Danny Boyle: 'I Still Have Great Faith In People'

Academy Award-winning director Danny Boyle talks to us about the Olympic Opening Ceremony, The Beatles, and his new film, Yesterday.

- Anna Walker

It’s 1964. Danny Boyle is eight years old and through the floorboards of his childhood home in Lancashire, he can hear his parents listening to Beatles records. He should be sleeping, but he’s awake pretending to be John Lennon. His twin sister, Maria, is Paul McCartney and his younger sister, Bernadette, is George. Or Ringo. Or maybe both at once. They didn’t really care. All they knew was that The Beatles were cool.

Danny, now 62, tells me this story gleefully, propelling berries from a neatly laid fruit platter into his mouth as he does so. We’re sat in London’s elegant Soho Hotel, but despite being one of Hollywood’s heavyweights— the Academy Award-winning director of Trainspotting, Slumdog Millionaire and 127 Hours—Danny isn’t one for ceremony. Throughout the interview he offers me food, asks me about myself with genuine interest and before we begin I hear him quietly turn down the offer of a taxi home, insisting that he’d prefer to take the tube (he’s lived in Mile End for nearly 40 years). There’s something PeterPan-esque about him—a boyish quality, that assures you those days of miming to Beatles records don’t feel so distant.

With his memories of the Fab Four taking root from such a young age, the concept of his latest film, Yesterday—which was written by romcom titan Richard Curtis—is most likely one Danny himself finds hard to fathom. Struggling singer-songwriter Jack Malik (Himesh Patel) awakes from a cycling accident to find he is the only person in the world who remembers The Beatles. And once he grows accustomed to this bizarre new reality, he realises that means that their entire back catalogue is now his for the taking…