Danny Boyle on Why You Won't Notice the Next Punk Revolution

If punks were to rise again, no one would see it coming, according to the makers of the new FX on Hulu show Pistol.

Director Danny Boyle and creator Craig Pearce have put together the new TV show which tells the story of how the Sex Pistols burst onto the cultural scene of 1970s Britain. The six-part series, which is out now, stars the likes of Maisie Williams, Thomas Brodie-Sangster, Anson Boon, Talulah Riley and more.

The Sex Pistols, Vivienne Westwood and her partner Malcolm McLaren were instrumental in leading the rise of the punk movement in the U.K. at a time of boredom, recession and oppression. The Pistol creator and director spoke to Newsweek about the possibility of a modern movement taking hold at a time of political tension.

"The thing is," Boyle told Newsweek, "You will not know until it arrives.

"That's the whole point of these things. When they erupt, they erupt organically. Out of forces that you then go on to examine and say, 'Oh, it was because of this, it was because of that'. But you can't predict it," Boyle said.

The Oscar-winning director of movies like Trainspotting, 28 Days Later, 127 Hours and Slumdog Millionaire was born in 1956, and vividly remembers the days of punk and the Sex Pistols in the U.K.

"You can't manufacture it either, because it's fake. I mean, they do manufacture them in pop culture, and they're fake. And then everybody dismisses them, but something like this, [punk] is pure."

Episode 1, "Track 1: The Cloak of Invisibility," introduces audiences to the SEX Boutique in London, which was owned by Westwood (Riley) and McLaren (Brodie-Sangster). Their designs and clothing were a prominent part of the movement, and their collaboration with the Sex Pistols benefited all parties.

"Something like this movement is pure. Malcolm and Vivienne, in being the creators of it in so many ways, they had this wonderful mixture of the purity of intent, and their love of filth and sex. And they just smashed those two things together." Boyle added, "You can't predict that, you can't go 'Oh, what if we, if we put together this and this?' It came out of those crazy minds."

Pearce created Pistol, adapting Sex Pistols guitarist Steve Jones' book Lonely Boy: Tales from a Sex Pistol to the screen. Australian Pearce is known for his collaborations with Baz Luhrmann and co-wrote the screenplays for Romeo + Juliet, Moulin Rouge!, The Great Gatsby and most recently Elvis.

Elaborating on how Pistol documents the finer details of the punk movement, he said, "It's this sort of extraordinary feeling of bringing back and recognizing the craft artists in the U.K., and [what] they meant by that is the little old lady making rubber suits in a cottage in Wiltshire somewhere that you never really heard of. SEX the shop, grew out of that."

He continued, "I had discussions with people about going to Glaswegian council estates to hunt down Nazi memorabilia freaks, so they could put upside down Luftwaffe insignia on their clothes.

"They are the completely unpredictable and purely real obsessions that just weren't manufactured," Pearce said.

All six episodes of Pistol are available to watch on Hulu now.