Top 50 Danny Boyle Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I grew up in a city, I’m a city person – I go on holiday and I’m bored.”

— Danny Boyle

2. “We want to see drama told in a cathartic way, with power, with emotion where you empathize and then you’re frightened. All those feelings charge up in you and you feel for the story.”

— Danny Boyle

3. “The great thing about space films generally, with the exception of Apollo 13, is that big stars tend not to work in space and I think that’s because space is an equaliser. It makes everyone the same really and suits an ensemble cast and actors who are prepared to work with each other.”

— Danny Boyle

4. “Always changing genres, making very different films is a good idea. It’s a way of making yourself feel vulnerable again, getting back to that innocence. As is working within a circumspect budget.”

— Danny Boyle

5. “If you have to be persuaded about something, you shouldn’t do it.”

— Danny Boyle

6. “I’ve just been to the Taj Mahal which I’d never been to and I’m not a very romantic kind of guy but it is the most romantic thing I’ve ever seen.”

— Danny Boyle

7. “The perfect equation is form equals content. The style of the film reflects the story, and that’s what you’re always aiming for. You’re not always necessarily successful at it, but that’s the ambition that you’re trying to do.”

— Danny Boyle

8. “The most important thing about Olympics, of course, is the games and not the opening ceremony. It’s weird the way it gets inverted sometimes.”

— Danny Boyle

9. “Although computer chips now are thinner, they’re more powerful, they’re not as reliable. You’d harvest computer chips from the 1980s from all around the world because they’re reliable.”

— Danny Boyle

10. “It’s not so much what you learn about Mumbai, it’s what you learn about yourself, really. It’s a funny old hippie thing, but it’s true as well. You find out a lot about yourself and your tolerance, and about your inclusiveness.”

— Danny Boyle

11. “I find that people find a way out of misery through humor and it’s humor that’s often unacceptable to people who are not in quite such a state of misery.”

— Danny Boyle

12. “Film industry is a pretty brutal business. If you fall too far behind, all of the perfectionism in the world won’t save you.”

— Danny Boyle

13. “Actors want to impress at the beginning, so you take advantage of that by suddenly saying, ‘Right, you’re here for two weeks.’ What you’re doing is creating a siege mentality.”

— Danny Boyle

14. “When you’re in zero gravity everything moves at the same speed and nothing stops it. If you throw something it travels forever but it still travels at the speed you threw it at. To make it plausible, movies have chosen to show it in slow motion.”

— Danny Boyle

15. “I’m always after putting people in extreme circumstances. I’m always after not knowing what I’m doing in those extreme circumstances.”

— Danny Boyle

16. “It just seduces you when you read a story and your brain relates to it. You recognize or connect with it. You identify with it; you’re bound to.”

— Danny Boyle

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

17. “A lot of film directors are quite scared of actors. They are a bit of a nightmare sometimes, but I like them. It looks like cunning, but you try to get extra things from them all the time, by stealth, by making them feel confident, so they trust you and you can push a bit.”

— Danny Boyle

18. “Good storytelling for me is not so much technical expertise, which I know is applauded often; it’s actually freshness of approach. It does mean you sometimes stumble and fall and make a horrible mess of things in seeking that freshness, but you should always keep trying to do that.”

— Danny Boyle

19. “I was brought up a very strict Catholic and I don’t practice anymore or anything.”

— Danny Boyle

20. “I love watching the Bond movies obviously and I grew up reading the books as a kid. I’ve always loved them because of that.”

— Danny Boyle

Featured in: Reading Quotes

21. “To create the reality of space with this sense of suspension: nothing’s happening, it’s endless; we’re traveling at 28,000 kilometers an hour but nothing’s happening. Nothing! And you have to do that! There are all these rules you have to follow, I’ve never known anything like it.”

— Danny Boyle

22. “My dad was a labourer and my mum had exactly the same job as Noel Gallagher’s mum – she was a dinner lady at our local school. Everyone comes over from Ireland and they get the same jobs.”

— Danny Boyle

23. “I don’t want people to sit there and objectively watch the film. I want them to experience it as something that’s under their skin, so you try to make the films really tactile.”

— Danny Boyle

24. “Directing is a mixture of compromise and perfectionism. When you lose the judgment of which is more important at any particular moment, you’re time is over. They find you out and send you packing.”

— Danny Boyle

25. “Everybody knows Aaron Sorkin’s scripts. There’s a huge amount of lines. There’s a huge amount of interchange. You gotta do a lot of learning to be able to get it up to pace.”

— Danny Boyle

26. “Theres a certain truth that you do end up making the same film again and again so if you vary the genre you have a chance of breaking that cycle.”

— Danny Boyle

27. “I kind of call myself an atheist, I suppose – although quite a spiritual atheist, I hope.”

— Danny Boyle

28. “You live your life and it ends quite quickly and all you can do with it is pass it on decently to someone else. Whether directly or indirectly, behave decently to other people.”

— Danny Boyle

29. “I made this film ‘The Beach,’ which didn’t take place in a city, and it didn’t really suit me.”

— Danny Boyle

30. “I trained in the theatre.”

— Danny Boyle

31. “The individual will to survive is often seen as just that, an individual thing. In fact, it’s sort of a gene we all carry and like a network of computers it all contributes in some way to when it’s individually needed.”

— Danny Boyle

32. “Clearly, you can think back and see that a character has had enormous odds stacked against him and has to overcome them. It’s usually a guy, I’m afraid. But then you’re setting up a new movie you have amnesia about these meetings, when you’ve discussed it more analytically.”

— Danny Boyle

33. “I tend to score with songs from Western pop music.”

— Danny Boyle

34. “There’s lots of things that can be solved with cash.”

— Danny Boyle

35. “I find it difficult enough being called “Mr. Boyle,” which as I age I’m increasingly called.”

— Danny Boyle

36. “The awards season gives a chance for independent films to have a bit of longevity in the press and the media.”

— Danny Boyle

37. “I always say to anybody who’s going over to America for the first time, ‘Whatever you do, go and see a popular mainstream film with a big audience.’ Because people shout out. You never get that in Britain. Everybody’s so quiet, scared to laugh. It’s like being in church.”

— Danny Boyle

38. “If the American taxpayer knew how much they paid per person to put Neil Armstrong on the moon they would never have paid it. It was hidden from them deliberately because the costs were astronomical.”

— Danny Boyle

39. “My kids are too old to remember this now but, when they were much younger, I swore to them if this miracle ever happened, I would receive it in the spirit of Tigger from Winnie the Pooh, and thats what that was.”

— Danny Boyle

40. “I don’t want to make pompous, serious films; I like films that have a kind of vivacity about them.”

— Danny Boyle

41. “Everybody expects you to be qualified to talk about your films, but in a way, you’re the least qualified person to talk about them. When you’re finished, you don’t watch them at all.”

— Danny Boyle

42. “Even though one of them is about an Edinburgh junkie and ones a little boy of eight in Manchester, you want them to always portray their world in such a vivid way that the audience can disappear inside the story.”

— Danny Boyle

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

43. “I always wanted to make this film or another film. I thought the worst thing you could do was to react to Slumdog’s success in some way. I thought it would be really foolish.”

— Danny Boyle

44. “I’d love to do a modern-day musical that’s full of original music. To get your contemporaries to sing and dance without looking foolish and for it to be transformational and magical and all those things a musical is supposed to be.”

— Danny Boyle

45. “I always think, when there’s stuff that people don’t like, I always say that if I have another success, I’ll enjoy it more, but you don’t really.”

— Danny Boyle

46. “If I was American, I think I’d live in New York, because I like that East Coast mentality. There’s nothing wrong with Hollywood. If you want to be a big time filmmaker, you should go to Hollywood.”

— Danny Boyle

47. “If you love a book you tend not to follow its surface value, you follow the other things in it.”

— Danny Boyle

48. “The extraordinary thing about India is that it’s such a family place. It’s full of families everywhere.”

— Danny Boyle

49. “You use elements of noir, but you don’t want it to be too noir-ish. You don’t want it to be advertised as though you’re asking people to go and watch an updated noir. I don’t think they’ll go do that. They want to see a modern story.”

— Danny Boyle

50. “I’ve sort of escaped my background, as people often do, through art and culture.”

— Danny Boyle