It's been teased as a possibility for years, but Danny Boyle has once again expressed a willingness to revisit Renton, Begbie, Sick Boy and Spud in a sequel to **Trainspotting. "It will happen, I think," he said at the weekend. "We have a very strong idea that it would be a wonderful thing to reapproach, where they've all aged clearly into a mid-life kind of crisis..."
Trainspotting 2 already exists, of course, in the form of Irvine Welsh's 2002 novel Porno, which picks up the principals a decade on. Renton is running a nightclub in Amsterdam; Begbie is just out of jail and on the warpath towards whoever was anonymously sending him all the gay porn; Sick Boy is mining a new vein of "adult" entertainment; and Spud is contemplating both suicide and a history of Leith.
It's a different beast to Trainspotting, not least because it seems to be a sequel to the film rather than the novel. "It's not a great book," concedes Boyle, "in the way that Trainspotting is genuinely a masterpiece. But we've been doing some work on it, and it's got potential, for sure. When the moment's right, I think we will approach it."
That moment will involve the alignment of several stars, obviously, not least Ewan McGregor, who had a rather famous falling-out with Boyle over The Beach. McGregor has, however, previously not seemed averse to the idea of a reconciliation (he wasn't initially keen on the idea, but warmed to it after reading Porno), and Robert Carlyle (Begbie) has basically said he'll do it next week for free.
"It won't be just cashing in," promises Boyle. "[We'll] look at these guys a whole generation fell in love with, in a certain kind of way. They've aged, just like we all do. It will be a very deliberate and imaginative approach to it [rather than] just a sequel which is cravenly a business decision."
Renton: So we all get old and can't hack it anymore. Is that it? That's your theory?
Sick Boy: Yeah. Beautifully fucking illustrated.