Columbia Pictures’ T2 Trainspotting reunites Academy Award®-winning director Danny Boyle with the original cast of the 1996 Trainspotting film – Ewan McGregor as Renton, Ewan Bremner as Spud, Jonny Lee Miller as Sick Boy, and Robert Carlyle as Begbie.
The sequel will be shown exclusively at Ayala Malls Cinemas (Glorietta 4 and Trinoma) starting March 1, 2017.
First there was an opportunity……then there was a betrayal. Twenty years have gone by. Much has changed but just as much remains the same. Mark Renton returns to the only place he can ever call home. They are waiting for him: Spud, Sick Boy, and Begbie.
Other old friends are waiting too: sorrow, loss, joy, vengeance, hatred, friendship, love, longing, fear, regret, diamorphine, self-destruction and mortal danger, they are all lined up to welcome him, ready to join the dance.
“It’s 21 years since the release of the first film, and conventional wisdom says that’s 20 years too late to do a sequel!” says director Danny Boyle. “The delay wasn’t exactly deliberate — we’ve been talking about doing another one for years. But, actually, it’s what gives the film a raison d’etre. When you put the actors side by side with how they looked 20 years ago, it’s very brutal. We looked at it ten years ago and the actors didn’t look that different. I used to joke with them that they must moisturise all the time! But 20 years is a long time and you can feel it. The guys dealt really well with how they look now and how that they were going to be compared to how they looked previously. It was honest. They weren’t shy about owning up to where they are now, and that’s what the movie is all about.”
Jonny Lee Miller, who plays Simon (aka Sick Boy), agrees that this is not a traditional sequel: “I always said there was no point in making a sequel to Trainspotting unless you’re examining some bigger issues. What’s it like being older? What have you done? What’s happened to the characters and what are the implications? A straightforward sequel to a caper, with the answers to who got away and who got revenge, becomes very boring really. The only way you could make it interesting is to put people’s lives in between it.”
“The main question was ‘could John Hodge produce a script?’” says Danny Boyle. “The 20th anniversary was coming up and we thought it’s now or never. John went away and wrote a script that I knew, as soon as I read it, I could send to the actors. I thought ‘they’d be crazy not to do it’. They still might have said ‘no’ because of all sorts of factors, not least because a couple of them are in serious full-time TV shows. But they all responded very positively, so we were able to get it going.”
“We always sort of knew that there would be a pleasure in seeing these four characters together again” continues Boyle, “but the big surprise is the emotional impact. You see their faces, and it’s immediate. There’s a pathos. It’s to do with our awareness of what time has done to them, and to us. The film kind of telescopes time—you look one way and the past is there, so close; you look again—and it’s gone. It’s interesting, T2 is really an adaptation of two books: Porno, Irvine Welsh’s 10 years later sequel but, even more, it’s a direct loop back to Trainspotting. For me, the original book is like a modern Ulysses. It’s unsurpassed I think, and reading it is still like the ‘rush of ocean to the heart’. The new film is constantly drawn back into its orbit and it’s been a privilege to step back into that world”.
T2: Trainspotting is distributed by Columbia Pictures, local office of Sony Pictures Releasing International.
