Trainspotting

“Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting. This movie is so punk. It’s of a time, it’s of the ’90s, when I was a teenager. This explosion of Ewan McGregor and how fantastic that Performance is, how dark it is, how… the gallows humor, the Scottish humor in this. It’s amazing. These images. Fantastic. I still remember, yeah… The sequence when he defecates in the bed is so amazing. It’s so funny. And it’s a high-wire act, this movie.”

“God, Trainspotting, Danny Boyle. This is an incredible film. Heroin addiction and Scotland. And, you know… “A country colonized by wankers.” It was just amazing. That’s a bad Scottish accent, but those are my ancestors, so I feel some bizarre affinity for the place. And, God, it was such a good movie.”

“Trainspotting, which has actually got a Pulp song on the soundtrack of it. We were making the Different Class record and we’d recorded pretty much all the songs and then we got this message saying, 'There’s a guy making a film and could you write a song for it?'... As luck would have it, we had a song called 'Mile End' that we’d recorded but didn’t really fit on the album. And so we said, 'Could you use that?' That was a bit of kind of serendipity. So... This is going in the bag too.”

“Trainspotting was like exciting filmmaking. It is so hard to give anything stakes when you're creating an imaginary world. This is stakes up the wazoo.”

“Trainspotting. It’s energy, that’s all it is. It’s just energy for an hour and a half or two hours. And Danny Boyle’s one of these great filmmakers who… I love filmmakers that have a style or a signature. But Danny Boyle kind of doesn’t do that. He’s like the Ween of filmmakers. He just explores different genres and different styles whenever he wants.”

“I want Trainspotting. I think I was 18 or 19. I was going to school in London, did an acting program in London for a couple of months one summer, and nothing like this had ever been made. I went to go see it by myself in a little theater, and it’s just one of those experiences that you have every once in a while where I was just completely stunned. I finished the movie and just sat in the theater by myself, and I really want to show this to my daughter, who’s 19, who I think will love it.”