Danny Boyle admitted he had to sacrifice a couple of things in order to utilize the "chaos" for Pistol, the new TV biopic of the band the Sex Pistols.
The Oscar-winning director leads a cast comprising of Maisie Williams, Thomas Brodie-Sangster, Anson Boon, Talulah Riley and more. He was tasked with getting his actors into the suitably punk-era mindset of 1970s Britain for the show.
All six episodes of the limited series drop of FX on Tuesday May 31.
Members of the Pistol team, director Boyle and actors Brodie-Sangster, Boon and Jacob Slater sat down with Newsweek to share a glimpse of life behind the scenes on the Sex Pistols biographical show.
How Boyle Organized the 'Chaos'
"You can have all the talent in the world, but if you don't get the casting right, it's goodnight really," Boyle told Newsweek.
Asked about what he tried to implement on the set of Pistol to get his actors in a punk frame of mind, he suggested the actors did it themselves.
"If you feel you have got it right, you trust them and then you just want to create the conditions that they can blaze. That's what you want. Because I love quite strong acting, you know it's not mumblecore."—mumblecore is a movie subgenre generally featuring low-budget, improvisational acting—"It's absolutely full on good lines [...] And big personalities, which of course the stories fall off," Boyle said.
Boyle is predominantly known as a director of movies coming to prominence for 1996's Trainspotting before going on to direct The Beach, 28 Days Later, Slumdog Millionaire and 127 Hours. His career has taken him across different themes and genres, and Pistol posed an entirely new challenge.
"The best way to capture it is not to try and lock it and order it. It's to just let it run loose," Boyle continued. "And you sacrifice some things. You lose some things like some close-ups you never get. You suddenly realized, 'oh, f***, we didn't get that close-up.' But the benefits of empowering them more than compensate for those technical things."
Boyle said his background working in the theater prepared him for this shoot, which involved so much compromise.
"Anybody who's interested in becoming a director or becoming a writer involved in our business, get some experience in theater. Because it just preps you for everything. You know, everything. It won't make you very rich," Boyle joked. "But it'll prep you for everything else."
A 'Stinky, Sweaty' Set
"I'd like to work with him again, not just because he's a fantastic man and director, but I'd like to see how he'd vary," Brodie-Sangster told Newsweek on working with Boyle. "I think he may have used some quite specific things for this show."
Brodie-Sangster, of Game of Thrones, The Queen's Gambit and Love Actually-fame, plays the Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren in Pistol. He described the shoot as "frantic," "chaotic" and "all over the place," in the best way possible.
Boyle would hide the cameras from the actors, meaning they were never playing to the cameras in a scene. "He crossed the line constantly. Like, he broke all the rules," said Brodie-Sangster.
"He would whip round and he would play so you get this kind of fast-paced, moving, energetic, chaotic, slightly disorientating feel without it being that kind of sicky, jolting feel, though as an audience member, and that I think really helps create that tension that's within the group itself," Brodie-Sangster added.
Two of the actors playing Sex Pistols also felt this sense of energy and mayhem Boyle created. Jacob Slater plays the drummer Paul Cook while Anson Boon had the unenviable task of portraying frontman Johnny Rotten.
"Constant motion" is Slater's biggest memory of Boyle's style on set. "Nothing ever stops. Which is great. Because, I guess that was the spirit of the era. Everything was so fast."
Boon added: "There was an electric pulse pumping through this set."
"There really was. You'd walk on set every morning and you go like 'woah, okay, let's do this again,'" Slater said.
"Organized chaos was how I think they made this show," Boon said. "Everything you've seen music-wise in the show was actually performed live, we didn't pre record anything, and we haven't edited anything in post. It was really important to Danny, to really give this band their dues to do live performances. So you get all the lumps and bumps of live performances."
Boon continued: "We might know that there's eight cameras on us, but all we can see is the audience and our bandmates, and all we can feel with our characters. And it was such a special experience for an actor to have that. So yeah, it wasn't like making a TV show a lot of the time because I couldn't even see a camera."
Confirming the authenticity of the gigs, Slater said it even smelled like a gig, for better or for worse. "It was real, real stinky, sweaty bodies in a room." he said.
All six episodes, or "tracks" of Pistol will be available to watch on FX from Tuesday, May 31, 2022.
Uncommon Knowledge
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
About the writer
Jamie Burton is a Newsweek Senior TV and Film Reporter (Interviews) based in London, U.K. His focus is reporting on ... Read more
