THE dizzying, breakneck pace of Trainspotting is set in the opening scene as the camera - and a pair of store detectives - chases the movie's anti-hero and one of his mates through the streets of Edinburgh while Iggy Pop's Lust For Life pumps up the adrenalin on the soundtrack. What follows is an astonishing audio-visual experience as director Danny Boyle takes us deep into the world of Scottish heroin junkies, some hopelessly addicted, others attempting to control or break their habit.
Firmly eschewing the social realism approach which British cinema traditionally has employed to explore such themes, Trainspotting employs a remarkably bold visual style to form a movie that is, by turns, shocking, chillingly unsettling, blackly humorous, bursting with energy and startlingly surreal. Fuelled by sharp, rapid-fire dialogue and vividly played by an exemplary young cast, this is a Clockwork Orange for the 1990s - a reference most explicitly evoked in the anti-hero's voice-over narration and in the set constructed for the movie's nightclub sequence.
The most eagerly awaited British film in years, Trainspotting is the second movie from the Shallow Grave team of director Danny Boyle, producer Andrew MacDonald and screenwriter John Hodge, and it marks a quantum leap from that very promising but rather over-hyped first feature. That the hype machine was in overdrive again was abundantly evident in London last week with the movie's striking series of black-and-white poster shots papering the billboards and Tube sites. and with copies of Irvine Welsh's cult novel, on which the movie is based. and John Hodge's published screenplay prominently placed side-by-side in the city's bookstores. Not to mention the publicity for the successful stage adaptation of Welsh's book, moving into the West End, and for the movie's tie-in soundtrack album with its hip, hot compilation of Pulp, Blur, Elastica, Leftfield, New Order - and Lou Reed, whose Perfect Day has never been used before to such ironic effect.
Trainspotting is one of those rare movies that can withstand and live up to such a welter oil promotion, and when I met Boyle, MacDonald and Hodge at a London club, they were enjoying the anticipation of the audience reactions when their movie goes on release in Britain and Ireland next Friday. Its European launch is at Cannes in May and it opens in the US during the summer where it's anyone's guess what the audience, will make of it at a time when the cinemas are crammed with Hollywood blockbusters.
It was producer Andrew MacDonald - whose grandfather was the renowned producer and director, Emeric Pressburger - who came up with the idea of transferring Irvine Welsh's novel to the screen. "After the success of Shallow Grave we were offered a suitcase full of cash by Hollywood," he says. "But we felt it was important to stay in Britain and make another contemporary film. The only thing we had to do was to keep it relatively cheap, so we could keep control over it.
"The big decision was to let Channel 4 finance it, because we worked so well as a team with them on Shallow Grave. They don't wank us around. If we had been involved with a more commercial backer like Miramax or PolyGram, it would have been a lot more difficult, I think, and would involve a lot of compromises. The deal we have with Channel 4 is that we have the cinematic theatrical cut for Britain and they can change it for TV, if necessary - but they won't because they love those fights anyway."
John Hodge, the quiet-spoken screenwriter who quit his job as a doctor after the success of Shallow Grave, had serious misgivings about adapting Trainspotting for the screen. "There were fierce problems with the adaptation," he says. "First, it's not perceived as a novel, but written as a series of short stories collected over several years. There isn't really a clear narrative running through it that lends itself to screen adaptation. So we had to choose a "central" character from the book, which was pretty easy. We chose Mark Renton as the strongest voice in the book, to lead us through his journey.
"The other problem was that a lot of the book takes place inside people's heads, in interior monologues. Then there is the language of the book - it's written in this very intricate, highly amusing Edinburg-speak. The language chat you just have to accept - no film can ever capture all, the verbal acrobatics of the book. So you devise ways of using as much of it as possible. One of chose ways is to use a voice-over because that enables you to slip in a lot of Irvine Welsh's prose. The film is a compromise, inevitably, a selective adaptation of the novel. You could make several different films out of Trainspotting, and we've chosen to make this one.
The film-makers are well aware that they are courting controversy with their treatment of drug-taking in the movie. The movie neither preaches about nor glamorises drugs, although one of the characters dies a heroin addict and another undergoes a traumatic cold turkey treatment. However, Barry Norman, for one, has said that by not condemning, drug-taking, the movie condones the habit.
John Hodge strongly disagrees. "The film doesn't condone drug-taking," he insists. "It just accepts bounds of reality. I think it's a responsible film because it shows what goes wrong if you take heroin. There's so much hypocrisy about the argument. People are quite happy to ignore the damage that alcohol does, for example. In the film, the Begbie character is the most dangerous character and his drug is alcohol. Though we may not know someone who's addicted to heroin, we all know people who've had the misfortune to sit on a train next to someone like Begbie."
DIRECTOR Danny Boyle - whose parents came from Ballinasloe and Clare and who worked extensively in London theatre and in television (including several episodes of Inspector Morse) before beginning his cinema career with Shallow Grave - is even more forceful on the drugs issue. "I just thought the book was an amazing experience to read, which doesn't happen very often," he says. "People say it's about heroin, but like all great books, it's actually about how complex humanity is and how we just evade definition. You think you can define a junkie and a junkie lifestyle, but when you see inside it, it's different somehow."
Boyle, MacDonald, Hodge and their principal actors researched the film by meeting heroin users in Leith, the Edinburgh suburb where the book is set - "a really grim, depressing experience," says Boyle - and by meeting former addicts at Calton Athletic Drug Rehabilitation Centre in Glasgow.
"I always think that art tries to catch up with life," Boyle says, "and occasionally a book like Trainspotting comes along which tries to view the experience from the inside so it doesn't become what you think it's going to be about - which is about victims, which is how we tend to view it, sympathetically or unsympathetically depending on your persuasion.
Now 37, Irvine Welsh worked as a training officer for Edinburgh District Council until three years ago when he moved to Amsterdam. He has a cameo role in Trainspotting as a nasty drug dealer. "Welsh doesn't want to have anything to do with the victim mentality, because he views it from the inside," says Danny Boyle.
"Of course, when you're inside, you're not a victim. You don't view it like that - it becomes about survival, about getting on and getting what you want, whether it be a fix or a girl or whatever. You have to deal with that. You can't just take the old position of you touch drugs, you die. They will damage you. There are people out there who appear to be contradicting that. In the long run, of course, there's probably terrible damage waiting."
Meanwhile Boyle MacDonald and Hodge are preparing for their third collaboration, A Life Less Ordinary, which, in sharp contrast to Trainspotting, will be a romantic comedy-adventure about a Scotsman confronted with money[ problems in the US. "No drugs involved," Hodge promises. And the team will not be involved with 20th Century Fox's project, Alien Resurrection, after all - the fourth film in the Alien series, in which Sigourney Weaver's Ripley's character will be brought back to life.
"We're definitely not doing it," Boyle says. "It's very weird. We were flirting with Fox about it and suddenly, they're pregnant and they're saying, Oh, it's your child. And we said, Hang on a minute, we were just flirting away."