Danny Boyle Takes Us Inside ‘Pistol,’ His Chaotic and Brilliant Sex Pistols Series

The Sex Pistols were defined by filth and fury, anarchic rebellion, and face-spitting insolence, and that chaotic spirit is alive and well in Pistol, director Danny Boyle and writer/creator Craig Pearce’s six-part FX dramatic series (May 31) about the legendary British punks.

Based on guitarist Steve Jones’ memoir Lonely Boy: Tales from a Sex Pistol, it’s a return to an era of gonzo sociopolitical insurrectionism, led by tremendous performances from Toby Wallace, Anson Boon, and Louis Partridge as, respectively, Jones, kamikaze frontman John Lydon, and wild-man bassist Sid Vicious. Those young actors expertly capture the inner turmoil and external insanity of the band and its meteoric rise to the top, which was aided by their puppetmaster-manager Malcolm McLaren (Thomas Brodie-Sangster), his movement-defining wife Vivienne Westwood (Talulah Riley), and their SEX shop employee—and future Pretenders leader—Chrissie Hynde (Sydney Chandler). Fast, gnarly and fueled by defiant attitude, it’s a series that’s both about the Sex Pistols, and feels like it could have been made by them.

Credit for that triumph goes in large part to Oscar-winner Boyle, who shoots and cuts Pistol with an unwavering eye toward orderly disorder. Riotous compositions, jagged transitions and flashbacks, and breakneck pacing are all components of an aesthetic package that generates the sort of frenzied energy required for a tale about rock’s preeminent rabble-rousers. For Boyle, it’s another idiosyncratically stylized affair infused with his own personality, which he’s previously brought to critical and commercial successes such as Trainspotting, 28 Days Later, Slumdog Millionaire, and Steve Jobs. Completed in the aftermath of his James Bond project falling apart, it illustrates that no matter the medium, Boyle continues to be one of our most dexterous and electric directors.

On the eve of the show’s premiere, we spoke with him about Johnny Rotten and Steve Jones’ reaction to Pistol, getting the series’ casting and music right, transforming truth into fiction, and what ended his involvement with 007.

Have you heard from John Lydon yet? How much do you expect him to hate (on) it?

Nick, you’ll hear from him before we do [laughs]. Obviously, he’s hostile to it. It’s interesting—it’s kind of built-in. Normally when you start a project, and you invest so much into it—there’s so much money spent, and so much time and love—you’re terrified of something going wrong, like somebody coming along and hijacking it or disrupting or destroying it or whatever. But it’s not been like that on this, because we know what he’s like. Part of the process of the project is uncovering what we think is his genius, in a way, and it’s that contrarian-ness—that he will not accept, or protect, anything. He will challenge everything. So, discord is built-in. I don’t want to sound Buddhist about it, but you have to open yourself to it and just embrace it because it ain’t going to be different!

For Anson [Boon], who played him, it’s a huge factor for an actor—they want to meet, they want to try and get the respect of the person, and to treat them with respect. They’re not so much interested in the story; they’re interested in the truth of the character. So, you feel for Anson, because he can’t get any feedback. Yet what we both relied on was to try and show people how extraordinary the guy is. Really extraordinary and unique. In an era when we’re losing originality in a way—because of digital copies and everything’s NFTs—you go, where is a true unique individual? And oh my God, there is one, right there! I’m sure he’ll behave like that in receiving or ignoring the launch of Pistol. But Anson, myself, Craig [Pearce] and everyone involved hope that we did some kind of justice to him. Got a bit of him, anyway.

What about the legal battle with John over the rights to the Sex Pistols’ music? Was that also a byproduct of his general combativeness, or was there a specific issue at the heart of that conflict?

When I joined the project, I asked, have we got the music? I’d followed John my whole life, in all his work, and I knew that he was off against the rest of the group, continually. They guaranteed me that we would get the music because it was a majority vote, and I think that’s why John has become isolated and separate from the rest of them: they constantly outvote him. So, as much as anything can be guaranteed in life, it was guaranteed that we’d have the music. Because I said there’s no point without the music; you don’t want to do one of those films that’s so much about these people, but you can’t have the music. We’ve all seen those and been there, and it’s like, no! That is not good [laughs].

We did want to put a PiL song in there, but we knew that if we did, that’s different, because his control of the PiL music is absolute—as it should be. He learned his lesson, because he didn’t have absolute control in the Pistols, and it went where it went. But I hope that we treated the music like it should be treated, as foremost to everything. Because I’ve always loved that about him.

It was really interesting doing a project like this, because drama is in people, and it’s in characters. But I remember that, when the band started, we—the fans—weren’t interested in them as individuals or personalities. We were only interested in the music. It was only later, really after they broke up, that the two of them emerged as personalities or celebrities or whatever you want to call them—John and Sid [Vicious]. It was amazing to start off [in Pistol] through one of the non-personalities. Steve Jones gives you a way in that’s almost like a secret side door into an edifice that’s unapproachable, without dealing with John and Sid upfront. You want to get into it before you meet them—settle in and find your bearings and start to explore it that way. That’s what we tried to do.

What about Steve Jones’ reaction? The show is based on his memoir, and centers him throughout, and yet it doesn’t take it easy on him either.

I’ve never really done one before where somebody’s alive. Obviously, I did the Steve Jobs film, where he passed, and it was based on Walter Isaacson’s book and then Andrew Sorkin’s interpretation of that. But here, Steve is alive and well and living in Los Angeles, as they say! We talked to him on Zoom, but you have to keep a distance as well. It’s a weird one. You want to keep them close; like I said, both Anson and I wanted to approach John. You want to get close, and you want to hear their voice directly so you can base things on it. But you also have to be careful that you don’t lose the fact that this is our version of this. It’s an inspiration; it’s not a documentary. So, we’ll have always got things wrong. If we got things really wrong, Steve would have objected, but he didn’t object as far as I understand it.

The show suggests that Malcolm McLaren was the guiding mastermind behind the Sex Pistols—an idea he himself has promoted, most famously in 1980’s The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle. Is that how you view him?

You always say this when you do interviews about things, that you learned so much and stuff like that. But I really did learn something on this. Reading about Vivienne and Malcolm, who are both the philosophy and the dress code of a movement, I always thought that I understood what they meant by chaos: that you have to have chaos before creation can truly arrive. I understood it intellectually, but I didn’t really understand it. Doing [the show], and especially portraying the two of them, who are not at the forefront in a way—they deserve to be, because I think they’re played brilliantly by Tallulah and Thomas—I began to understand why Malcolm, as so many people allege, destroyed what he created.

Having created this chaos and hired a bunch of ne’er-do-wells to create this extraordinary fusion and moment of energy, he then immediately felt like he had to get rid of it in order to keep that process going. Then it appears to have become almost comical—that he appears to have pushed it almost into music hall, which is why we have him singing along to Max Bygraves at the end, who is a light entertainer. This is my interpretation, anyway. You can see in The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle that he thinks he can replace John. As much as you can take it seriously—since he admitted lots of often contrarian things—he admits that he didn’t understand quite how much you had to nurture a star when you had one, and to cherish it, because it’s so special and so rare. I think he thought he could just replace John with Eddie Tenpole Tudor or himself, and in fact the making of that film is clearly an insult to John, because he’s just trying out vocalists. I’ll just get Ronnie Biggs!

He admitted later how he hadn’t realized that you have to subjugate your own ego to the star. That’s true for so many of us, like in the business of being a director and a producer. Sometimes It happens with actors. You know you have an extraordinary thing in your piece, and they behave terribly sometimes because of the world they live in and the pressure they’re under—whatever the reason, whatever the excuse! [laughs]—and that doesn’t matter. You have to swallow it, because the benefit you get is this uniqueness, which is what they had with John, who like Jagger before him, and Elvis before him, literally redefined singing and the frontman.

I think that’s probably the angle we took with Malcolm, though there are many contrary ones. To be honest, Nick, there’s many contrary opinions about all of them. It depends on who you talk to. It’s very revealing that women were much more aware of both John and Sid’s sensitivity and beauty. Whereas when you talk to the men, they just see the hostility, the unbalanced nature of them, and the conflict and violence. You have to try and find a balance between them and come out with your own. That’s why it’s not a documentary. If you were making a documentary, you’d really have to answer questions about, how can you prove that? And we had a great documentary! The Filth and the Fury is an excellent documentary. Julien [Temple] is a really brilliant documentary filmmaker, and just as punk encouraged us to do, we borrowed liberally from The Filth and the Fury! We’d ransack anything to get what we needed to make our own version of things.

How did you come to the project, and—given that this is your second TV series in four years (after Trust)—do you feel yourself consciously drifting toward television versus film? Or is it simply a result of opportunity?

Somebody famous once said, without music, life is a mistake. I absolutely believe that. I always wanted to make two separate films about Bowie and about punk, and we tried to do Bowie, but we could never get permission. Then COVID happened, and I was very lucky that I’d done Yesterday; we’d completed that film, and it was released and benefited from good audiences before anything hit cinemas. Once COVID hit, this script turned up from Craig Pearce, a writer I admire, and it was about the Sex Pistols. I thought, I better read that! But I have to say, I thought, you can’t do the Sex Pistols. I always thought if I did do a film about punk, it would be about Viviane Albertine, the Slits, and I talked to her extensively at one point about her book Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys. It’s a fantastic book, but that didn’t work out, and I think I thought, I’ll end up doing a film about The Clash, who were much more my band at the time than the Pistols.

But when I read Craig’s script, it was extraordinary. And then reading Steve’s book, it’s like a Trojan Horse; you were inside it, and you didn’t have to scale it from the outside. You were suddenly inside it, and you were introducing John into it, and Sid into it. That liberated it, and so I committed and we started work together straight away. And it was destined for television, because that was how it had been imagined. We changed the shape of it; we cut it down from eight episodes to six and concentrated more on Steve’s life within the Pistols and the Pistols itself, rather than the book does. It spends about a third of its time with Steve after the Pistols. We decided to leave that and just concentrate on the Pistols material and try to tell it in a way that gave a sense of chaos.

Writers are about order, and they’re trying to make things make sense. We were trying to do the opposite. We wanted to make it in a way that Malcolm would be proud of, so that there are no rules; you can go wild and be freer. So, you have this battle, and it’s a great battle to have. That’s the way we went about it. And television-wise, as you know, it’s where so much of the work from great writers is now, understandably. They’ve suddenly got a much more powerful tool at their service, rather than being at the service of a director or a studio for a movie. No wonder they’re embracing it. Obviously, I love the movies, and I love searching for an ending when you make a movie, which is the purpose of movies—trying to find your ending. In a funny kind of way, television is the opposite; John Boorman said that that’s the difference. They don’t want an ending in television—it’s a sin to end it. That’s the struggle as well, which I also loved.

Why did your Bond film fall apart, and was part of it not just the project itself, but the larger issue of blockbuster cinema—which is the opposite of something like Pistol, a TV series wholly infused with your personality and style?

We tried to make [Bond] as personal as possible. I was working with John Hodge, a screenwriter I’ve worked with many times, and we worked on something, and when they [the producers] didn’t really… we couldn’t see eye to eye about it, eventually. So, with those huge projects, you have to wish everybody well and depart, really, because you know it’s just going to get worse and worse if you can’t see eye to eye about it.

But no, I don’t think so. It’s more to do with chance and the way these things work. Like I said, I’d started work with Viviane Albertine a while ago, and that all fell apart, so you think, oh no! Then the Sex Pistols book drops in your lap, and I think they had been trying to get it off the ground for a while, and they just speculated, let’s give him a go! So it’s just believing in chance. It’s part of that philosophy. I’m still inside it really, since we’re just finishing and launching [the series]: Trust chance and trust chaos. You can try and overthink things, but you won’t succeed.

You must let go—I learned that working in India, actually. Directing’s about control, and it’s a very powerful thing, except it’s a limited power. The real power is in not quite having control. A good example of that is Thomas and Tallulah’s performances. I remember concentrating so hard on the band that I didn’t really know what they were doing, in a way. I know that sounds stupid, but when we got it in editing, me and my wonderful editor John Harris saw that they had built this extraordinary kind of experience. And they’d sort of done it on the quiet, really, while I was concentrating on the other actors. So that’s a case in point. You trust the process, and they liberated those characters. I always say, the director is at the helm of the ship, and you’re meant to be saying, we’re going this way. But then you turn around and realize, oh no, we’re going that way [laughs]. And that’s good! That’s my sort of proto-pseudo Malcolm-type philosophy.

How do you go about casting a show like this, especially when there’s so much baggage attached to the Pistols, and John and Sid—like, for example, Sid & Nancy?

You’re not really looking for a copy. Sometimes they’re very close, but you’re not looking for that, because that’s kind of like karaoke. You’re looking for an essence. I always say this, especially about Anson and John, which is that sometimes it felt like there were two of them in the room. There was John, who we were thinking about, and there was Anson. I also felt that way with Steve and Toby. The two of them are in the room at the same time, if you get it right, and you benefit from both of them, because what you’re trying to do is create a sense of truth in 1976, and you’ve got to be able to do it without needing a DeLorean to get back there. It has to be effortless, and not a trick. You just feel it for a moment and think, I believe that moment.

There’s a wonderful moment when they approach Buckingham Palace in episode five, and they’re fighting in the back of the car, and they’re just punching each other for no reason, because that’s what mates do! [laughs] And the next moment, they’re just mates. You’re just trying to find those moments that lock you in. So it’s not a photograph, and it’s not a copy. It’s a gallery, really, of shifting characters. Some of them are real sometimes, and some of them have gone off on their own thing.

Anson was the best example, when he came in. Because I thought, this is impossible; we’ll never cast John. He came in and he did the audition in a COVID environment, with him at one end of the room and us at the other, and it was brilliant. I thought, that’s as close as we’ll ever get, and that is close enough, because in a funny kind of way, John will always be John, and this is really Anson’s version of John.

It was funny and uncomfortable and unmanageable and dynamic and all the things you want in the Pistols. Then we found this kid Louie [Partridge], who was 17. He’s like a fully formed major adult actor, you know? He’s so complete, and he doesn’t really know who Gary Oldman is! He does know now. But that’s liberating! They don’t know what the fuck. You’re worried about carrying around all this baggage—I know Gary, I worked with him when I was Louie’s age!—but they’re not bothered about all that. They go, oh fuck that, let’s get on with it. That’s a good thing.