Millions-part 4

PART FOUR: THE NORTH - A BRIGHT AND SHINING STAR… With the breakout success of his directorial debut Shallow Grave and its follow-up, Trainspotting, Danny Boyle proved that British film talent was not simply to be found in a square mile of London's Soho district. In fact, he identified a thirst for such stories around the UK. "If you look at the films that work with the public here," he says, "with the exception of Guy Ritchie's and Richard Curtis' films they're usually from outside London. And they're usually from strong industrial areas. We tend not to watch country films, we tend to watch city films and I think that's where the stories are and where the drama is. There's something much more defined about it. London's like a snowball, picking up people as it rolls on and it's quite difficult to stop it and define something. But I think you can do it in places like Liverpool and Manchester. Just think of Sheffield and The Full Monty."

And with Millions, he was keen yet again to explore an area of Britain known and inhabited by many yet rarely seen on the screen. Since Cottrell Boyce is from Liverpool and Boyle is from Manchester, they decided to settle on a place in between. "Normally in Britain, we either make films about the upper classes, in period dramas, or we make them about the working classes," explains Boyle. "But actually the vast majority of people live in places like the one we tried to make this film about, on a new estate. That's where a lot of people live and I thought that was where the movie should be honed. I didn't want to set it in Manchester or Liverpool, I wanted it to feel like one of those satellite areas that so many, many, many people live in and are yet ignored. Films usually aren't made about them. So we went from town to town between Liverpool and Manchester and finally we found the perfect estate in Widnes.

Now, in British cinema history, the north of England has traditionally been relegated to the status of supporting character in a string of dour, kitchen-sink dramas of the 60s, shot in mournful backed white. But in Millions it comes into its own as a bright, vibrant place, where natural beauty contrasts with sophistication and modernity.

"The challenge was to make the film look full of colour and light," says Boyle. "It's easy to slip into a different kind of realism of the north because I think the colour and life are to do with the spirit of the people, because the humour of the people of the north is really special." Adds Broadbent, "Danny worked very hard in terms of formulating how the film would look. He wanted it to be bright, optimistic and new, portraying an image of Britain going forward."

To transform the images in his head into moving pictures, Boyle turned to cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, with whom he collaborated on the visually groundbreaking 28 Days Later, which was shot on high-definition video. Boyle and Dod Mantle took a similar approach to Millions and constantly convened to discuss fresh ways to photograph the film at every stage.

The fact that the events of Boyle's film occur in the run-up to Christmas posed something of a problem for Dod Mantle. "It's kind of schizophrenic because it's a winter film, but we've shot in summer doing sixty per cent of the film in exterior day sunshine. We also shot a small percentage of the film in the studio." Despite frequent light changes on its Liverpool and Manchester locations, Dod Mantle worked hard to create a strategic colour palette for the film, which would enable him to make last-minute tweaks and enhancements in post-production.

But although Boyle and co were keen to give the North its dues, the characters themselves were an integral part of the colour scheme. "We did a lot of tests to choose the colour of the kids' tops and we visited a lot of schools near where we were filming," says Boyle. "We went to this one school and I saw this mixture of yellow and blue and I thought that's just perfect for the film. I knew that Anthony would make it burst into life and it was a great key that our production designer, Mark Tildesley, could use to bounce off."

But despite this apparent spontaneity, Boyle and Dod Mantle and Boyle had very specific ideas for the characters themselves and the particular worlds in which they live. "For instance," says Dod Mantle, "Danny and I had aspirations about visual horizons for the father Ronnie as he tries to create a new role and a new life for the boys. Damian's a more spiritual character and as he encounters the saints I wanted his colours to be more muted and gentle. Anthony is a potential materialist, so I've tried to frame him and colour him in a certain way because I feel he's attracted by bright, violent colours. His eye-line and expression are much more brutal too as he looks towards camera - he looks hard and has his own passport for survival - while Damian is far more gentle and serene as he looks up to the camera. This is a boy who's searching for something."

The result is a vibrant, lustrous and even magical film (in the purest sense of the word), quite unlike anything attempted in the north ever before. "The film was not going to be pallid or muted at all," says Hauptman. "It was going to take risks."

A USER'S GUIDE TO SAINTS. #5: JOSEPH (1st Century BC - 1st Century BCE)

Little is actually known about Jesus Christ's adoptive father except that he was a carpenter of humble stock. Some reports claim that he was in his eighties when he became betrothed to Mary, although it seems more likely that he was in his early twenties. Nevertheless, Joseph was wise for his years and was respectful of his wife-to-be, even before he knew the child she was bearing, that was not his, was actually the son of God. Joseph is a mysterious character in the Bible and no words are directly attributed to him. However, he remains a character endowed with great faith because of his willingness to listen to the words of God. And to this end, he extends his patronage to cabinet-makers, confectioners, expectant mothers, house-hunters, married people and unborn children.

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