Trainspotting. It’s on every other ‘Best Films of the 20th Century’ list and those iconic lines of dialogue were a guide to life for a generation. So why tempt fate making a sequel to a classic?
“Why go back to it? Why risk disappointing people?," director Danny Boyle says he asked himself.
"This is like a highwire act of potential career-ending disappointment.
"If you made a really shite version of this, people would say, ‘That is it. Finish him. Put him down'."
Why go back to it? Why risk disappointing people? This is like a highwire act of potential career-ending disappointment.
Set in modern day Scotland, Trainspotting 2 brings back most of the original cast 20 years after we last saw them. In that way, Boyle says it’s a kind of a coming-of-age film.
“It’s about male behaviour. You know, we never talked about this on set. Not once.
"The film is absolutely about masculine behaviour, the movement from boyhood, that time when you’re completely indestructible - or you think you are - and you just behave completely recklessly, carelessly about everyone and everything apart from your own pleasure. 
"It’s about the movement from that to manhood.
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“It’s the point at which you arrive where you can no longer ignore time and you realise time no longer cares about you, and you think, ‘What have I done? What did that amount to? Who is that child?’”
In this way it sounds like a depressingly accurate BuzzFeed listicle that reminds you how life was a thing you once did… and now you live to pay off a mortgage
Yet this is Danny Boyle - Sunshine Danny Boyle, 28 Days Later Danny Boyle - don’t expect dull.
“It’s the point at which you arrive where you can no longer ignore time, and you realise time no longer cares about you, and you think, ‘What have I done? What did that amount to? Who is that child?’”
"We made this one, sort of, for ourselves," he says, on the high expectations of a follow-up.
"And I know it’s okay to stand beside the other one, and it can talk to the other one, as well.”
Legend has it, and Boyle confirms, that during the production of the first Trainspotting film leading man Ewan McGregor proposed he and Boyle take heroin to get into his character’s headspace.
“We had a long chat about it and we thought it would be disrespectful to the people who had suffered from it," Boyle says.
"'Cos one of the things that’s extraordinary about it is that some people touch it once and their life is changed forever and they can never escape it.
"Don’t mean they’re addicted to it, but it’s always there hovering in the background. Other people can take it just like some people take ecstasy, just once in a lifetime.”
Boyle added he learnt all he needed to know about the drug not by doing it, but from a drug recovery group.
The Brit came to appreciate how street users of heroin take it less for the high and more to deal with life’s lows and “take away an emotional burden.”
