The director’s new film imagines a world without the Beatles. He talks about bailing on the latest 007 venture, being a national treasure and why he naively believes in the goodness of human beings

Danny Boyle’s new film, Yesterday, is a spry piece of speculative fiction set in a land that has never heard Sgt Pepper, Hey Jude or Tomorrow Never Knows. On a superficial level, this alternative UK is not so different from our own. The Lowestoft bus still runs on time, friends gather on summer evenings in the beer garden and Ed Sheeran is on the umpteenth leg of his latest tour. But something vital is missing – and only a handful of people realise what has been lost. As one character puts it: “A world without the Beatles is a world that’s infinitely worse.”

Fittingly, Boyle’s film resembles a three-minute pop song itself – so simply structured as to feel skimpy and disposable until it snags in your brain like an infernal ear-worm and you find yourself pondering its implications for days. On the surface, the story is bright and perky. Underneath, it is desolate: a high-concept comedy about cultural amnesia and a wonderful Britain that might have been. I tell Boyle I think it might be a Brexit movie in disguise and he guffaws in embarrassment and reaches for his cup of coffee. “Yeah, well,” he says. “You could certainly make a case for that.”

Seeing as we are in the business of making grand and sweeping claims, let’s go one further. Boyle, it could be argued, is part of the same parallel cool-Britannia that Yesterday is longing for. He is the man who galvanised 90s cinema with Trainspotting, won an Oscar in the 00s for directing Slumdog Millionaire and presided over the all-embracing splendour of the opening ceremony at the 2012 London Olympics. If he is not quite at Paul McCartney level, he is surely within shouting distance. A few weeks ago he rocked up as a guest on BBC’s Top Gear and the producer bellowed: “National treasure coming through!” Boyle laughs at the memory. “So yeah, you do get a little of that, the ‘national treasure’ thing. And that’s all right, it’s not so bad. I’m happy to be a good ambassador.”

He pours more coffee and talks about Yesterday, which stars Himesh Patel as Jack, a callow young busker who is knocked off his bike and regains consciousness in a Beatles-free universe that is ripe for the taking. Before long, Jack is fixing a hole, passing off classic songs as his own – all the while terrified that he is about to be found out. Boyle accepts that it is a nostalgic film – or, rather, a film that examines the power of nostalgia. He likens it to Rocketman and Bohemian Rhapsody, two other crowd-pleasing pictures about Britain’s musical past. “It’s an interesting trend. In a time of complete uncertainty – politically, economically – people latch on to the things they can depend on.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Danny Boyle and Richard Curtis filming Yesterday with Himesh Patel and Lily James. Photograph: Jonathan Prime/Universal Pictures

Boyle admits that he was always more of a Bowie and Led Zeppelin fan, but that is by the by: the Beatles influenced pretty much everything. Yesterday concentrates solely on the music, but their social and political impact extended well beyond that. “If you took them out of the equation, the ripple effect would be enormous. We’d probably be living in this massive dystopian universe. It would take a novel to track just how much everything changed.”

Boyle is 62: a whippy live-wire, with thick-framed glasses and a shocking pink jumper, like an amiable geography teacher who moonlights as a seaside entertainer. Perhaps he is mellowing with age. Yesterday, for instance, is scripted by Richard Curtis, the saccharine McCartney to Boyle’s acerbic Lennon. Back in the 90s, they were viewed as natural enemies. Wasn’t Trainspotting (which Boyle made in collaboration with producer Andrew Macdonald, writer John Hodge and actor Ewan McGregor) seen as the gritty corrective to Four Weddings and a Funeral?

Boyle chuckles and says he never saw it that way, that he always liked Curtis’s work. “The truth is, after making Trainspotting, we were very cock-a-hoop and we thought: ‘Now let’s do a romantic comedy.’ So we set off for Utah and made a film called A Life Less Ordinary. Then we came back and over the Christmas period I got sent this script called Notting Hill. And I read Notting Hill and thought: ‘Well, that’s a romantic-comedy. I don’t know what the fuck it is we’ve just shot in Utah – but it certainly isn’t that.’”

Boyle, for his part, spent the bulk of Beatlemania squirrelled away in Radcliffe, north of Manchester. He spent eight years as an altar boy and briefly considered the priesthood before working in theatre, TV and finally film, which he feels is not a dissimilar calling. As a young man, he thrilled to the work of the 1970s film-makers who seemed intent on pushing themselves and their congregation to the limits. Apocalypse Now, he has suggested, was his Damascene conversion. So if he were to wake up in a world in which Coppola had never made it … “Oh, absolutely,” he says. “Yes, of course I’d remake it, 100%, shot-for-shot, I’m obsessed with that film. I’d probably do Nic Roeg’s films as well, because there’s no one else like him, he was our Picasso. That extraordinary 10-year period, Performance to Bad Timing. I’d remake all of those.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Trainspotting, 1996. Photograph: Allstar/CHANNEL FOUR FILMS

If Boyle’s work has yet to hit Roeg’s peaks of wildness, it compensates with a bold, buzzing energy of its own. It also has a brightness of vision that is sometimes at odds with the subject matter. Whether he is tackling heroin addiction, zombie apocalypse or life in the Dharavi slums, Boyle runs at the material with a bounce in his step. He rarely allows himself to be burdened by fatalism or misery. “Well, I’m a positive person,” he explains. “And I suppose that makes me a positive film-maker. I feel an obligation to lift people somewhere else with my films. And I believe in the inherent goodness of human beings. That’s naive – I recognise that. But it’s what keeps me going through the bad times.”

Professionally, at least, Boyle hasn’t suffered many knockdowns. He says he has learned that he is more comfortable on smaller productions, where he has room to manoeuvre and faces less pressure from upstairs. The Beach – a Hollywood behemoth starring Leonardo DiCaprio – remains a rare leaden misstep, while he and John Hodge recently bailed out of the next James Bond picture, citing creative differences with the franchise’s producers. I would like to get the full story on what happened, but his lips are sealed and his hands tied; there is not much he can say. “I was with John and they didn’t really like what we were doing and so it’s far better to part company.” He shrugs. “What we were doing was good. But it was obviously not what they wanted.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Himesh Patel plays the Beatles in Yesterday. Photograph: Jonathan Prime/Universal Pictures

Why did he want to get involved with Bond anyway? They’re movies for producers, not directors; he must have known that. Boyle grins. “You should be my agent,” he says. “And, yeah, you’re right. That’s ultimately what you learn. But you’ve got to go into that stuff optimistically. It’s like falling in love. You can’t go in guarded and trying to protect yourself. You have to be open-hearted and prepared to be hurt – and so what if you get a bit of bruising? You get well-paid and well looked after. So at the end of the day these are champagne problems.”

He insists he has put Bond behind him and no doubt that is true. But every now and then he is reminded of the bruising. Last month he went to see Claire Denis’s High Life and was especially taken by Robert Pattinson’s performance. “And it was so bizarre, because I was sitting there thinking: ‘Oh my God, they should get him to be the next Bond.’” Isn’t Pattinson a bit too young for the role? “No, no,” he scoffs. “He must be in his 30s. How old was Connery? He’s ready now.”

Ironically, Boyle’s greatest achievement may not be a movie at all, but his four-hour Olympic opening ceremony in 2012. Isles of Wonder was a joyous salute to British culture and history that commanded a TV audience of 900 million. The event bounded from England’s green and pleasant land, through the industrial revolution to the present day. It found room for Windrush immigrants and NHS nurses, Shakespeare and the Beatles, James Bond and the Queen. Tory MP Aidan Burley dismissed the show as “leftie multicultural crap”, while the Mail’s Stephen Glover labelled it “Marxist propaganda”, but these were voices in the darkness. Even in the moment, Isles of Wonder felt special. It was a celebration of the best of British liberalism, maybe the culmination of it, too.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The NHS section of Boyle’s 2012 Olympics opening ceremony. Photograph: Jae C. Hong/AP

At the time, Boyle said directing the ceremony had turned him into a patriot – or possibly made him realise that he had been one all along. He met with so many international Olympic workers who regarded the UK as a model society – a nation at ease with itself and its history – that he came away convinced. He saw his country afresh through the eyes of the world.

I read back to him what he once said about those international workers: “They see us as a beacon – as a modern, progressive country.”

“Yes, they did,” he groans. He clamps a hand to his brow. “And, oh my God, I wonder what they think about us now. Would they even own up to saying that in the first place? You’d have to ask them. But probably not.”

It is nice to think back on that Olympic opening ceremony. The further it recedes into the past, the more brightly it shines: the nation’s golden last hurrah, before the days of Brexit and backstops; societal confusion and the burgeoning bad times. Boyle hasn’t sat down to watch it since and says it would feel a bit weird. But he has a painting by his youngest daughter, who was 20 at the time, and was inspired by the industrial section of the show. It is very impressionistic; his one souvenir. “It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever had in my life,” he says.

By this point I fear that we have become hopelessly lost down memory lane. We started the interview pining for the Beatles; now, we’re coming over all nostalgic about the London Olympics. Boyle shakes his head and stares at the wall. “Oh my God,” he says. “You might be right.”

Still, he is at pains to remain positive; it is how he is geared. The times have gone bad and the country is in a mess. But he has faith in its people, its art and its industry. Its ideals are a bedrock, or perhaps a guiding light through the gloom.

“I believe that culture lives within us,” he explains. “It’s in our DNA and I really believe that, I can’t stress that enough. So when you hear a great song for the first time, it’s actually something you’ve heard before. It’s the culture that’s within us and that’s why it will survive what is going on at the moment. I’m not talking about culture as a last bastion, but as something that survives and endures and that we’ll eventually come back to.” He’s struggling for words and says he wishes he was more articulate. “It’s progress we’ll come back to,” he says. “Because I don’t think we’re heading towards progress at the moment. But it’s still there, it’s not gone. It’s progress we can return to whenever we want.”

Yesterday is released in the UK on 28 June