Danny Boyle Explains Why He Won't Direct Bond And How He Almost Directed 'Alien 4'

There are directors who seem to work solely in massive studio productions, and others that seem determined to stick with intimate indie-style flicks. Danny Boyle falls into the latter, though he says it's not due to a distaste for the former. "I love watching those movies," he insists. Nor is it that he can't see the appeal. In fact, he flirted with the idea of directing Alien 4 many years ago.

Nowadays, he's comfortable with the knowledge that $200 million pictures aren't for him, and not even a franchise like James Bond can get him to change his mind. At a recent 92YTribeca event in New York City, Boyle divulged his thoughts on big-budget filmmaking, the Bond series, his brush with Alien, and more. Hit the jump to keep reading.

I much prefer to have a ceiling. A ceiling that is limiting us and you try and break through. We want our films to look like $100 million dollars, that's for sure. And we want them to sound like $200 million. But you try and do that with that cap on them. And that's where the energy, belief and evangelical nature of the process comes from.

Boyle was quick to add that he liked watching blockbusters, he just didn't want to direct them. "I love watching those movies, I'm a big fan," he said. "Chris Nolan, Ridley Scott and they mustn't stop making them, but they are not really the ones for me." He himself got pretty close at one point with the next installment of the Alien franchise, but soon came to his senses.

I got involved, briefly, with Alien 4. After Trainspotting my head was turned. [...] Partly because I loved the Alien movies, but I realized very quickly that I couldn't make one. You wouldn't get the best out of me at all.

The idea that restriction breeds creativity isn't a new one, but of course studio projects have their limitations and attached strings as well. So it's interesting to see what kind of confines Boyle prefers to work with. The filmmaker has previously said that his first experience with "a proper Hollywood scale," The Beach, made him realize that expensive pictures weren't for him. "I'm much better with a smaller amount of money and trying to make it go a long way," he said last year.

Discuss: Do you like Boyle's low-budget approach to filmmaking, or are you dying to see what he'd do with a hundred million bucks?