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Deadline: 27th August 2016

Hello everyone, it’s once again time to announce the director I will be highlighting for the month in Director’s Chair and, seeing as how in the past few weeks we’ve been getting news about Trainspotting 2 and memories of the 2012 Olympics Opening Ceremony, I think now is the perfect time to highlight Danny Boyle.

In the years that he has been making films, Danny Boyle has proved himself to be one of the most eclectic filmmakers working today, able to make wild shifts in tone, most notably from zombie (sorry ‘infected’) horror film 28 Days Later, a film which helped define the modern zombie movie, to the light-hearted family film with a heavy dose of Christianity, Millions. Along the way he’s done sci-fi horror with Sunshine, some of the nastiest black comedies with Shallow Grave and Trainspotting, an intense survival story with 127 Hours (the most prominent scene in the film is something that, due to how squeamish I am, I will never be able to watch without closing my eyes and covering my ears), brought the style of Bollywood more to the mainstream in British and American culture with Slumdog Millionaire and gone into biopics with Steve Jobs, and I’ve still not mentioned the different styles he used for The Beach, A Life Less Ordinary and Trance.

Boyle also holds the distinction of being one of the few people to make me feel proud to be British, a feeling that over the past few months I am feeling less and less. Part of this is him growing up around the same area that my Dad grew up in (Bury in the country of Greater Manchester) but mostly it’s due to the 2012 Olympic Opening Ceremony. That was an event that could have easily turned into a disaster but in the hands of Boyle, reuniting with Millions writer Frank Cottrell Boyce, it became a loving tribute to the things that make Britain great, and things the current Tory government want to destroy, our culture, our acceptance of others and the NHS. That opening ceremony was one of the greatest pieces of British culture to come out in the past few years and something only a person as talented and with the background of Danny Boyle could have pulled off.

Once again, I will be accepting anything you’ve done, be it reviews, podcasts, retrospectives, whatever, on the works of Danny Boyle, and I will be accepting pieces on the 2012 Olympic Opening Ceremony. As a quick reminder, the films you can cover are:

• Shallow Grave
• Trainspotting
• A Life Less Ordinary
• The Beach
• 28 Days Later
• Millions
• Sunshine
• Slumdog Millionaire
• 127 Hours
• Trance
• Steve Jobs

Send all of your works to [email protected] and I look forward to reading your posts.