Director of the cult hit ”Trainspotting”, and more recently ”Slumdog Millionaire”, Danny Boyle jumps head-first into the unsafe territory of telling the true story of Aron Ralston (played by James Franco) and his epic, yet stationary tale of survival in ”127 Hours”, which reads far from traditional, with even the filmmakers themselves at one point calling the project “impossible.”
While trekking alone in the Blue John Canyon in Utah’s Desert, a boulder fell on seasoned adventurer, Aron Ralston’s arm, trapping him inside a narrow canyon for five days without any contact with the outside world. Surviving on just one bottle of water, Ralston must find ways to not only survive the interim, but also to free himself of the boulder and the arm it crushed when it becomes clear help is unlikely to find him.
With the vast majority of the film taking place in this small, narrow, isolated location with only Franco in shot, the challenges and obstacles of the project were obvious to the crew from the onset, and Moviehole’s Tim Johnson met with the cast and crew to ask them about it. “I thought it was an impossible adaptation was my first reaction. A beautiful book but enormously challenging to adapt,” recalled producer Christian Colson (who also worked on ”Slumdog Millionaire” with Boyle).
Screenwriter Simon Beaufoy too, needed convincing that the team would be able to pull off such a tough adaptation. “Of all the mountaineering stories, this is the one that shouldn’t be able to be told because it’s just one person on their own and they don’t even move. It has everything going against it in terms of making a good film. And that was my initial response when Danny and Christian said, ‘Oh, we’re doing a film about Aron.’ And I scratched my head and I thought of all the stories, why choose the one that’s impossible to make? And then, Danny presented this document which had a way, how it could be shot and how it could be done. And crucially and very cleverly, he realized that he wasn’t really down in the canyon on his own. Because he had this video recorder, he was talking to somebody. And that is what really makes the film possible.”
Boyle explains that a film needed a supremely strong actor to essentially carry the entire film’s narrative, much of which features Aron by and talking to himself, and recalls the unlikely first moment he envisaged James Franco as his lead. “I remember seeing Pineapple Express and thinking ‘Whoa, great movie’. But also thinking ‘Wow, Franco –he’s got real range, hasn’t he?”
And luckily for Franco, getting in the head of a character who, for some ‘127 hours faced imminent death was made much easier by Aron who was on hand to explain his memories and decisions through the process. “We were at the Four Seasons in L.A. and it was the first time I met Aron, and he brought this ratty VHS tape that had the original videos on it. And we all sat there and watched it. And it was for me, incredibly powerful for a lot of reasons. One of the main reasons, just as why it was so powerful, but (also) why it was so valuable as an actor too, is every other variation of the story that you hear from now on, you know that Aron made it out. And Aron can tell the story and we can tell the story, but you know with happens. On the video, it’s Aron in the middle of the situation, not knowing that he’s going to get out. I was saying to myself while we were watching it, ‘Wow, there’s a guy that thinks he’s going to die, and in some ways, he’s accepted it. You (Aron) said something like, ‘Gosh, it’s weird to watch this with a director and an actor in the room because it’s such a poor performance,” Franco explains.
And while Aron does make it out alive, it’s not before one traumatic experience (perhaps for both he and the cinema-goer, too), where Aron must remove the part of his arm stuck under the boulder to free himself. While uncomfortable to watch, Boyle felt it necessary to show the long, painful experience as realistic as possible. “We didn’t want to make it for a horror audience (and) we didn’t want to make it so that it was watchable by everybody. You know, it was obviously going to be something that had to truly reflect his experience, and the key things in it are that it took Aron over 40 minutes, and that it had a degree of pain in it, which most guys never get near. But also, that it was a doorway to something else, that it wasn’t an event in itself. And that what we decided that people would go through this as part of the experience of watching the film. And the euphoria or the exhilaration, the ecstasy you feel at the end of it is deeply earned because you, like him, have been through some kind of intense experience. And that was always how we judged it.”
After seeing the horrible pain Aron must go through to release himself from the canyon, it seems a far cry from the celebration that was Slumdog, though Boyle sees the two films differently. “I mean, we all do think of the film as being very different from Slumdog because Slumdog was about millions of people, and this story is about one person, but we’ve discovered sorts of strange similarities between the two films. And I challenge the notion that Slumdog is somehow euphoric in a way that this isn’t. People remember Slumdog as being euphoric because there was a dance at the end, but we pass through some pretty dark material before we arrived at that point in the story and earned that euphoria. And in that sense, I think the two stories share a certain similarity. They don’t pull their punches in the darker moments, but the up side of that is at the end of the movie, hopefully, audiences feel they’ve been through something powerful, meaningful and true.”
And we couldn’t let Boyle go before finding out if he had any interest in a third installment to his 2002 cult hit ”28 Days Later”, said to be called ”28 Months Later”. “I’d love to direct another one of it, actually, because … I wasn’t that involved in the second one, and I really enjoyed watching it as a punter, you know? Because when you make films, you never really see them as like punters see them. It’s weird. You’re entrusted with editing a film for an audience and preparing a film for an audience, and yet you’re as far away from what they will see as you could ever get because you’ve watched it hundreds of times, and you’ve produced it. But I watched it as a punter, and I thought, ‘Wow, I’d really love to direct the next one’. And that’s where that began really. It’s just – it’s a question of time and … stuff.” Though, unlike Aron in the canyon, Boyle has much more than five days to work out the details for ”28 Weeks Later” sequel.
