I chatted with Danny Boyle recently about Sunshine, and confirmed what I probably already knew in my gut — that the guy is whipsmart, intellectually curious and therefore predisposed to make the sort of movies that, to whatever degrees they individually fail or succeed, still have an involvement, strong visual sense, momentary hold or some other element that leaves them kicking around in your head for a bit, unlike so much cookie cutter studio product.

I certainly had problems with the latter-act narrative bends and turns of Sunshine, but one thing it most certainly has going for it is a legitimate sense of uncertainty and ambiguity with respect to who’s getting out of any given situation. “What’s lovely about an ensemble in space is that you don’t really know who’s going to dominate in the end, and you can also kill them in any order that you want,” says Boyle. “And there are some great deaths available in space; because it’s so hostile, you can kill people in interesting ways. That was one of the joys — getting all these actors together and then killing them.”

Great actors, indeed; Boyle and his casting director put together an interesting and disparate group that includes Rose Byrne, Cliff Curtis, Chris Evans, Troy Garity, Cillian Murphy, Hiroyuki Sanada, Mark Strong, Benedict Wong and Michelle Yeoh, but it’s not just a collection skewed toward international commercial viability, as you see with some movies. “The original script doesn’t define their gender even, and it certainly doesn’t define their nationality or race,” notes Boyle. “It’s interesting, because space movies tend to quite colorless like that — it’s just a group of people, and you can identify with any of them, because they don’t have any social conventions that they’re obeying on Earth. But for me, I felt that it should be an American-Asian mission, because all the advice was that in 50 years time the only economies that would be able to pay for this sort of staggering cost of space travel would be the American economy, maybe still, but certainly the Asian economies that are emerging. And (people we talked to) said probably India and Brazil too, but we sort of ignored that a bit, because it was getting too disparate. So we made the movie mostly American and Asian, and then I just started to search for my favorite bunch of actors to create an interesting mix. Michelle was the first to be cast, and I remember saying to her, ‘You can play any part you want.’ And she picked Corazon, which is actually a Mexican name.”