On Movies: How a stuck '127 Hours' became dislodged

Danny Boyle

- the energetic and impossibly upbeat British director who took home a bagful of Oscars for

Slumdog Millionaire

- has wanted to tell

Aron Ralston's

story for years now.

A hiker whose arm was pinned beneath a boulder when he fell into a Utah ravine, Ralston was trapped for more than five days. He lived to tell his tale, and to write about the ordeal, too, in Between a Rock and a Hard Place, published in 2004. Boyle read the book, and met with Ralston, but the canyoneer envisioned something far more documentary-like than Boyle, and so it was on to other projects, like the one about the street urchins tearing happily, and tragically, around Mumbai.

And then, with a global hit to his credit, Boyle approached Ralston again. This time, Ralston agreed to let Boyle try it his way: a "solo man movie," but one that took the audience inside the protagonist's head. Impressionistic. Hallucinatory. Weirdly funny.

"We had to wrest it off him, and we had to say, you've got to lend us this story and we will tell our version of it and then we will give it back to you at the end," Boyle says. "We won't disfigure the story, I promise you that, and I hope you'll be very proud of it and it will be emotionally truthful to what you went through. And he agreed. So we were off."

Well, they were off if he could persuade Fox Searchlight, his Slumdog Millionaire distributor, to let him have a go. This was, after all, a movie about a guy quite literally stuck in a hole, and running out of food, water, and hope.

"Potentially, it's unwatchable, in one sense," says the director, in town last month when he screened his Ralston story - 127 Hours, starring James Franco - at the Philadelphia Film Festival. The picture opens at the Ritz East on Friday.

"But I always thought that the chapters set in the canyon, of him trapped in the canyon, were as compelling as anything I'd ever read. I could see it as a film, and I knew how to do it, which is quite rare - when you think, I know how to do this, and I can explain how to do it.

"It didn't necessarily make sense to other people, but it did to me."

And then Boyle had to find someone to play Ralston, someone who could own the camera for 90 minutes and keep the audience with him on this harrowing journey.

"So we were looking at actors, we met a few, some of them would audition for you, some of them wouldn't," recalls Boyle. "And I met with James in New York and he was a bit - he was like, 'James? Hello James! I'm here. Do you realize I'm here?'

"It didn't go very well. But the casting people said see him again.

"So we met again in L.A., and I said if we're going to see him again I want to ask him to read a bit of it, and he came in and he was brilliant. He read this sequence - the video message Ralston taped for his mother and father - and as soon as James read it, I knew. It's him.

"He didn't look like Ralston, he's not physically an obvious choice, but it's him."

Franco, whose various movie projects, book projects, conceptual art projects, TV guest spots, and academic pursuits have made him (1) kind of legendary and (2) kind of a joke (a joke that he, quite possibly, is in on), delivers a truly remarkable performance.

"His brain is clearly hyperactive," Boyle says about his multitasking star. "And we benefited from that. He soaks up information. He gives you the impression he's not listening, that he's half asleep, but he's soaking up everything that's said, and he doesn't miss a trick."

Boyle shot 127 Hours in just eight weeks, deploying two cinematographers and two separate crews, "so they didn't share a day off, so I could keep shooting."

But Franco had to have the day off, "because legally you're only allowed to employ the actors for six days a week, maximum. So on the evening of his day off he would go to New York, overnight, sleep on the plane, presumably, show his face in two separate schools to try and keep himself up on [his] courses by showing up once a week, and then he would get the flight back, late at night to L.A., and then he'd sleep in the airport . . . and get the first flight into Salt Lake in the morning and be back on set.

"And I think that worked for this kind of story. You have to do it in this obsessive-compulsive way."

Unless his plans change drastically, Boyle, 54, will not be back behind the movie cameras for a good year or so now. He's about to start a play at the National Theater in London - an adaptation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, told from the monster's point of view. Benedict Cumberbatch and Johnny Lee Miller will trade off the roles as the misguided doctor and his monstrous creation. It will be Boyle's first stage production since before Shallow Grave, his 1994 screen debut.

And then, taking a leaf from Chinese filmmaker Zhang Yimou, Boyle will direct the opening and closing ceremonies for the 2012 Summer Olympic Games, to take place pretty much in Boyle's London backyard. But don't expect the extravagance of Zhang's 2008 Beijing spectacle.

"Everybody realizes that you can't make one like that anymore," Boyle says. "That was like a zenith, an end-point, that type of ceremony, so we're going to try to do something a bit different. Start anew.

"But that can be hard, because whatever they say about being delighted in doing it in a different way, and however much they acknowledge only having a certain amount of money - like a tenth of whatever they spent on the Beijing one - there are certain protocols and ingredients that have to be the same: the lighting of the torch, the cauldron, the speech, the parade of athletes."

So Boyle feels somewhat daunted, but also determined. And, yes, honored.

"I live very close to the stadium, and the area that it's regenerating in East London has been neglected for many years, so it's a wonderful thing. And also, when they asked me, I said yes immediately, because I think someone in the position I'm lucky enough to be in should do that. That's your obligation, that's your payback.

"I've been brought up by the arts in Britain. . . . So you've got to give something back. I feel that very strongly."