McAvoy and Dawson are a patient and therapist caught up in an art-heist conspiracy.
"Sometimes we're quite rude," says Danny Boyle, "because you get impatient when you're busy." In fact, Boyle is not rude, even though he is beyond busy. It's October 2011, and the director has two weeks to finish Trance, a psychological thriller that won't hit theaters for another 17 months. With his spectacles slipping down his nose and his hair disheveled, he scurries--the man doesn't walk--through the labyrinth of stages and rehearsal rooms of London's 3 Mills Studios, laughing frequently, pausing each time someone places a schedule or drawing in his ever gesticulating hands.
At the moment, Boyle deploys his frantic energy seven days a week: he films Trance from Saturday to Wednesday and spends the other two days planning the opening ceremony for the Olympics in London. He created a pop-cultural touchstone with his second feature, Trainspotting, back in 1996 and a global phenomenon with Slumdog Millionaire (2008), which won eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Soon his $42 million Olympic spectacle is going to raise his international profile even higher. For now, though, he's happy to let Trance distract him from the 7,500 volunteers he needs to cast and the 12,956 props his team needs to make for the opening ceremony. "The idea was to give us a break from the Olympics because there's so much planning involved," he says. "It's lovely to get out and do something else."
Now Boyle is rushing to another set, which resembles a sleek doctor's office on London's famous Harley Street. Except for the trail of ratty carpet squares just outside the camera frame. And the fact that no one in this office is wearing shoes. The makeshift insulation and the no-shoes policy are meant to minimize background noise so that carefully positioned microphones pick up only Rosario Dawson's voice. Dawson plays hypnotherapist Elizabeth Lamb, who in this scene attempts to lull her patient Simon, a fine-art dealer played by James McAvoy, into a trance. McAvoy will spend the afternoon slouched in an armchair and later admits that at times Dawson's calm voice and gentle instructions to relax affected him as much as his character. "I fell asleep once," he says, "just because she was so soothing."
Few aspects of Trance, which hits theaters April 5, qualify as soothing. The mind-bending narrative opens with a snatch-and-grab raid of a London auction house and the theft of a multimillion-dollar Goya painting. Simon, the heist crew's inside man, suffers a concussion in the melee and afterward claims not to remember where he stashed the loot. Lead gangster Franck (Vincent Cassel) tries and fails to use torture to jog Simon's memory, then turns to Elizabeth for help. As the narrative twists and backflips, truth, hypnotic suggestion and psychosis blur together; a love triangle comes into focus, but it's hard to find a hero--or a reliable narrator. "If you like pledging yourself to a particular character, then you may struggle with this film," Boyle, 56, says. "You won't be quite sure where to stake yourself."