This article originally appeared on VICE UK.I was far too young to watch Trainspotting when it first came out. Mind you, that didn't stop it from penetrating the bubble of my pre-pubescent world. It was the film my friends and I would talk about in class, the film that had promotional posters we'd want to buy with our Christmas HMV vouchers, the film we lied about seeing right up until the point of actually seeing it.
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In the late 90s, pre-internet, in a small English town in Yorkshire, Trainspotting provided us with a lot of firsts. It was a portal into an adult world we'd never seen before, in real life or on the screen. Tarantino had given us a glimpse at sex and drugs, but under a heavy gloss of style. Trainspotting added the weight of reality to that world, and watching it as a 12-year-old, the film made you feel more grown-up, somehow more experienced. Or at least it did for me.Last week marked the 20th anniversary of the film, so to celebrate, I spoke to three of the main players: Ewan McGregor, who played Renton; Kelly MacDonald, who played Diane; and the author of the original novel, Irvine Welsh, whose new book The Blade Artist—out this April—continues the story of Trainspotting's Begbie.
THE BOOK
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FROM BOOK TO FILM
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AUDITIONING
THE MOST MEMORABLE SCENES TO SHOOT
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IW: The scene when "Perfect Day" [by Lou Reed] is playing, and he sinks into the ground—I think that was a great way to have that overdose, the way that you're lulling towards death. The second half of that scene, there's a relentless energy of it, and it's set piece after set piece. It struck me, as I've seen the way people can die not remotely dramatically on drugs, but just by slowly fading away and going to sleep, essentially. They can actually enjoy that sense of being taken, in a way, and sometimes they pull out of it and sometimes they don't. That scene summed up both the horror and the appeal of heroin to me. The deathly caress of it. I think that was a fantastic scene. There are very few visual directors around better than Danny Boyle; he knows how to tell a story in pictures, and he knows how to say something visually in a set piece.
THE FINISHED FILM
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KM: What I recall most about seeing the film for the first time is more Bobby Carlyle's reaction to the film, because I was sitting next to him. He was almost crawling on the floor with embarrassment. Every time he came on screen he would dip lower in his seat, which I thought was interesting. That's how I feel too, though. I think it's fairly common. I didn't like watching myself. I still don't.IW: Where I think I came into my own a bit with helping on the film was the soundtrack. Because I knew a lot of the musicians personally, I was able to put them in touch directly so [the filmmakers] could circumvent the process of having to pay massive bucks that they couldn't afford to get the music cleared. The artists were so enamored with the movie and wanted to be involved so much that they were coming in and saying to their record companies, "Can we let this [song] go?" That helped us secure the rights for a low cost, and sometimes no cost. There is no way we'd have been able to get such a soundtrack normally. Danny had worked with Leftfield on Shallow Grave, and I think he knew New Order from Manchester as well. There was such a great vibe about it that it spread to these musicians too, who gave us a bunch of stuff that would have normally cost us a fortune.I reference most of the artists in the book: Iggy, Lou Reed, Bowie, and a lot of the house stuff I was into at the time. But what I didn't get was the Britpop thing. Primal Scream and Damon Albarn were friends, and I knew Jarvis Cocker, but I didn't really see the Britpop involvement. I didn't see how it would work, but I think it was Danny who decided we needed that contemporary feel, which was a masterstroke, because Britpop was kind of the last strand of British youth culture, and it helped to position the film as being the last movie of British youth culture.
THE MUSIC
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REACTIONS TO THE FILM AND ACCUSATIONS OF DRUG GLAMORIZATION
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