Lust for life
Trainspotting hit theaters in 1996, bringing with it realistic dialogue, dark humor and an outstanding soundtrack, all set against the bleak backdrop of Edinburgh’s inner city. Directed by Danny Boyle and adapted from the Irvine Welsh novel of the same name, the film has been heralded as the launch pad for Ewan McGregor’s big screen career.
McGregor’s character Mark Renton is a junkie who’s trying to get clean, but discovers the path to sobriety is littered with misadventures. Coming very early in the movie, the scene in which he dives into a toilet and swims to look for his opiate suppositories has become as equally emblematic of the movie as Renton’s opening lines: “Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career… But why would I want to do a thing like that?”
Cult classic
The year 2016 will mark Trainspotting’s 20th anniversary. Talk of a sequel started in earnest in 2010, when Boyle teased the possibility of adapting Welsh’s follow-up book Porno, in which the characters from Trainspotting cross paths again 10 years later. Fresh off the Steve Jobs premiere at the Telluride Film Festival early this month, the director said that, if scheduling allows, his next project would be the next installment of the cult classic.
“All the four main actors want to come back and do it,” Boyle, who has since served as the artistic director for the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Summer Olympic Games, told Deadline. “Now it is only a matter of getting all their schedules together which is complicated by two of them doing American TV series.” Ewen Bremner, Jonny Lee Miller and Robert Carlyle have told Boyle that they’ll return to play Spud, Sick Boy, and Begbie, respectively for the sequel.
Unfortunate situation
In an interview with Details in late 2014, McGregor said, “It looks like it might happen. The idea is that we shoot it in 2016, which would be 20 years after the original came out. And I’d be up for it. I wouldn’t have been 10 years ago, but I am now.” It’s a bit of a surprise to hear the Scottish actor’s willingness to do the project as he and Boyle had a falling out some time ago.
Aside from Trainspotting, the two had worked together on 1994’s Shallow Grave and 1997’s A Life Less Ordinary. They were set to reteam in 2000 for The Beach, which had McGregor attached as its lead. When production began, however, the more bankable Leonardo DiCaprio was suddenly brought in to replace McGregor. “It was an unfortunate situation, and it wasn’t handled well. I was very upset. But time has gone by, and we put to bed the bad feelings and all of that,” McGregor told Details.
Porno vs. Fifty shades
Boyle’s regular contributor John Hodge has written the screenplays from Shallow Grave to Trance, and he will once again be in charge of the script for the upcoming project. Boyle has already called it “terrific.” The text will draw heavily on Welsh’s novel, which focuses on Sick Boy’s introduction to the pornography industry, but will most likely draw inspiration from other sources as well. Welsh said two years ago that the emergence of the Fifty Shades Of Grey novels has rendered Porno “passé” by comparison.
For his part, Welsh said that he would like to “excite people” with the new film. “We’re not interested in doing something that will trash the legacy of Trainspotting. We want to do something that’s very fresh and contemporary,” the author told BBC Radio 5 in 2014. But if there are individuals who could match — or perhaps even surpass — Trainspotting’s grim yet bitingly funny portrayal of squalor and addiction in economically depressed 1980s Edinburgh, it should be the team that made the original such a vivid piece of cinema.
