The last time we talked, when you were promoting Millions, you were just starting prep work on Sunshine. You sounded excited, but also a little
apprehensive about working with special effects and the scope of the
movie. Did it turn out the way you expected?

Back then, I had no idea about how difficult it was to do a film
like this. All movies are a challenge, obviously, but there are really
tough. You suddenly become aware that, unless it’s a franchise deal, no
director ever goes back into space after having done one. [Laughs] The
demands that are set by your predecessors—the really good movies—they
sort of remain in the audience’s brain in a way unlike any other genre.
Technically, you have to be on a certain level, which is terrifying.
You realize, quite quickly, that your initial naïve conception isn’t
good enough, and you really have to ratchet things up. So it’s a very
grueling experience, and you always feel that what you’re doing isn’t
quite good enough. If any of the crew is reading this, I apologize.
[Laughs]

Talk a little about how the project got
started.

Well, it was the writer, Alex Garland; we’d worked together on
28 Days Later and wanted to do something else. After I did
Millions, he sent me the first draft, and I just thought about
how much I loved space movies. Little did I know, at that point, what
it was all going to be like. (Laughs) But I did love watching them. I
realized that, more than any other genre, I’d always go catch space
movies in the theater. And that’s not usual with me; I’ll usually catch
up with things, but I don’t normally go to the opening weekend, you
know? So the chance to do one, and especially with this original idea
about the sun, fascinated me. In a funny sort of way, I think we’ve
forgotten about the sun. Ever since our species came up with
electricity we’ve felt independent, and I think that it’s only now that
we’ve realized that we’re not, really. We’ve made a slightly contrary
film in that regard, as it’s about the opposite of global warming, but
it still makes you realize how fragile and vulnerable we are. I mean,
the sun has burned for four billion years, but that’s no guarantee. It
was only 300 years ago when he had a mini Ice Age and the Thames froze
over. Before that, the Vikings had to leave Greenland. So it’s like,
you know, wow, it could happen at any moment.

What were the films that really inspired you?

Well, there are three huge ones: 2001, of course; the first
Alien film becomes, I think, more and more of a landmark with
every year that goes past; and then Tarkovsky’s Solaris. All
three of those are just titans that you cannot help but be inspired by.
You can set out to avoid them but you’re eventually going to end up
slamming into them. So what we tried to do is acknowledge them and sort
of doff our cap. There were a lot of other films that we used that
weren’t based in space, actually. Rather than research every film set
in a spaceship, we went more to films like Das Boot and,
especially The Wages of Fear, where they had to drive trucks
filled with nitroglycerine through the mountains. That last one was a
big inspiration because we always saw our film as, basically, eight
astronauts strapped to a bomb. So we drew ideas from a lot of different
places, really. But I have to say, what we tried to do was then abandon
all that research once you actually start filming. You never want to
become slavish. The tricky thing with this genre, I found, was that
there are certain rules that you can try to contradict but really
can’t.

What are the rules?

Well, we would try to do things in a more realistic fashion, and
then ultimately have to reshoot, because we would find that, although
they were real, once you put them on the screen they looked less
convincing than the movie version. Like for example, seeing star fields
in space. If you’re actually in space, especially if you’re flying
towards the sun, all you’d see is black. So I, you know, said, “Why do
all these idiots use star fields in their movies? I’m not going to do
that!” But of course, once you do that, you realize that without star
fields as a backdrop, nothing moves, because there’s no way to suggest
movement in a vacuum without it. So that’s why every space movie you’ve
ever seen has stars. The other big rule was weightlessness. If you look
at footage of the space station, the weightless astronauts move at the
same rate as people on earth. When they make a gesture or pick up a
screwdriver, they’re moving at the same speed as they would with
gravity. But we’re so accustomed to see them moving in slow motion in
movies, that to do it realistically makes it look funny and speeded up,
like a silent movie. I wanted to do it, but it just wouldn’t work.
There’s a bunch of stuff like that which you don’t think about until
you actually have to shoot it.

So a totally realistic space movie would have astronauts
moving around in total blackness, at Benny Hill speeds.

Basically, yeah. [Laughs] One real thing that I especially tried to
get across was how hard it is to work in space. I think it was Buzz
Aldrin who came back and said the effort of doing things in a
weightless environment was just phenomenal. You know, you’d go out for
a six-hour spacewalk and be completely fucked after an hour, no matter
how much you’d trained. But it’s difficult to do that in movies,
because you have to be all floaty. On the other hand, one of the rules
that I do really love about space movies is how everybody is made
equal. It isn’t a genre that really suits big movie stars. You think
about Alien, and one of the great things about it is that none
of the characters have any special status, and you can kill them off in
any order. That freedom is one of the joys of this type of movie, I
think.

I wanted to touch on the quasi-religious element that comes
in toward the end of the film, as the characters get closer to their
destination. Any thoughts?

Well, it’s interesting, really. Alex, the writer, is a convinced,
confident atheist. I’m an atheist as well, although not quite as
confident as him. I can say for certain that that religious element
wasn’t in the first draft of the script. But I think the process of
making a film like this makes you think about things. I mean if you’re
making a movie about flying to the nearest star, about knowing the
unknowable, there’s a feeling of wonder that your characters have to
experience, something there that’s beyond their scientific reasoning.
And I think you have to go there as a filmmaker as well. It doesn’t
mean that you’re going to convert to Catholicism or anything, but
there’s something there.