Director Danny Boyle on the set of Sunshine Courtesy of Fox Searchlight

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How much work went into making the ship itself look unique?
You have the ingredients. There's usually a tube, a steel tube that they travel in. But what was different about this was they had this bomb, which we wanted to be the size of Manhattan. So you had this vast bomb that had to be protected from the rays of the sun, so that gave us this kind of Grecian shield protecting them. It seemed to kind of design itself, that. Interior-wise, we went to a nuclear submarine in Scotland, and it was quite interesting and a lot of the design was based on that,; although, it's a bit bigger than a submarine, because NASA said you'd never take them up in a submarine-sized ship for that length of time because they'd go mad. Astronaut sanity is a really critical part of their thinking for any kind of long-term exposure in space. And we wanted the color of it to feel like Alien, which dictated that kind of blue–steel gray kind of look that you get inside spaceships which is regarded as classic now. But it helped us, because we wanted it to not have any kind of orange, red, or yellow color palettes, so you got robbed of that color when you are inside the ship for quite a long period of time. Then when you went outside, the yellow flooded you. You had forgotten it as a color and then it floods you and passes over you.

If Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic gets off the ground, are you buying a ticket?
He's got real estate, hasn't he? In New Mexico or something? He's ready to go. I mean, I would, I'd love to go. I've been lucky, I've had two experiences: I went on the Concorde, once; I flew that from New York to London, and I saw the curvature of the earth. Because one of the extraordinary things you can do on the Concorde, because it flew at 65,000 feet rather than 35,000, was see the curvature of the Earth. And I remember thinking, "That is absolutely unbelievable." And I don't know why, because we all know it's curved, but you never see it. It's always flat, isn't it? And I once went on a weightless flight, went on the "vomit comet." That's $3,000 to go on that. If you've got $3,000, do it, because it is an extraordinary experience.

Since you're not going into space again, any chance you'll get around to adapting Porno, Irvine Welch's follow-up to Trainspotting?
Well, [Trainspotting screenwriter] John Hodge has done a kind of a loose, rough first draft of it. We wanted to try it out and see if it works, and it does work. It definitely works. But now we're waiting for the actors to get a bit older. Because, unlike the book, which happens quite soon after the original novel, our idea is that they're much older and they've hit middle age and they're still hanging around Edinburgh. What's going to happen with their lives? Because they were 20-year-old hedonists, who could literally inject anything and just about get away with it — their bodies were resilient enough. But now they're 40, and it doesn't work like that anymore. So we thought that'd be interesting. Because the original audience would have grown up with the film as well, and they'll all be in their 40s and have that history to bring to it as well. It will be interesting to see.