Danny Boyle is giving his “Sunshine” fans a ray of hope: The director has revealed how the 2007 science fiction film almost landed a franchise, especially since screenwriter Alex Garland had “extraordinary” ideas about expanding the plot.
Boyle, who recently announced that his other Garland-penned film “28 Years Later” is part of its own new trilogy, told Collider that two sequels were outlined to continue the “Sunshine” storyline. “Sunshine” starred Cillian Murphy, Chris Evans, Hiroyuki Sanada, Rose Byrne, Cliff Curtis, and Michelle Yeoh as astronauts tasked with reigniting the sun in the year 2057.
“Originally, when we were doing it, Alex wrote two other parts. It was supposed to be a trilogy,” Boyle said. “He [Garland] only wrote an outline. [But] it was a planetary trilogy. It was to do with the sun itself, with two other stories.”
While Boyle added that he “can’t remember [the plot] in enough detail” for the other two slated films, there was “an extraordinary idea in one of them” that involved the concept of “looking outside and moving.”
However, the ideas were partly scrapped because “Sunshine” underperformed at the box office. “We might well have done it, yeah,” Boyle said, also adding that “the movie did no business at all!”
Boyle also recalled how he tangled with 20th Century Fox over creative differences on the film. “I remember, Tom Rothman [then Fox film chief] — who is the reason you can only watch 28 minutes of ’28 Years Later’ today — I’ve had a number of fights with him over the years,” Boyle said of working with the studio executive. “I remember him watching ‘Sunshine,’ and I remember him saying, ‘The only hope you offer. The only hope you offer, Danny, is that little green plant shoot in that burnt-out oxygen garden. There’s a little green shoot, and you think there’s hope! And Michelle Yeoh sees hope! Then you kill her! In that moment, you kill her! You can’t do this!’ Anyway, I remember a big blowout with him about that.”
As for his continued collaboration with Garland, Boyle said, “What’s interesting is Alex has a natural instinct as a storyteller to want to tell these expanding stories, and that is why ’28 Years Later’ wound up as a trilogy.”
And “Sunshine” will always be a bright spot in Boyle’s own filmography: “Look, I love the film. I really love the film,” he said. “Some of that film, I just think, ‘wow, did I do that?’ It’s like, yeah you did! My daughter watched it a few years ago. I remember watching it, I was in the kitchen, but I’m watching bits of it, and I’m like, ‘oh, that’s quite good.’ Because you get infected… not to make a pun…But you get infected by its performance, and you think, ‘oh, people didn’t like it.’ But then I meet people like you, and I meet a lot of people — and there are many films I’ve made people don’t think this about — but ‘Sunshine’ is one they really, genuinely think about and really love the film.”
Read IndieWire’s interview with Boyle here.
