"When you're adapting a book, on one hand you've got to be prepared to sacrifice things to make it more cinematic. So I went ahead and did the first draft in a few weeks." For Hodge, Trainspotting proves to be a trickier task than Shallow Grave which, being an original screenplay, allowed him entirely free rein. "I think he wanted to move on to other projects, which was understandable. "Irvine Welsh expressed a wish not to be involved with the writing of the screenplay," he explains. But, of course, we're desperate to get the rights." Hodge presses on with the script, regardless. They don't have plans of their own to film Trainspotting, but, as soon as they sniffed that something was up, they wanted to be co-producers - and we weren't keen on that. "The problem," laments MacDonald, "is that we can't directly buy them from the book publishers (Minerva) because they've been sold to Noel Gay (TV production company responsible for Red Dwarf). One of the key issues was not to make a film that cost a lot of money. And this, from the proverbial handshake over the book rights, to the point when the rest of the world discovers just what all the fuss is about, is how it came to be. The result is an electric combination of hilarity, razor-sharp irony and the harrowing effects of drugs on a life. In the case of Danny Boyle, Andrew MacDonald and John Hodge, the directing/producing/writing trio behind 1994’s hit Shallow Grave - you shun the overseas hotline, take £1.5 million and some up-and-coming talent, and head back north of the border to film Irvine Welsh's cult Scottish novel Trainspotting, a series of vignettes concentrating on heroin-hooked anti-hero Mark Renton and his attempts to kick the habit, despite a lack of cooperation from his similarly-inclined friends. There's just one small problem: how do you follow it up? Movie folk from across the pond deluge you with six-figure offers just to say yes to their next project. You're pronounced British Film Industry saviours, are compared to everybody from Hitchcock to Tarantino, scripts pour through your letterbox at an alarming rate, and the phone rings off the hook. It receives astonishing reviews, and earns more than £5 million on its home turf, making it the biggest home grown film of the year. You make a modest little thriller, filmed in Glasgow in 30 days and starring a trio of relatively unknown actors. You're a director/producer/writer team trying to carve a niche for yourselves in the British Film Industry.
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