Arms and the man

Danny Boyle isn’t into making huge mega-box movies.

“You do have a rare moment, and it’s temporary, where you have a bit of freedom,” Boyle tells CityBeat. “But I’ve made a few films, and it wasn’t like it was happening to me and I was 25. I already knew what sort of work I wanted to do, and it wasn’t huge mega-box movies. I wouldn’t be very good at those. They don’t really play to my strengths, those kinds of films.”

In 127 Hours, James Franco plays Aron Ralston, a self-sufficient rock climber whose his right arm was crushed and trapped by a boulder after a fall. Five days later, after drinking all his water and then beginning to consume his own urine to say alive, he cut off his own arm and staggered out of a labyrinth of canyons.

“I thought it [Ralston’s experience] was perceived fairly superficially,” says Boyle, who used Ralston’s book and interviews with the man himself as his source material. “I found it a much more compelling and more profound story than it appeared to be on the surface. I don’t think of it as a survival epic about a heroic individual; I think it’s got a social context, as well, that’s very profound for all of us.”

During the course of the film, Ralston comes to realize all the many things in his life he regrets. He’s not a bad person, but he’s just as self-absorbed as the next guy. He has relationships he could have handled better. He doesn’t always return his mother’s phone calls. Those are things all of us face, but we don’t spend a lot of time worrying about them because we don’t expect to suddenly find ourselves spending five days trapped under a big rock. Boyle and Franco pull this off by keeping almost the entire film in the canyon itself, rarely drifting away into Ralston’s world outside his present confines.

“Ever since I read his book, I had a very clear way of how I wanted to make it,” Boyle says. “We’d have an actor, you know, and we’d just disappear with that actor inside that canyon. We wouldn’t structure it around other things. It would just be structured around him and his experience in that canyon, alone.”

Even though it’s about Ralston’s experience, 127 Hours is Franco’s show. And Franco’s great. He’s come a long way from the good-looking kid who almost squandered his Freaks and Geeks cred on crappy movies.

“I think he got lost initially in that flush of the good-looking boy with talent,” Boyle says.

Somewhere along the way, Franco seems to have started to care about what movies he should take. And he’s since put together an eclectic résumé of performance, education (he’s going for his Ph.D.) and writing (his first book of short stories, Palo Alto, is in stores now).

“He floats into things,” Boyle says of Franco, “and for a film like ours, where it’s just going to be him, it’s crucial that you have that relaxation, even in the middle of appalling circumstances.

He’s fascinated by things that are slightly off-center, because he’s tried being on-center, and it hasn’t really worked.”

Going outside of the mainstream with films like Milk and Howl most certainly has worked, and 127 Hours will likely earn him consideration when Oscar nominations are in play.

At the end of the day, 127 Hours is still a movie about a guy who cuts off his arm. And that bit of business is not for the faint of heart. Still, Boyle says, that’s the key to making it resonate.

“It’s one of those classic, pure moments where you think, Oh, I couldn’t do that, when you hear it described in your living room—when, actually, of course we’d all do it. Sure, we’d probably fail, or stumble out of there and die, or faint, or the blood loss would be too much, or we’d never get through it. But we’d all do it.”

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