,” premiering tonight as the closing film of the Los Angeles Film Festival and opening in theaters July 20, occupies dangerous territory: it’s a thinking-person’s save-the-world film. Imagine “Armageddon” -- with good reviews.

Like much of Boyle’s earlier work -- the Manchester-born filmmaker burst onto the scene with 1994’s “Shallow Grave” and made “Trainspotting” two years later -- “Sunshine” is visually stylish and narratively idiosyncratic. His new film embraces some of the familiar beats of science fiction and tries to reformulate others. Where Boyle brought new urgency to the zombie genre with “28 Days Later,” he delivers contemplative patience to “Sunshine.”

“I think fans of original science fiction will really appreciate it,” Steve Gilula, Fox Searchlight’s distribution president, said of “Sunshine.” “The question we had internally is, ‘Can you release a “2001” in 2007?’ We think there is an audience, but we don’t want to minimize the challenges.”

Together again

“SUNSHINE” marks a reunion between Boyle and novelist-screenwriter Alex Garland, the director’s collaborator on both his biggest hit -- 2003’s “28 Days Later” -- and his principal disappointment, 2000’s “The Beach.”

Both movies grossed about the same domestically, but “The Beach,” adapted from Garland’s novel of the same name, was a $50-million, post-”Titanic” Leonardo DiCaprio movie whose difficult production (and subdued reception) led Boyle to steer clear of sprawling, big-budget movies for a while.

But Hollywood kept calling, and after his “28 Days Later” and his saints and miracles fable “Millions” were behind him, Boyle was set to direct “3000 Degrees,” a hefty Warner Bros. movie about a Massachusetts blaze in 1999 that killed six firefighters. But then that movie fell apart, as some of the victims’ survivors and other firefighters opposed the production.

Around the same time, Garland’s “Sunshine” script came in. “I knew it was a mission to the sun,” Garland said of his initial “Sunshine” idea, “and that it was going to belong to the strand of science-fiction movies of the 1960s and ‘70s -- ‘2001,’ ‘Silent Running,’ the original ‘Solaris.’ ”

Those movies are anchored more by big ideas than big effects; the movies may be set in the cosmos, but space is used as much for mood as for drama.

“You go into deep space,” said Garland, whose novels include “The Tesseract” and “The Coma,” “and you encounter your subconscious.”

However poetic that notion, the movie still needed a plot. “The original trigger for the movie was an article about the long-term future of the sun,” Garland said. “We completely rely on the sun for life. And it’s totally hostile. It’s beautiful, but if you look at it, it will blind you. I’m an atheist, but you can make a fair argument for the sun as God. It does a lot of God-like things, even though it’s not sentient. It’s a life giver and a death giver, in equal measure.”

When “Sunshine” opens, we’re five decades into the future, and the big ball of light is in its death throes. Instead of global warming, “Sunshine” presents the counterintuitive idea of a freezing planet. The first mission to relight the sun with an island-sized nuclear device has gone missing, so a second crew sets off seven years later to try to finish the job.

After 16 months and 55 million miles of space flight, Icarus II approaches the center of our solar system. Cooped up together for far too long, its international crew of eight is starting to fray at the edges. When they find the remains of the original Icarus I spacecraft, let’s just say one of its crew members might have taken Garland’s God analogy a little too seriously.

The movie didn’t come together easily. Boyle’s longtime producer, Andrew Macdonald, had a deal with Fox Searchlight, which was initially nervous about “Sunshine’s” subject matter and its preliminary $40-million budget, much higher than Fox’s specialized film unit usually spends on a single film.

“Twentieth Century Fox was not bidding on ‘Sunshine,’ ” Macdonald said. “They reason is pretty obvious -- they had made ‘Solaris.’ ” That 2002 Steven Soderbergh-George Clooney remake had been a critical and commercial dud, grossing just $15 million. And “Sunshine” wasn’t going to be an obvious, down-the-middle movie: it would be part suspenseful thriller, part existential meditation.

To get “Sunshine” rolling, Macdonald had to cobble together money from British lottery funds, U.K. rebates, and outside investor Ingenious Film Partners.

“If you pitch the movie, it sounds like [the 2003 bomb] ‘The Core,’ ” Macdonald said. “But the key thing is that the people -- especially Danny -- are going to do it a whole lot better.”

One of the things Boyle tried to do better was to create a believable “Sunshine” world. To that end, the film’s 2057 looks and feels a lot like 2007 -- “Star Trek’s” skin-tight Lycra thankfully hasn’t replaced T-shirts.

“My problem with science fiction is when you try to invent too much,” Boyle said. “A phone looks like a banana and not a phone, and that doesn’t make any sense. You don’t have to have everything reinvented. Look around today. You can have an iPod on a Victorian desk.”

Boyle, production designer Mark Tildesley and costume designer Suttirat Anne Larlarb reached into all directions of history, industry and pop culture for visual and narrative references. The corpses of some of the film’s victims (of course people die!) are modeled on Pompeii; the Icarus II interior is designed like an oil tanker, the disfigurement of burn victim Pinbacker (Mark Strong) was influenced by the scarring suffered by race car driver Niki Lauda, and the astronaut’s space helmets owe more to “South Park’s” Kenny than NASA.

At the same time, the “Sunshine” production team wanted to make sure the film’s outer space looked severe and inhospitable, rather than Hollywood’s usual cool and beautiful depiction. Producer Macdonald said one early scene needed to be re-shot because it actually looked too nice.

“It didn’t look harsh enough,” Macdonald said. “It was too warm -- not threatening.”

Even though the script is clearly fictional, Boyle and Garland met with scientists and physicists to try to keep the film from taking a constellation of factual liberties. “The script does take some leaps at the end,” Boyle said. “But if you can ground it in the first quarter, you can believe the stuff that happens in the end, when it all goes time-warping ballistic.”

Instead of the industry norm of farming out visual effects to a dozen vendors, Boyle essentially used one effects house (London’s Moving Picture Co.) for almost all of the film’s 750 effects shots. Macdonald said Boyle preferred working that way because it gave him the greatest level of quality control. Yet it also slowed the post-production to a crawl.

“Sunshine” was supposed to be completed a year ago, with a planned theatrical release in October 2006, which was then moved to March 2007. “Sunshine” eventually opened in Britain, and most other foreign territories, in April. The reception, like the movie’s global weather, was cool.

View from the finish line

WITH Boyle’s film finally done in early 2007, it’s hard to get a read on the filmmaker over lunch. He’s either excited, relieved -- or both.

“No director, unless they are contractually obligated, will ever go back and do a sequel set in space,” Boyle said. “When I finished it in January, I would have said no, it wasn’t worth it. Because I fell out with everybody. To make these movies, you have to be so uncompromising and scorch all of the ground in front of you. But now, especially talking about it, you realize what you’ve learned from it.”

In a way, the lessons of making this movie parallel what Boyle hopes audiences take away.

“Do we go back to the moon? Do we go somewhere different?” the director said. “Do we play safe? Or do we take a big risk?”

Boyle himself, who is remarkably candid for a director of his caliber, said his next movie will be far more manageable. Not that he’s playing it totally safe. “Slum Dog Millionaire,” as the movie is called, unfolds in Mumbai around the Hindi version of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.”

“But I can shoot it in summer,” Boyle said, “and be done by Christmas.”

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john.horn@latimes.com