The storyline is also familiar: It echoes such earlier films as 2001: A Space Odyssey, Alien and Solaris. But coming from English director Boyle, whose previous work has comprised such diverse films as Trainspotting and Millions, it feels like something fresh.

Boyle assembled an international cast—including Cillian Murphy, Chris Evans, Rose Byrne, Hiroyuki Sanada, Cliff Curtis and Michelle Yeoh—to make up his crew of ill-fated astronauts.

Boyle took a moment to speak with SCI FI Weekly recently about Sunshine, which opens July 20.I wanted to ask you a question about the influences and homages.

Boyle: I remember watching Alien, and I don't know whether you remember it, but at the beginning the ship's quiet, and there's these ... bouncy things, which are bouncing up and down. ... They're little toys that are bouncing up and down. You think, "What are they doing in the film?" I remember when I first saw it, I thought, "Well, it's just, he's an advert director, isn't he, Ridley Scott?" And, you know, so it was kind of like that kind of little tricksy things that advert directors often like putting in. ... [But] once you make a film like this, you realize that all of the things, they do suggest motion. Because you've got this problem, which is that you have a huge vehicle, but it's fake. It's not moving at all, and you have to create a sense of it in motion. So you have to do two things. You have to create a starfield for it to pass across, because otherwise there's no sense of motion. And you put these things in the ship which groan or move. ... And so we did that. There's a little moment in there, which is a kind of total ... respect thing toward Alien like that.

And there's stuff toward 2001. The monoliths at the end. And there, they were on accident, of course. We went to this park in Stockholm in Sweden, and it's actually a memorial. It's a May Day memorial. It's a Workers Day memorial in Stockholm. But of course they just look like [the monoliths].And you name one of the characters Pinbacker, after one of the characters in John Carpenter's 1974 space movie Dark Star.

Boyle: Pinback, he's called in Dark Star. And that's the man who wrote Alien: ... The guy who played that character, Dan O'Bannon, wrote Alien. So it all makes sense in the end.With all the attention to scientific detail, there's one issue you don't address: gravity. The ship has it. How do you deal with that?

Boyle: It is addressed, in the sense that what we did—and we did this very deliberately— ... when you look at the exterior of the ship, ... there's something turning, ... and, basically, you say, "That's the centrifugal kind of gravity. ... That gives them artificial gravity." But, no, we didn't have a character stopping and discussing it. ... We did have a [scene] at one point where they turned off the artificial gravity in the ship for a particular event that we cut in the end, and ... we didn't even shoot it, I don't think. ... Listen, if they all floated ... around, I'd still be shooting it.

One of the things I particularly enjoyed about the film is that it reminded me of an old Ray Bradbury story. It's not about the science. It's about the people. It seems like it's going back to a more traditional, earlier day of science fiction. Nowadays sci-fi movies mean technology and explosions.

Boyle: Yeah, yeah. And fantasy creatures and ... weird planets that you go to and stuff like that. It is a love letter to the great sci-fi, what we call serious sci-fi or hardcore sci-fi. Which is thoughtful, which is ... mentally challenging, psychologically challenging. ... There are some great science-fiction writers that it comes out of. Alex is a huge Bradbury fan, so it's definitely in that world, without a doubt, yeah, for sure.In a film like this you sort of almost necessarily find yourself repeating things that have been done before. There's always a mysterious signal, an emergency spacewalk, an explosive decompression. How do you make a movie like this without falling into a cliché?

Boyle: I would say ... you're right. There are a limited amount of things that you can do in these stories, and they do tend to resemble each other a bit. ... We have this journey to the sun, which was the original thing which hasn't been done. Astonishingly, to our amazement we couldn't find [a film]. It hasn't really been done. And it seems like the most extraordinary journey you could ever make as a human being, you know, to travel to the source of life, really. And so you hope that that will give you enough to actually maintain the freshness of it, even if some of the ingredients that you come across during it inevitably are familiar. Like what you said, an emergency decompression of the ship. ... There are similarities to other films, for sure.Was the 1972 Bruce Dern space movie Silent Running one of your influences?

Boyle: That's another one, yeah. That's obviously a big one, the oxygen garden and everything. That kind of stuff.There is a terrifically claustrophobic feel to the film. Can you tell us about making it?

Boyle: We tried to make quite real sets. ... I want the actors to feel it for real. ... I hate actors having to fake it. I want them to feel it for real. And so ... we tried to have complete sets, which ... had four sides ... that were complete and whole. We couldn't build them all in one room. We had to build them in different studios next door to each other. But they were complete in themselves. And so [the actors] were able to interact with real things. And, in fact, ... at one point I was going to get them to live on the set for a couple of days, you know? But actually we couldn't do it for insurance reasons. We weren't allowed to do it.

But I had them all living together in a student accommodation for a couple of weeks anyway. But I wanted them to live on the set ... so it would get worn in, you know? Because sometimes sets are very difficult to break down, to stop them looking brand-new. But, yeah, the claustrophobia was very important.

We went to a nuclear submarine. We tried to get on an oil rig, which is probably the only other example of a modern containment of a group of people. But oil rigs you can't get near now for security reasons. But it was easier for us to get on a nuclear submarine than it was to get on an oil rig, believe it or not. And the nuclear submarines are really interesting. ... It was very useful to tell the actors, they have this extraordinary thing in them. I don't know if this is the same on the American subs, but in the British subs, they go out for, like, six months at a time. And the men who go on the ship—there's no women—they've had this whole debate: ... The men have a choice at the beginning. They have to tick a box at the beginning, and the box says, ... "If there's bad news, do you want to hear about it or do you not want to hear about it?" And they have to tick that box, and they can't change their mind once they tick the box. So ... say, for instance, God forbid, their child dies. Do they want to know? Because nothing will change the mission. They won't come back, and they can't send any messages back. They can only receive messages. Because if you send messages out you give away your position, which of course they're not allowed to do. But they can pick up messages without revealing their position. So they have this choice: Do you want to live with the fact that you didn't know? You spent six months on this mission, and then you get home ... and get told your wife died five months ago. Just seemed extraordinary, psychologically, I just thought. The actors loved that, of course, because it puts them in the zone of where ... they're in on this kind of mission. Sunshine features some actors you've worked with before, such as Cillian Murphy from 28 Days Later.

Boyle: Actors, they're their own people. I try to work with the same actors sometimes, and I like that feeling of using the same actors a number of times. But they're also independent, you know, and they make their decisions based on their own careers, I think, in the end. And good luck to them. Why shouldn't they?How has your success with 28 Days Later affected your ability to do a project like Sunshine?

Boyle: It was a big help, because it gave us the money, the trust, to be able to go off and make it on our own and make it on our own terms, really. So it was a big help, and a success, particularly the first one, made Fox a huge amount of money, so they'll give you more money the next time. And so that helped enormously. It just helps you generally, I think. I mean, I think if I directed the second one, they'd have preferred that. They'd have liked to have had a package of the same rights and the same team. They'd have liked to have had that, but I was busy on Sunshine, and I didn't really want to do it anyway, because I sort of felt I'd done it, really, and I was just going to be repeating myself a bit. ...

We took more money for this, because just technically, you know ... they're expensive, space movies. They just are because of the CG involved and just because of the time. They lengthen time of shooting. But what we've always tried to do is take a ceiling. We deliberately create a ceiling of money, and we know we can make the film independently for that amount of money. That is, we don't have to be constantly going to the studio, saying, "What do you think of this person? What do you think of that person?" And we say, "Give us a certain amount of money, and we'll deliver the film to you for that." And then they give us tough notes along the way, as you'd expect, because you're still borrowing millions of dollars. It's a lot of money in anybody's terms. But it gives us a certain amount of freedom, really. More freedom than you'd have if you took $100 million. If you borrow $100 million from anybody, they're insane if they don't know what you're going to be doing every single moment of the day.Can you briefly tell us about your shooting schedule?

Boyle: We shot for three months in London, and the thing that takes the time is weightlessness. The proportion of time that was taken for that was just astonishing. It seemed to go on forever to achieve weightlessness. You cannot believe it. It's like what they say about filming at sea. They always say when you film at sea, it takes eight times longer than when you film on dry land. But for weightlessness, it's 20 times longer than filming a scene with gravity. It's amazing, isn't it? This tiny little force called gravity, which we just all take for granted is ... try to contradict it ... try to make something float, [it] is just unbelievable. And a ... large proportion of the time in post was spent on waiting for the CG, because ... the render time that they have, this kind of new, this new CG power they have, is staggering.