‘Trainspotting’ sequel director Danny Boyle said time was right to revisit characters

Renton. Sick Boy. Spud. Begbie.

Their names are as iconic as the image of the Scottish lads from “Trainspotting” running away from the cops — an homage to The Beatles outpacing their fans in “A Hard Day’s Night” 32 years earlier.

The final scene of the 1996 black comedy saw Mark Renton (Ewan McGregor) absconding with a satchel full of cash and delivering, in voiceover, his famous “choose life” speech. For years moviegoers pondered if director Danny Boyle and screenwriter John Hodge would ever return to Edinburgh to see what time and tide had wrought to the antiheroes of “Trainspotting.” With the opening in the District this weekend of “T2 Trainspotting,” their questions will be answered.

“They’re the same, but they’re different, and the film will be different as well,” director Mr. Boyle said during a District stop on his current worldwide tour to promote the sequel, adding that a two-decade gap — for both the characters and the actors portraying them — represents “a huge milestone … which is [why] they will be different.”

Mr. Boyle and Mr. Hodge made a few earlier, ultimately aborted, attempts to return to that world of drugs, reckless sex and a youth culture at war with bourgeois values, but the timing and the scripts were never quite ripe. In the aughts the duo had a screenplay based on the novel “Porno,” Irvine Welsh’s sequel to his own “Trainspotting” book, but abandoned the plans — somewhat over concerns of sullying the love cinephiles have for the original.

“There is a part of you that feels we shouldn’t touch it,” Mr. Boyle said, “and you don’t want to dishonor it, nor do you want to make … a too-easy sequel that just rehashes the first film.”

Mr. Boyle said he is content with the decision not to go with the earlier screenplay — “it was an inadequate, inferior idea,” he said — which was faithful to “Porno,” whereas “T2” is largely an original idea using Mr. Welsh’s novels as a springboard.

“When John and I went back to it a couple of years ago, it felt more personal,” Mr. Boyle said of the end result of their toiling in the writing room, adding that the entropy of time in fact made the writing better. “We were more honest with ourselves about … our aging, and we were prepared to actually allow it into the film more.

“And, of course, that’s what the actors responded to, because they are [older] as well.”

Indeed, Mr. McGregor and co-stars Jonny Lee Miller (Sick Boy) and Ewen Bremmer (Spud), who were all in their early 20s at the time of “Trainspotting,” are now middle-aged men with careers launched thanks to the 1996 film. (Co-star Robert Carlyle, who plays Begbie, is a decade older than his co-stars.)

“Nobody had a career. They didn’t [care] about anything in that first film,” Mr. Boyle said with a smile of his then-young cast, adding they were game to film scenes in the nude even outdoors in Scottish weather. “[They’re] not going to do that now. They’ve got families and careers to worry about.”

“T2” opens with Renton returning to Edinburgh to seek out his former mates, to right some wrongs and perhaps reconcile with his family and even his former girlfriend Diane (Kelly Macdonald, seen in the U.S. on HBO’s “Boardwalk Empire”).

Not only has Renton changed, but so too has his native Edinburgh.

“It was kind of a pristine, slightly reserved city — rather middle-class,” Mr. Boyle said of the Edinburgh of the mid-’90s, calling the city both “medieval and Georgian.” “It’s a much younger city now. And some [young people] are drawn apparently by the first film. They changed the town,” Mr. Boyle said in his animated fashion.

Accordingly, Renton finds himself a stranger in an even stranger hometown than the one he walked away from two decades prior. A key scene takes place on the Edinburgh Trams, which cost nearly a half-billion pounds to build but has seen only moderate ridership.

“We asked permission to put Renton on the train, and they said, ’Yes, please! Can you set the whole film on the train?’” Mr. Boyle said with a hearty chuckle.

Mr. Boyle described the first film as largely “internal,” with the characters content to be “inside their own heads” and holed up inside one another’s homes — frequently accompanied by shooting up heroin.

“If you think about the first film, there’s no sense of place other than when they run the street,” he said, adding that the interiors of the previous film were actually shot in Glasgow.

But in “T2” the Scottish capital city takes center stage, with Renton and his mates seen out and about on the streets of Edinburgh and walking the glorious countryside. Renton and Spud even take a hike up to Arthur’s Seat, which local legend posits as one of the possible locations of the legendary Camelot.

“We were going to do it whether it was raining or shining, and it was shining,” Mr. Boyle said, adding that Edinburgh effectively was born “around” Arthur’s Seat.

Despite Renton’s best intentions to right past wrongs and reconcile with his friends after taking off with the money, things do not go quite as planned. Sick Boy — now going by his given name, Simon — is understandably hesitant to pal around with his old friend. At the same time, Begbie manages to finagle his way out of prison, and upon hearing that Renton has come home, the madman becomes instantly hungry for revenge.

Shenanigans, as they frequently do, ensue, and vows of sobriety are tested. The same dark humor that accompanied the antics of “Trainspotting” are back, but Mr. Boyle was keen that not only was the story for “T2” not be a carbon copy of the original, but that his directorial approach would be fresh. He wanted the humor and the adventure to come from the characters, not from him imposing the hyper style of the first film onto its successor.

“They are crazy characters; they’re quite extreme, so I tried to get as much of it to come from them as possible,” he said, adding that the actors re-found the “rhythm” of their characters and their repartee with one another rather quickly.

“I thought I’ll let as much of it emerge as possible from the actors being in the room,” Mr. Boyle said. “That’s the main thing I copied from the first film in terms of directing — leaving as many decisions as late as possible.”

This gonzo approach led to some unexpected gifts, such as a humorous scene in a pub where Mr. Miller attempts to play some piano for a glaring audience, but then trips over his fingers at the keys, leading to a mistake and a vocal regret. This was unscripted and an improvisation from Mr. Miller.

“Johny can’t really play piano; he learned some basic stuff, and that suits the character because he’s remembering chords from school days,” Mr. Boyle said of Mr. Miller’s actions. “If you set that up, you probably wouldn’t get it.

“So it’s stuff like that that seems so inconsequential, but there is a delight when [those] moments happens. You do get those pure gems.”

Despite the conscious effort not to parrot the first film, one returning element is Renton’s “choose life” speech. However, it is now delivered extemporaneously in a restaurant to a new character rather than in voiceover — and refracted through the prism of Renton’s life experiences.

“What he was mocking in the first film was bourgeois addictions,” Mr. Boyle said. “It felt right that he should update it.

“It felt good that a critic like Renton — and he is a critic, in a way — should actually comment. But he’s doing it live; it’s not a voiceover anymore. And it became more confessional and more personal. It’s not a sort of sardonic, cold-eye-on-the-world outlook. It’s actually quite full of anger [since] his choices have not worked out.”

Mr. Boyle describes this middle-aged version of Renton as “left behind” by the internet and social media culture. Part of this isn’t so much that the world has purposely thumbed its nose at Renton, but merely that it has moved on and left him behind in a culture increasingly in love with youthfulness.

“I think it’s a really valuable speech,” Mr. Boyle said. “He’s beginning a kind of process by which he’s getting his voice back again. He has to ’earn’ the right. He has to speak to people, not just watch them.”

Indeed, unlike the hopeful speech at the conclusion of “Trainspotting,” Renton bookends his new soliloquy with “choose disappointment, choose not becoming the person that you wanted to be,” almost as if in admission that not only have his choices not worked out, but that life often delivers as many setbacks as it does opportunities.

Mr. Boyle, whose career since “Trainspotting” has included an Oscar for directing 2008 best picture “Slumdog Millionaire,” as well as the biopic “Steve Jones” with Michael Fassbender and Kate Winslet, wishes to impart that he and his cast returned to the “Trainspotting” universe for the love, not the money — the budget was a modest $18 million — and at the correct time to do so.

“There was a reason to do it that you could stand behind and say, if you didn’t like it, I just haven’t expressed it well enough,” the filmmaker said. “This was the philosophy of returning to these guys.”

Mr. Boyle calls “T2” a “more thoughtful film” when compared to its antecedent given the effects of time on both the characters and filmmakers. But he hedges when asked if another return to the mean streets of Edinburgh is in their future.

“There might be an idea that arrives in two years’ time,” he said. “I don’t know what that idea is, but it’s the idea that is important — that it has a value.”