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Welsh traces the appeal of his book to its adversarial stance. "There was a representation of British culture in classic Oxbridge fiction and movies like Four Weddings and a Funeral," he says, "that was one-dimensional--a kind of '80s middle-class, yuppie, Thatcherite, right-wing ideal. And that view of Britain in art went unchallenged. When Trainspotting came out, there was a sense of affirmation that different cultures actually existed." There was also the pleasure of Welsh's heady prose and unsentimental view of the druggies, a take that Hodge and Boyle turn into giddy film art. They avoid the socialist-realist, Ken Loach approach in which the director is a well-meaning social worker. "Realism can't help making this into a story about victims," says Boyle. "We wanted to kick it with humor and surrealism."
Boyle and Hodge did the same thing with their first film, the 1994 Shallow Grave. Hodge, a physician who left medicine to work on scripts (but plans to return soon to hospital work), wrote this macabre comedy about three flatmates who discover a dead body, a suitcase full of cash and their own darkest impulses; one of the three goes bats after having to cut off the corpse's hands, feet and head. Andrew MacDonald, eager to become a producer, brought in Boyle, who had directed for television and at the Royal Shakespeare Company. They got backing from Channel 4, cast young McGregor as one of the roomies and hatched a surprise international hit. Hodge was offered rewrite jobs, "mainly on things that involved dismemberment." Fortunately, MacDonald discovered Welsh's novel.
Hollywood is still beckoning. Boyle was asked to direct Alien 4 but finally declined the offer "because you can't contribute much; it's a machine." But this fall Boyle, Hodge, MacDonald and McGregor will team up again for A Life Less Ordinary, a Hodge original that Boyle describes as an "incredibly optimistic love story."
For now they can take satisfaction in knowing that Trainspotting has hit an open vein in pop culture--at home and now, perhaps, despite its director's misgivings, in the U.S. "There's a generation that wants things like Pulp Fiction and Trainspotting," says Boyle, "because they help them proclaim their position. It's their film; they use it as a badge." Like rock 'n' roll: kids love it, in part, because their parents hate it.
But there's a better reason to love Trainspotting. In an era in which every movie seems way longer than it has to be, this one packs a whole multiplex worth of black-and-blue comedy into 94 minutes. The film is about joy--in conniving and surviving, in connecting with audiences, in its own fizzy, jizzy style. And that's why, compared with it, most other films look zombified. Death hangs like crape over Renton and his mates, but the movie couldn't be more vital. So say it without irony: Trainspotting chooses life.
--Reported by Michael Brunton/London and Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles