28 May ‘Casting heaven’: Danny Boyle excited about Alan McGee biopic Creation Stories
The movie is a biopic of Creation Records co-founder Alan McGee, the man who discovered Oasis, during the 1990s.
Filmmaker Danny Boyle has spoken of his excitement at working on the upcoming Creation Stories film, which brings to the big screen all the hedonism of the most famous British record label of the 1990s.
He revealed that filming has nearly finished on the movie, which is a biopic of Creation Records co-founder Alan McGee, the man who discovered Oasis, and that producers have found an unknown actor to play Liam Gallagher following a social media appeal for people to audition.
Trainspotting’s Ewen Bremner plays McGee, while Jason Isaacs, Rupert Everett, Jason Flemyng, Thomas Turgoose and Suki Waterhouse also star.
Boyle was recently brought in as executive producer, reuniting him with his Trainspotting writer Irvine Welsh, who has come up with the script.
Speaking to Sky News on the red carpet at the South Bank Sky Arts Awards, where he picked up the prize for best visual art for his Armistice Day project Pages Of The Sea, Boyle said he was excited to be involved.
“Nick Moran’s making it, it’s written by Irvine Welsh and his writing partner Dean Kavanagh, and they’re people who I admire enormously,” he said.
“But, they’ve also cast Ewen Bremner as Alan McGee, which is casting heaven. I can’t think of a better piece of casting that I’ve ever heard.
“They’ve nearly finished [filming], actually. It’s not a big budget. I’m not sure how it will do anywhere else but I think in Britain everyone will want to see Ewen Bremner as Alan McGee and the Creation Story in the 90s.”
Boyle, whose film credits include Slumdog Millionaire, 127 Hours and new Beatles film Yesterday, as well as Trainspotting, said it was an “interesting” project to work on but would not give too much away.
“It shows how creativity comes from some unlikely sources sometimes, and long may it continue, that process – we’re kind of like mavericks in the North Atlantic Ocean, that produce some wonderful stuff, really, and he’s [McGee] the embodiment of that.”
Boyle also spoke to Sky News about winning the visual arts prize for Pages Of The Sea, saying he felt “really proud”.
The project saw portraits of those who left Britain to fight in the First World War, never to return home, sculpted in the sand on 32 beaches across the country.
Artists began work in the early hours at low tides and used stencils and rakes to create the images.
Boyle said winning the award for the nationwide gesture of remembrance was an “acknowledgement of a real community project”.
“You get the credit for so many other people’s work, really,” he told Sky News.
“I’m just the figurehead really that dreamt it up at the beginning, but it’s actually the people who executed it. The whole point about it was that it was the execution on the day.”
Other winners at the South Bank Sky Arts Awards, which is the only ceremony in the world to celebrate all the different arts genres, included singer Lily Allen, author Diana Evans and actress and singer Jessie Buckley, with Lenny Henry winning the top prize for outstanding achievement in the industry.