The sun worshipper

When Danny Boyle tries to describe something such as the Sun, he can't help but use religious reference points. 'Imagine this gigantic star; you might say that you "bow down" in front of it,' he says. 'That's a very religious term.

I was an altar boy and bowing down was part of that ritual, of serving the priest.

I don't believe in God but that kind of description means God to me because I was brought up that way.'

Boyle's Catholic upbringing isn't the starting point of new movie Sunshine but it certainly feeds into it. An ambitious sci-fi opus, it features eight astronauts, including Cillian Murphy and Michelle Yeoh, who are strapped to the back of a nuclear bomb the size of Manhattan with the intention of detonating it in the centre of our dying Sun. As their spaceship, the Icarus II, picks up a signal from Icarus I (its doomed predecessor) the crew start to crack under the pressure of their mission, which is when some more 'metaphysical' elements start to crop up. To reveal much more would ruin the twist but Murphy's character is eventually confronted by someone whose very existence challenges his rationalist beliefs.

'The point about the film is, what does Cillian see?' says Boyle. 'There's a moment when he looks at this person in front of him and it's like he's trying to work out if he's real or not. It's a challenge to his sanity, which is what the whole mission is really about.'

Considering that Boyle's cinematic career started with Shallow Grave, his low-key film about three mates trying to hide a dead body, it's a measure of his ambition that his two most recent creations have dealt with the end of the world. 'I like extremes,' admits Boyle. 'Extremes are a fantastic way to get into stories. The odd apocalypse is a good place to put characters; to have a guy waking up in the middle of a deserted London, or to have eight astronauts flying towards a dying star.'

Boyle may be more concerned with the latter at the moment but it's the thought of that guy waking up in a deserted city that brought him to Sunshine. Penned by Alex Garland, 2002's survival horror flick 28 Days Later was a surprise hit, giving Boyle the kind of kudos that helped him secure the bigger budget for Sunshine (another Garland script).

'A success like 28 Days Later buys you some credit for your next film,' he says. 'Well, up to a certain point. So the studio gave us some money for Sunshine and trusted us to deliver the goods. It's only when you get to a specific budget that they want to get a star in it, or they want the staple ingredients of a disaster movie: cutting back to Earth to see people waiting anxiously for news for example. But we said no, we'll stick to the budget we have and make it the way we want.'

Boyle has always done things his way. When the controversy-baiting Trainspotting launched his career into the stratosphere in the mid-1990s, the 50-year-old director followed it with screwball romcom A Life Less Ordinary. Now he follows horror with science fiction, although Boyle proudly prefers the term 'science fact'.

Every aspect of Sunshine's groundbreaking technology has come complete with instructions from renowned physicist Dr Brian Cox. Though with any new sci-fi film, the shadows of the past loom on the horizon. 'There are three films that tower over everything else in the genre,' agrees Boyle. '2001: A Space Odyssey, the first Solaris and the first Alien. So while you try to make your ideas different, occasionally you just have to doff your cap to them. You have these meetings before making the movie and you can literally feel Stanley Kubrick, Andrei Tarkovsky and Ridley Scott in the room.'

Doyle's passion for his craft is infectious and his imagination has clearly been fired by the complex issues space travel throws up. 'Brian [Cox] talks about scientists searching for this special particle, which - ironically, since they're all atheists - they call God's particle,' he enthuses. 'When you go into space and see something that enormous, a convert will see that as something to worship, whereas science will see it as an opportunity to improve our lives, rather than become slaves to idolatry.'

Where Sunshine succeeds is in tying these spiritual themes into a fast-paced narrative, allowing audiences to appreciate a thoughtful treatise on human faith, or just sit back and enjoy a rip-roaring space adventure. 'There was a chance to make something a bit groundbreaking here,' enthuses Boyle. 'We could take people to the surface of a star. That's what I wanted the film to allow an audience to do; to reach out and touch the sun.'