The catalyst for the plot is the trio’s search for a fourth person to share the apartment. And nothing is worth worshipping other than money.” Greed, aggrandizement, pleasure, selfishness, individualism. It’s not a directly political film, yet it’s deeply embedded in post-Thatcherite decay in Britain. “It’s really about British society at the time. We didn’t want this film soaked in British social realism.”Įven so, as the director later conceded, it’s not hard to detect a political subtext to Shallow Grave. Everybody takes responsibility for their decisions. The movie, Boyle emphasized at the time of its release, “is not about class or society, or people being crushed by forces they can’t control. (At one point, the film’s title was going to be Cruel.) None of the characters are likable, nor are they meant to be as McGregor subsequently noted, “The accepted rule is that you have to sympathize with the leading characters, but we wanted to break the rules.” The filmmakers’ unsentimental take on their characters is refreshing no facile excuses are offered. Like Blood Simple, Shallow Grave is witty and stylish, fizzing with energy and reveling in its own heartlessness. Shallow Grave shares much of the Coens’ gleeful delight in pitch-black humor, setting up a situation as tight as a coiled watch spring and letting it unwind into mayhem and disaster. But gradually, under pressure, their relative positions shift and change.īoyle’s invocation of the Coen brothers’ first film makes good sense. At first, Alex, cocky and irreverent (this was only McGregor’s second film role, and his first of any substance), seems to be the alpha male, with the buttoned-up David the butt of his jokes, and Juliet lazily aware of both men’s unexpressed desire for her. As the action develops and the tension builds, the three play off one another like musicians, weaving and maneuvering while the lines of sexual attraction, greed, and power fluctuate between them. The apartment’s residents are professionals in their late twenties: David (Eccleston), an accountant Juliet (Fox), a hospital doctor and Alex (McGregor), a tabloid journalist. The focus on one key location enhances the sense of a close-textured, borderline claustrophobic chamber piece. As part of the rehearsal process, Boyle had his three principal actors-Christopher Eccleston, Kerry Fox, and Ewan McGregor-live together for several weeks before the shoot in a similar actual apartment, to help make the intimacy between them feel casual and habitual.ĭespite a restricted budget, the collaborative style and unanimity of vision (relatively rare in moviemaking) of the producer, writer, and director created a film that feels wholly assured in its narrative drive and single-minded in its intentions. Hodge had devised his script so that the bulk of the action could be filmed in a single location: a replica of a highly desirable apartment in the elegant Georgian district of Edinburgh’s New Town, built slightly larger than life-size in a Glasgow warehouse, complete with all utilities connected. “The first words out of my mouth were ‘ Blood Simple,’ which was crucial, I think-that dedication to the narrative, to the drive of the story.” It immediately excited him he has said that he found it “wonderful-lean and mean and a very clean read.” He was invited to meet with Hodge and Macdonald, who were auditioning potential directors. He was sent the script of Shallow Grave in 1993. Boyle, the oldest of the three, had an impressive track record as a stage and television director. Macdonald’s background was the most conventionally cinematic: he was the grandson of the Hungarian-born screenwriter Emeric Pressburger, and his younger brother was the director Kevin Macdonald. Hodge was practicing medicine when, after meeting Macdonald at the Edinburgh Film Festival in 1991, he was inspired to try his hand at screenwriting. It took a trio of feature film first-timers-director Danny Boyle, screenwriter John Hodge, and producer Andrew Macdonald-to shake things up, with a movie that, in Boyle’s words, dispensed with “the moral baggage that British films carry around all the time.” Mike Leigh and Ken Loach were still in top form, but their politically aware, social-realist work was never intended for a mass audience. The energy of the eighties that had given rise to such diverse hits as The Long Good Friday, Chariots of Fire, Gandhi, The Company of Wolves, and My Beautiful Laundrette had dissipated. In the early 1990s, mainstream British cinema seemed to be sinking into a comfortable mulch of Austenry and Dickensiana-tastefully made, well-acted, impeccably mounted period literary adaptations, guaranteed to upset nobody.
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