Danny Boyle thinks he's become a "worse" director as he's got older and more experienced.
Danny Boyle
The 'T2: Trainspotting' filmmaker has learned a lot about the technical aspects of putting together a movie over the years and thinks that has made him take a more cautious approach as he's aware of the consequences of his decisions.
He explained: "This is genuinely what I believe -- is that you get better as a director in theory, right? You don't, actually, not as a film director. You actually get worse, I think.
"There's something about when you really are in awe of it, and you don't know what to do, and it's terrifying and amazing. You never get that feeling again, because you learn, technically, how it works.
"If you're a conscious human being, you're picking up, like, "Oh, this is how it works, is it, and if I do that, that happens, does it?" There's a series of skills you pick up, but I don't think they necessarily make you a better film director...
"I remember on 'Shallow Grave', the one before 'Trainspotting', making it up, like, 'Why don't we do that? OK, let's do that!'
"Whereas now, you'd go, 'Well, I'm not sure that's a good idea, because of all the consequences that'll happen.' So, it's very, very interesting."
And the 60-year-old director admitted he felt conflicted when making 'T2' as to whether he should embrace the skills he has learned or adopt the "innocence" he still had when working on the first 'Trainspotting' in 1996.
He added to Vulture: "[With 'T2', the question was] do you direct it with all of your supposed present skills, or do you try and recreate that innocence, that naïveté, that feeling of awe in the face of making a movie?
"You know, I've watched them for so many years, and now I get to make one! What am I going to do? I don't know!
"I think it helped having the actors, and the memories of the actors from the first time, but I tried to recreate that feeling of, 'Here we go, what should we do?' on the day, as much as possible, rather than plan.
"A film has a tendency to plan, plan, and execute, rather than discover.
"When you're doing character drama, the discovery is the character work, but when you're doing entertainment films -- and these are entertainment, really, they're not serious art movies about characters; they're fun and enjoyable and you want to include as many people as possible -- the tendency is to plan, and I tried not to do that."
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