Danny Boyle revealed the disturbing truth behind Trainspotting’s infamous ‘worst toilet in Scotland’ scene
Award-winning director Danny Boyle turns 70 today and what better way to celebrate than remembering one of the most iconic but also disgusting scenes in his repertoire?
The filmmaker from Bury might well have won an Oscar for Slumdog Millionaire but Ewan McGregor was really slumming it when he dived down a toilet in Trainspotting to retrieve his drugs.
If you haven't seen the 1996 classic, you might not be familiar with the scene, where the cast visit the 'worst toilet in Scotland' after lead character Mark Renton's rather urgent need to relieve himself came at the worst possible time.
Having just consumed some drugs, Renton's addiction sees him explore through his own faeces before jumping into the toilet head first in order to retrieve them, which is enough to make everyone watching feel a bit ill.
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But it turns out that the reality was far nicer for McGregor who fortunately didn't have to climb through literall poo in the name of cinema, as he had almost the dreamy experience of climbing through various kinds of chocolate.
Boyle said: "It was meticulously clean. The set smelled really sweet — delicious, really, kind of like a confectionary. You could have licked the chocolate right off the bowl.
"We used a half toilet and, when he slips down, there's a slide on the other side. Ewan claims it was his idea to twist around. It was great fun."
So, it's credit to McGregor's acting ability that he makes the scene feel incredibly disgusting, but if you do plan on watching the film again in the near future, at least you can rest a little easier knowing that it's actually just chocolate that he ends up wading through.
Although the scene is classic in its own right, Boyle does raise the point that 'British films always have toilet scenes'.
He adds: "Most other cultures don't bother, but the British always do — we're obsessed with them, I think."
Of course, there's the famous shower scene in Psycho, the exchange of toilet-related puns in Austin Powers and even Harry Potter flushing himself down one in the seventh movie to sneak into the Ministry of Magic.
But few go to the lengths that Boyle does in Trainspotting, and it's certainly a scene which has gone down in history, which won't change just because a few more of us now know the secret about the set.
Boyle also said: "When you come up against something really ugly, you want to turn it into something beautiful straightaway."
Boyle's next film Ink, which focuses on The Sun newspaper and promises to shine a light on their coverage of the Hillsborough disaster, is due to come out in January.
It's an adaptation of the play by James Graham, with Boyle messaging the playwright after seeing the play, which led them both to work on a screenplay together.
He told the British Film Institute: "I wrote to James saying I really enjoyed it. Years later, he sent me a draft of a screenplay, we started to do some work on it, and it was a chance to develop a film. Even if you kept it exactly like you’d done it on stage, I knew a film would focus on a different character, because it’s about an interior mind that you then can investigate with film, no matter how rambunctious it is; whereas on stage you’re celebrating a live communal event.
|It felt like the touch paper or the ignition point of the modern media where we are now. I could see clearly it traced back to the establishment of what you’d call true – if that’s the right word – tabloid vocabulary and behaviour.
"The attention economy, clickbait, the dopamine economy – this is its hatching point. It’s evolved to where we are now, and if that was what you thought [would happen], well, that’s wild. But wonderful to make a film about."
Topics: Ewan McGregor, Cinema, Entertainment
James Moorhouse