Photo book for the 25th birthday of “Trainspotting”: Heroin Chic – Culture

Because he had too much cocaine in his head in the 1990s, Noel Gallagher once refused to play a song by his band Oasis Contribute to the soundtrack of “Trainspotting”. He thought it was a documentary about guys watching trains. Boring!

Which is why there is of course no better author than Noel Gallagher for a foreword to an opulent making-of book that will be released to mark the 25th anniversary of the film. In it, the rock star apologizes using the word ten times fuck for his misjudgment. He praises “Trainspotting” as a masterpiece that tells of the hell of being a junkie like no other, without hiding the happy moments of intoxication.

Of course, it would be impossible to see a film like that today, says Gallagher. Because of the fucking internet. And the whole fucking state of the world anyway. You couldn’t shoot something so exciting anymore because some guys were going to freak out. “But,” said Gallagher, “the whole Trainspotting team didn’t give a shit what other people think. And that’s exactly the attitude that makes great art.”

There was no money for a real film studio, the film was shot in an old cigarette factory

British journalist Jay Glennie has written several notable books on film making, including “Raging Bull” and “The Deer Hunter”. His books are so good because he gets almost all of the stars involved who tell the most beautiful stories again. Glennie has worked with Mick Jagger, Robert De Niro and Meryl Streep, among others, and he was able to speak to almost everyone involved on “Trainspotting: 25th Anniversary”.

The volume has so far only appeared in England in a limited edition of 1000 copies (Coattail Publications, 120 pounds) and can be ordered on the Internet. In it, Glennie tells the story of how the classic film came about using unpublished material (Polaroid recordings from the castings, excerpts from various script versions, budget calculations, drafts of the legendary Art Design for the posters). Not only is the book a making-of, it’s also a nice little history lesson about the “Cool Britannia” years, when music and films and books from the island were the gold standard of pop culture.

The “Trainspotting” poster was a small work of art in itself.

(Photo: Coattail Publications)

One of the defining characters of Cool Britannia was a filmmaker trio consisting of producer Andrew Macdonald, screenwriter John Hodge and director Danny Boyle. They landed a surprise hit in 1994 with their cinema debut “Kleine Morde unter Freunde”. The black comedy was the opposite of the dusty British cinema of the Thatcher years and, the cinema operators could hardly believe it, finally attracted young viewers to an English film again. Fortunately, the producer Macdonald read the novel “Trainspotting” by Irvine Welsh afterwards. He knew immediately that this crazy book about a clique of junkies in Edinburgh had to be their next film together.

“Trainspotting” was a low budget production, the calculations in the book are less than two million pounds. The filmmakers could only afford a good seven weeks of shooting, six in Scotland, one in London, little for a feature film. But the fact that the film had to be made in a start-up atmosphere with little money and time is what all those involved describe (at least in retrospect) as exactly the right drive.

“Pervert!”: Approaching girls on the street for a film role turned out to be a moderately good idea

In order not to have to pay expensive film studio rents, the filmmakers set up shop in a disused cigarette factory in Glasgow, where most of the sets were built. The Wills Tobacco Factory belonged to a certain Lord Hanson, who was considered a merciless businessman but had a weakness for film glamor (especially Audrey Hepburn, with whom he is said to have had a brief affair in the 1960s). Perhaps because of his love for movies, the Trainspotting team got the entire cigarette factory premises rented for just £ 7,000. There was also the legendary scene in which leading actor Ewan McGregor dives into “the worst toilet in Scotland” in a dream drunkenness, which in the film looks exactly as it is called. The disgusting fecal smearings are actually a product of the art of pâtissier: They were imitated with chocolate, and it is said to have smelled quite special on the set.

The scriptwriter John Hodge gets the biggest compliments from his colleagues in the book. He succeeded in developing a structure from the novel that on the one hand honored the deliberate lack of structure in the original with its endless, confused monologues (heroin frenzy!), But on the other hand developed a dramaturgy that more than did justice to the requirements of a movie. Hodge, who is a trained doctor, is now one of the most accomplished screenwriters in Great Britain. The fact that he was intended to be the author of the current Bond film, but the producers did not dare to film his script, can safely be described as a drama.

The famous monologue at the beginning of “Trainspotting”, in which Renton (Ewan McGregor) ponders the insignificance of bourgeois life (“Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career” …) was somewhere rather inconspicuous in the middle of the novel hidden. Hodge put him at the beginning of the chase in which Renton and his buddy Spud flee after a shoplifting. As a result, he created one of the best intros in film history. That got even better because the filmmakers also played Iggy Pop’s “Lust For Life”.

The song was one of the most expensive items in the budget, actually there was hardly any money to buy pop hits. But the creators negotiated a deal with the record company. All artists received a small, rather symbolic sum (for example £ 15,000 for Iggy Pop) and a promise of further payments if the film was a success. And “Trainspotting” became a huge hit when it hit theaters in 1996.

The production assistant Saul Metzstein claims the greatest learning effect from the shooting in the book. For the role of Diane, with whom Ewan McGregor had an affair in the film, he was supposed to find a young, unknown woman with no previous acting experience. His approach of simply approaching girls on the street and asking if they would like to act in a film turned out to be rather disastrous, he reports. “Piss off, pervert” were the friendlier answers until they finally decided to hold a real casting.

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