Foreword to the 2013 Edition

'This is for everyone who has ever looked at the stars, or gazed from atop a hill, or across the sea and wondered .'

Tim Perkins, Worlds End: The
Riders on the Storm

At just after 8 p.m. on Friday 27 July 2012, I sit in front of the television with my daughter. She is a few days shy of her eighth birthday. She is calm and composed. I am jittery, unsettled, consumed with childish anticipation. It is nearly two years since I teased Danny Boyle about rumours that he was going to direct the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics. Boyle never had any doubt about accepting the job. I thought it was a bizarre, eccentric decision.

What was he thinking? Why would he want to deal with the International Olympic Committee (IOC), the sponsors and the inevitable politics of the opening ceremony when he could just make another film, safe in the knowledge that he always enjoys director's cut?

Slowly, however, his decision began to make sense. If he had turned it down, he would never know what he had missed out on. And why wouldn't the most successful British director of recent years take on one of the toughest and most exciting directing jobs on the planet? Boyle relishes a challenge. He thrives when working under stress, acknowledging that film-making is 'a kind of madness'. He can see the bigger picture and yet, even when proving himself human by teetering on the edge of exhaustion, doesn't let the smallest of details go.

In recent years, Boyle has decided not to make films for more than $20 million. He enjoys the pressure of producing spectacular movies out of relatively small budgets. He did it with Trainspotting in 1996 and again with Slumdog Millionaire in 2008, so there was no reason why he couldn't kick-start the Olympic Games with £27 million. It's said that the Beijing opening ceremony in 2008 cost at least ten times that amount, possibly even as much as $500 million. It was spectacular, but in attempting to flex its muscles in the new world order it gave a post-communist display that ultimately felt cold and clinical. The best decision Boyle made was not to 'better' Beijing, but to create something different altogether: a truly idiosyncratic ceremony.

On 12 June - an utterly miserable wet day - a press conference for the opening ceremony was held at 3 Mills Studios. Close to the Olympic Park, it was also where the control deck of Icarus had been built for Sunshine. In a cold, cavernous space, Boyle unveiled a model of the Olympic Stadium: fake grass, plastic toy animals, a village green, Glastonbury Tor, a mosh pit. Boyle, talking fast and fluent, discussed his vision of England's green and pleasant land. He had the air of someone in control. But only just.

At the end of the press conference, I spoke briefly with him. 'The whole thing is beyond pressure,' he said, with a huge grin. 'But we're having fun mostly because the volunteers are so amazing.'

I wanted to ask what the inevitable edge to the ceremony would be; I refused to believe that he would present a bucolic and anodyne vision of Britain to the world. I wanted to ask if the thousands of nurses invited to the stadium might provoke memories of Benny Hill rather than the intended celebration of the NHS. I wanted to ask how the alchemy of film-making, when the film somehow comes together in the edit, would work with the opening ceremony. Was he hoping that, almost by magic, it would all come together on the night? As Boyle was briskly whisked away by officials, my questions were left to hang in the air.

Despite my scepticism, I managed to write a positive preview piece for the Radio Times in which I surmised that '[Boyle's] ceremony will surely reflect the Britain we'd like to be: inclusive, caring, energetic, positive and quietly ambitious'. I concluded that he would either fail heroically or succeed spectacularly.

Back to the sofa. Back to the nerves. Back to the biggest night of Danny Boyle's working life. We watch Frank Turner sing 'I Believe' as men play cricket on the village green. We listen to the Four Nations Choirs sing 'Jerusalem', 'Flower of Scotland', the 'Londonderry Air' and 'Bread of Heaven'. I make a cup of tea and return to find the Industrial Revolution is taking shape on my screen. We sit, my child and I, transfixed. I give her a potted history of Britain. The dark satanic mills are erected. I get goosebumps.

And then the five steel rings, forged on the floor of the stadium by the workers, start to rise. Giving off dazzling yellow sparks, the Olympic rings light up the stadium. They light up Britain. For a moment, they even light up the world. I find myself in tears. Because this is my country and I have never felt proud of it before. And because Boyle, I realise, has cracked it.

When Danny Boyle agreed to direct Frankenstein at the National Theatre in the autumn of 2010, he had been away from the stage for fifteen years. He decided to use the Mary Shelley play as a dry run for the opening ceremony, as a way back into live entertainment. Designer Mark Tildesley and costume designer Suttirat Larlarb had experience of the theatre; composer Rick Smith had none.

Smith, who first met Boyle back in the mid-1990s when the director asked to use 'Born Slippy' in Trainspotting, was on tour with his band Underworld when Boyle sent him a cryptic text out of the blue. 'He said there were two things he wanted to discuss. One big and one not so big. We met a month or two later and discussed Frankenstein. I rather naively thought that the play was the big thing and that the little thing had gone away.'

Smith and his Underworld partner Karl Hyde wrote a soundscore for Frankenstein of violent industrial noises, soothing sea shanties, wedding toasts and gentle guitars. 'It was probably the most enjoyable experience of my working life,' says Smith. 'I loved everything about it, including being yelled at by Danny. Regularly. He's really demanding and vocal, but extraordinarily kind. He's always got guidelines and a brief. Yet you know there's so much space to bring in what you want. He desperately wants to be surprised. I love it when he comes to the studio in Essex; he's so passionate about music. It's very collaborative, very inspirational. I've been a man working in a techno shed most of my adult life, and I find working with Danny incredibly exciting.'

What Smith didn't know is that Boyle was effectively using Frankenstein to audition him for the opening ceremony. If he thought 'the little thing had gone away', Smith was wrong. When Frankenstein was in preview, Boyle invited him to come over to 3 Mills Studios and asked if he'd be music director of the opening ceremony. 'It sounded as though it was a really difficult project in terms of bureaucracy and organisation,' recalls Smith. 'It took me less than a minute to say yes. I was delighted. Let me at it!'

Larlarb had just finished work on 127 Hours when she got the call. She was back in New York, taking some time out, and her boyfriend asked her what she was going to do during her break. 'I said, without really thinking, "Read, see movies, catch up with friends. Unless, of course, someone asks me to do the Olympics." I had no idea Danny was involved. It was an "if I won the lottery" comment.' Two weeks later, Boyle called her up to say he was being courted by the head of ceremonies for the 2012 Olympics and was she in?

Frank Cottrell Boyce, writer of the opening ceremony, says that Boyle knew he was going into battle and 'wanted to have people around him who genuinely liked and cared about him and whom he could trust'. In the small room in Soho he set up two years ahead of the ceremony, Boyle, Cottrell Boyce and designers Larlarb and Tildesley - the 'gang of four' - talked and talked about British popular culture until the evening began to take shape.

Like the opening ceremony itself - and this is absolutely not a criticism - the meetings were more punk than polished, more DIY than formal. 'What was brilliant and troubling about working on the opening ceremony was that I never quite knew what my role was,' says Cottrell Boyce, laughing. 'And I never quite knew whether I was doing it right. I felt slightly out of my depth, which was good. Danny, for example, never told me that I was officially the writer. He just mentioned it in passing in an interview.'

Cottrell Boyce, who thought that Boyle was talking about some kind of sports movie when he first asked him if he'd like to be involved in the Olympic Games, says modestly that he was 'quite good at putting together the others' brilliant ideas and giving them emotional logic'. When pushed, he admits that with his vast knowledge of poetry, literature, television and music, he would be a natural king of the pop quiz.

He also, vitally, gave Boyle a copy of an out-of-print book called Pandaemonium as the director was preparing to direct Frankenstein. Inside the Humphrey Jennings tome, which explores the development of the machine age in Britain, Cottrell Boyce wrote a note: 'You'd better read this. It cost me £42.50.'

Boyle is a bibliophile who often makes films out of books: Irvine Welsh's...