Sunshine 5 Apr 2007

Danny Boyle's latest film Sunshine tells the story of a team of astronauts tasked with launching a nuclear reactor the size of Manhattan into the dying sun in the hope of reactivating it and thus saving the Earth from certain doom.

While the film has been getting great reviews, it's Boyle's film-making process - and the experience he creates for the viewer (or user) as a result - that is of most interest to us. In a recent interview with Empire magazine, Boyle was asked about how he used colour to highlight the sun's presence. Boyle replied:

"If you use [the sun's colours] too much then it's dull very quickly. We use them at the beginning and one other place but otherwise you just have to rob everybody of that colour range. There was literally nothing on the ship that was red or orange or white, it was all blues and greens and greys - a classic sci-fi look but we tried to use it to show the contrast. With most science fiction they cut outside about every five minutes, we tried not to do that though. We tried to stay inside for 20 minutes at a time and then when you went outside and you're flooded with these colours it's almost disorientating."

Better still, when you - the movie-goer - leave the darkness of the cinema and step out onto the street, the first thing you notice is your eyes scrambling to adjust to the intensity of the sunlight outside. Sounds corny, but it really makes you think about the film's central message - what would we do without the sun? What a way to leave a lasting impression on the audience.