Irvine Welsh: twenty years of trainspotting

Michaël Bellon
© Agenda Magazine
13/05/2013
If Irvine Welsh’s 1993 novel Trainspotting and its immensely successful 1996 film adaptation by Danny Boyle heralded “the voice of punk, grown up”, then punk sure must be retired, now that we’re another twenty years on. Or not?

According to Irvine Welsh – who in the mean time wrote both a sequel (Porno, 2002) and a prequel (Skagboys, 2012) to Trainspotting – the book and the film have held up pretty well. Prior to the 20th anniversary screening of the film, the Scottish writer will comment on that and a lot of other issues in an exclusive public interview in Bozar.
Welsh comes over to Brussels from his present dwelling place in Chicago, though it needs to be said that the Scottish Cup Final is also on his programme, as well as the screening at the Cannes film festival of the film adaptation of his novel Filth (directed by Jon S. Baird, starring James McAvoy and Jamie Bell) which will be out in October. Irvine Welsh: “You can’t really sell a book nowadays if you haven’t some adaptations around them. Literary prizes like the Booker used to be kingmakers for writers, but nowadays you really need a piece of cinema, TV, or stage project to push you into the light.”

Were you already aware of that when you wrote Trainspotting?
Irvine Welsh: No, I didn’t have a clue. Trainspotting started before I actually started writing the thing. It came from some notes I was writing in a diary. When I was trying to make sense of them, I realised that they could form the basis of a novel. Basically because there was so much bullshit in them anyway. They weren’t factual accounts of what happened in my life, but self-aggrandising stuff: me casting myself as virtuous figure denigrating everybody else. It was fiction that I just needed to fictionalise a little bit further.

The film made the book even bigger. It probably also changed your life.
Welsh: Yeah, it probably did. In any case it earned me more money, which is a good thing for a writer. Trainspotting enabled me to escape from the prostitution young writers can get forced into, like writing crappy marketable genre fiction, having to work in the public sector, chasing grants, or pretend you really enjoy teaching creative writing at a
university.

Were you very much involved in the making of the film?
Welsh: I probably would have wanted to be more involved than I actually was, but I stepped back from it because I felt that the same team that had just made Shallow Grave (Danny Boyle, John Hodge, Ewan McGregor...) was strong enough. I was only disappointed that my small part as Mikey Forrester the drugdealer didn’t win me any Oscar or Golden Globe nominations.
Judging from Porno and Skagboys, you seem to have become attached to Trainspotting’s characters.
Welsh: The whole thing has become kind of a franchise, although I never really intended that. The characters gatecrash into subsequent books because they are characters who can only do a certain kind of job, but are suitable for different scenarios. There is no point inventing new characters in that case, because people will see they are actually the same.
It is also remarkable how the movie and the book have held up. It’s been twenty years now and the phenomenon is still going strong. Danny Boyle is talking of doing Porno as a sequel. You never know what is going to happen and if everybody is going to be collaborative, but people seem to be enthused about it, so we’ll see.

Irvine Welsh • 16/5, 20.00, €6/8, EN, Bozar, rue Ravensteinstraat 23, Brussel/Bruxelles, 02-507.82.00, www.bozar.be

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