I recently sat down with Danny Boyle, director of 127 Hours to talk about the film, Trainspotting, The Wrestler, and his career progression. Enjoy!

Laremy Legel: For the record, I plan on making this a Chris Farley-style interview. So let's start with: Man, how good are you?

Danny Boyle: [smiles] Well, I've got a lot of experience now. And something like Slumdog gives you a confidence boost, which is necessary with a film like this to push it through. When you're first describing this film to people they are like "Egh..." and I think if your confidence was low you'd be affected by that.

LL: Do you ever think, "Oh, we've nailed this," or does it not work like that? Is it impossible to get enough distance and perspective to judge your own work?

LL: The visual style choices you're making feel really innovative. How did you decide to have things like triptychs in there?

DB: It felt like it belonged to the story. The beginning is disguised as a title sequence. But that was deliberate, that was the way to introduce the grammar so that when you reintroduce it in the middle, when you start seeing three screens again, it won't feel like, "Whoa, what's this?"

LL: In my review, I compared you to an anesthesiologist because you keep bringing the audience back from the edge with little moments of levity.

DB: Yeah, you have to.

LL: Because it could have been awful to watch, right?

DB: And that's what was written on people's faces when I was describing it to them. That this could be impossible to watch. And they are also aware that when you come off a successful project like Slumdog Millionaire one of the routes people go is to choose a vanity project. Which are unwatchable. So they must of thought, "Oh my God, this is the vanity project." But I always thought, "No, this is an action movie. This will be watchable, this will be unmissable, compelling." I didn't think, "Oh, maybe this will get an audience."

LL: So it always made perfect sense to you.

DB: Yeah, and you have to be like that. And there were moments where you doubt things, and that's important to test yourself. But I felt it [how I'd do the film] very strongly when I was reading the book, so I was very disappointed when Aron didn't want to do it the way I'd imagined when I first met him. I remember feeling gutted. Because the problem with a true story is you have to back off. You can't tell someone they are wrong about their own life. You have to say, "Fair enough." You hope you'll meet again another day, which we did.

DB: I'm really looking forward to Black Swan. I remember watching The Wrestler, and it was important to this movie, because I remember thinking, "I must make a film where I just follow an actor, where they dictate so much of the movie." Because that's one of your jobs as a director. And he's a bit like me in that he likes to make the screen dazzle a little bit. He likes to use the camera like that. So I did it with Franco, and I was conscious of it, because you do surrender a bit of your control by focusing so much on one actor. If it feels like you're controlling them it won't be any good. It has to feel like they are dictating the film. Whether you're over Mickey Rourke's shoulder or full-on in Franco's face.

LL: Are all the reports of audience members passing out while watching 127 Hours helpful in terms of marketing? Or is that something you'd rather never happened?

DB: It's not marketing, and when it first happened Fox Searchlight would have loved to have the power that studios used to have where they could kill the story. But you can't now, there are tweeters in the room! It's out before the paramedics even get there.

LL: Are audience members better off not knowing the original source material? I saw it with someone who didn't know anything about it, and I kind of wanted to nurse her through the film. She was really emotionally involved with the film.

DB: I think that's wonderful. It's not trash or torturing women for no reason, it's real life and it really happened, and it's something we'll never have to confront ourselves. We use cinema to confront things, it's knowledge, isn't it? Experience. You go there, you feel it. We've been very honest about it. It [audience fainting] does happen sometimes, but it happens for the right reasons. It's an empathetic reaction.

LL: Honestly, the film isn't even all that gory compared to what you could have shown.

DB: It's in Franco's face. That's the real reason people go over the edge, it's in his face, his acting is incredible. There's one moment in it where he looks like Heath Ledger in Dark Knight and it's weird. He goes to these places with the pain, it's extraordinary. He's taking you right to that edge. Most of the audience, event though it's not the kind of thing you would choose to watch, have to keep going with him. You've got to get through it. They keep telling me to stop saying this, but it won't work as well on TV, it's that collective thing of seeing it with people in the theater with you.

LL: I'm sort of amazed that you made this story so global, when it could have been all about the power and perseverance of the individual. Did the book feel hopeful and humanistic to you?

DB: It's hidden in the book, but it's there. He leaves these messages, some of them you see in the film, but there's long sequences where he talks to his friends. He goes on and on, and then he says, "Rayna, I been thinking about you, girl." And as a filmmaker you go, "What was that? Who is Rayna?" It's funny what you follow. If you love a book you tend not to follow its surface value, you follow the other things in it. I think, because of his wife, that he's much more trusting than when I first met him. He's much more capable of opening up. And he's continued to learn from it. It's not just about the moments in 2003, it's the significance for everyone else, what he's learned, and you compress all that into a film. But it has a much broader impact, and it's not about the heroics of it.

DB: My two favorite moments in it, one is where Spud sings to the boys at the funeral of Tommy. And then before that, when Tommy and Renton meet, and he asks Renton for money. And Renton gives him some money, and something passes between them. That scene is really humanistic to me. But I've always been like that, even though the movies are often thought of as cynical. And there is some savagery, but it's not a bleak worldview.

I've learned a lot about myself. This movie is about a person I'm not at all like, I don't like the wilderness, but there are things he does that it's taken me 20 years to learn. And it took him six days.