Director Danny Boyle, Michelle Yeoh, and Hiroyuki Sanada on the set of Sunshine Courtesy of Fox Searchlight

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For a director who seems to find his inspiration in decidedly Earth-bound people, places, and things — heroin addicts (Trainspotting), tropical locales (The Beach), and viral infections (28 Days Later) — of late, director Danny Boyle has been in orbit. In his new film Sunshine, a multicultural crew of astronauts and scientists are asked to shuttle a nuclear bomb into space with the hope of reigniting a dying Sun and saving a freezing Earth. Boyle keeps things realistic — more 2001 than Star Trek — but adds his own personal stamp on a genre he freely admits to loving, but also is quick to express a desire never to visit again. Space — it's a nice place to visit, but you don't want to direct there.

PREMIERE.COM: How long was Sunshine in development?
Danny Boyle: We spent about a year working on the script. Alex [Garland] gave me the script at Christmas time, and we worked on it for about a year, then we spent a year setting it up, then about three months shooting, then we spent another year editing it— well, not so much editing it as it was waiting for the CG to be delivered. So it was a three-year trip, really.

Is it frustrating, having to wait?
It's too long, yeah. It's too long to make a film, to be honest. I'm very proud of it and all that stuff, but it's too long. I think two years is the maximum you should spend on a film. We knew it was going to take a long time because if you're going to try and create the sun, the reason that it's never been done really is 'cause it's only now that CG's been able to kind of deal with its complexity, its size, its power. And we've only now got the tools, so it was always going to take a long time to deliver that element of it. But it's way too long.

How do you convey to the actors the power of what they're supposed to be seeing?
For me, that was key. People were saying to me, "You're wasting money here. You've built these rigs that nobody's ever going to see because it's going to be replaced by CG." And I said it doesn't matter. It's so that when Cliff Curtis, when he sits here, he feels the sun. He can feel it, so he can act accordingly, as Jack Nicholson says. You've got to act accordingly. The biggest danger with CG, I think, is that it looks a bit plastic sometimes, and secondly, actors look a bit bored, because they've just sat there for too long and there's nothing to look at. Or there's a green man pretending to be a horse running across a green screen. And they just can't summon up the energy to say, "I believe this." Or, they overdo it. They overcompensate and go, "I really believe it!" and they're overacting. So I always wanted there to be something there that was feasible so the actors could react to it the way they would to other environments. So I spent a lot of time on that, making sure they had stuff to look at that was convincing…that was disturbing, if that was appropriate…and let them lose themselves in the moment.