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Associated Press

For a fleeting moment after Trainspotting came out, Ewan McGregor felt like a rock star.
It was not his first significant project; it was not even his first film with director Danny Boyle. And he was, in his words, fairly arrogant and cocksure at the time. But that kinetic film about four heroin addicts in late-1980s Scotland was and remains defining – in his career, in the culture and in his understanding of what true artistic satisfaction can feel like.
“It’s very much in that early part of my career, and of course, even today, probably the most important piece of work that I was involved in, just because it had such a massive effect on my life. Not only because of what it did, but because of how it felt to make,” McGregor says.
“It set the bar unknowingly high because it’s been quite hard to match ever since.”

The 4K digital restoration is currently on show at cinemas in North America to mark its 30th anniversary.
Though Trainspotting was very much of its moment with its Britpop soundtrack, its Thatcher-era grit, its darkly comedic tone and shrewd blend of giddy highs and tragic lows, it is also one that has stood the unforgiving test of time.
“You get kids coming up to you who are 17 who said they’d just seen it,” Boyle says. “I could be their grandfather … yet it still spoke to them.”
Putting Hollywood on hold
Boyle was a hot commodity after Shallow Grave, a 1994 black comedy about flatmates in Edinburgh starring McGregor, and Hollywood was literally calling. Sharon Stone, then at the peak of her fame, cold-called him and asked if he wanted to make a film with her. But he had his sights set on Trainspotting, Irvine Welsh’s buzzy debut novel, teaming once again with screenwriter John Hodge and producer Andrew Macdonald.
The budget would be small, £1.5 million, and the shoot would be quick and local. What they didn’t know did not concern them: Boyle remembers asking his cinematographer, the late Brian Tufano, if they could use an anal probe camera for the “worst toilet in Scotland” scene.
“I remember him saying, ‘Well, Danny, yes, you can get that. But I’m not sure how Ewan and his family and agent will feel about that,’” Boyle says with a laugh. “He tempered my kind of extreme way of approaching this material.”

And somehow it all worked, driven by youthful energy, a bit of arrogance and a passionate commitment to the material.
“Trainspotting had to be made that way,” says McGregor, who was 23 when the film’s production started. “It would have been a disaster if it had been done differently.”
For McGregor, at least part of the vitality came from the fact that they were shooting on film; money was going through the camera on every take.
“We shoot on these cards now, and it just doesn’t matter any more,” McGregor says. “There’s no natural sort of, like, rhythm to filmmaking like there used to be then … I think back to Shallow Grave and Trainspotting, and it feels almost like a different job.”
The rock star moment
Like any film about drugs, there was a fair amount of discourse around its release. United States presidential candidate Bob Dole even denounced it, unseen, for romanticising heroin during his campaign. But the film was in the conversation – and it had an enviable group of supporters, including Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker and Blur’s Damon Albarn, both of whom provided songs for the film.
After Trainspotting became a hit, life changed profoundly for McGregor. In London, he says, “it was madness”. He was sharing a flat at the time with his co-star Jonny Lee Miller, as well as Jude Law and Sean Pertwee. When they went out to clubs, they felt like rock stars.
“There was a real energy around it,” McGregor says. “We were part of that, you see, the Blur and Oasis and Pulp and The Verve and all of that amazing music that was happening then. We were the sort of movie version of it, I guess, because Danny knew what he was doing with the soundtrack and because the novel was so huge and current and… and maybe because it was ours. It was British, and it wasn’t pandering to America. We didn’t make it for America.”

An absolute love of cinema
Boyle hopes that audiences take a chance on Trainspotting in the cinema, whether they are revisiting it or seeing it for the first time. It was, he says, made with an absolute love of cinema.
“It’s very indebted to [Martin Scorsese’s 1990 mafia movie] Goodfellas, which also has that feeling of: you are here to be absolutely assaulted by an experience,” Boyle says.
“You know, you have given us your money, and you’ve given us your time to be here for 90 minutes, two hours, whatever it is, and we promise, we promise to deliver everything to you that we can.”


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(From left) Ewen Bremner, Ewan McGregor, Jonny Lee Miller and Robert Carlyle in a still from Trainspotting. Danny Boyle’s dark comedy, based on Irvine Welsh’s novel about a group of heroin addicts in Edinburgh, remains one of the most defining films of the 1990s. Photo: Sony Pictures Classics via AP

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Danny Boyle turned down a film opportunity with Sharon Stone to make Trainspotting. Photo Invision/AP

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Trainspotting star McGregor and director Boyle share how the 1996 film about Scottish heroin addicts still resonates three decades on


Trainspotting star McGregor and director Boyle share how the 1996 film about Scottish heroin addicts still resonates three decades on.


Fame and celebrity

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As Trainspotting turns 30, Ewan McGregor and Danny Boyle on the film’s massive impact

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Trainspotting star McGregor and director Boyle share how the 1996 film about Scottish heroin addicts still resonates three decades on

Trainspotting star McGregor and director Boyle share how the 1996 film about Scottish heroin addicts still resonates three decades on