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Trainspotting actors resume their personal journeys

You can’t accuse the makers of Trainspotting of rushing to cash in on success. It has taken 21 years for a sequel.

British director Danny Boyle in Sydney yesterday promoting T2 Trainspotting. Picture: Justin Lloyd
British director Danny Boyle in Sydney yesterday promoting T2 Trainspotting. Picture: Justin Lloyd

You can’t accuse the makers of Trainspotting of rushing to cash in on success. The 1996 movie adapt­ation of Irvine Welsh’s vernac­ular tales of friendship, betrayal and heroin was a box-­office smash, but it has taken 21 years for a second instalment to appear.

“I like the fact we left it so long,” director Danny Boyle said yesterday of T2 Trainspotting. “If you move too quickly, there’s not a good enough reason for making it.” The returning figures for T2 include Boyle, screenwriter John Hodge, and the four lead actors.

There were emotional momen­ts when the characters met again. “The story that emerged and the journey we were on, making it, was much more personal than people expected. I think that’s what really attracted the actors: it felt like we were working, writing, filming about ourselves through the prism of these characters,’’ Boyle said.

Decades on, Renton (Ewan McGregor) sets things in train when he returns to Edinburgh after a minor heart attack. Meanwhile, Sick Boy (Jonny Lee Miller) runs his late aunt’s rundown pub, with a sideline in blackmail and a cocaine habit; the psychotic Begbie (Robert Carlyle) is in jail but has an escape plan worked out; and the doleful Spud (Ewen Bremner) is still mired in heroin.

Yet change of sorts turns out to be possible once these four connect again in various combinations, in ways that can be funny, brutal, self-referential and poig­nant. Giving four characters equal time is quite a balancing act, Boyle says. “But that was always part of our agreement, that they’d all be equally important, and that everybody would be paid the same. Not a lot of money, but if the film was a success they’d get back-end.”

Filmmakers decided to jettis­on the voiceover narration of the first film, Boyle says, because it gave too much emphasis to the character of Renton. But they wanted to find a way to pay tribute to the vivid energy of Welsh’s original stories. Voices gave the book and the movie impact, Boyle says. “Voices that are normally never heard from. They’re marginalised as victims or evil, they’re certainly not allowed into the centre of culture. Irvine sent them smashing into the centre of culture and we helped with the film.”

So there’s a kind of origins story for Welsh’s book deftly woven into the new movie, a clever­ way of reintegrating the directness of personal expression.

“We came to a point where we thought we should stand up and speak to it again, and make something half-decent that’s worthy of standing beside the original.”

T2 Trainspotting opens on February 23

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Original URL: https://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/film/trainspotting-actors-resume-their-personal-journeys/news-story/54b126c2e131abede7e2eebbb67b0525