Trivia for
Millions (2004) More at IMDbPro »

• The book that Damien reads and references throughout the film is called "Six O'Clock Saints". Popular in the UK in the 1950s, it is surprising that any parent would give a copy to their child, as the screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce points out at 03:08 in the DVD commentary, since it contains all the gruesome stories that Damien tells in class, plus many more. Its inclusion is a sort of homage to Martin Scorsese, who, according to Boyce, has cited it in interviews as one of his favorite books growing up and that it gave him a wider understanding of the human experience than had been revealed to him as a child. In Roger Ebert's 3/18/2005 review of the film, Ebert mentions that Boyce "got the inspiration for the screenplay from an interview in which Martin Scorsese said he was reading the lives of the saints."
  
  
• Danny Boyle and Frank Cottrell Boyce mention at 27:17 in the DVD commentary, that one of the actors who play the martyrs of Uganda claimed to be a descendant of the real martyrs of Uganda of 1881.
  
  
• Many of the cutting and shot compositions in the train robbery sequence are intentionally referential to moments in Night Mail (1936) and The Great Train Robbery (1903).
  
  
• The scene between Damien and St. Peter was not in the original screenplay. Director Danny Boyle mentions at 46:03 in the DVD commentary that he suggested Frank Cottrell Boyce re-write the screenplay as a novel to which that scene was then added. When Danny Boyle read the novel, he decided the scene needed to be in the film because of the emphasis that the saints' appearances had gained in rewrites of the original script, so the scene was re-written in script form and shot as a pickup.
  
  
• Instead of making cast and crew T-shirts, production donated the money to Water Aid, to build a well in Africa (like the family did in the film).
  
  
• At one point, the family is watching Britain's "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" (1998) on television. This show, of course, plays a huge role in Danny Boyle's later film, Slumdog Millionaire (2008).
  
  

• SPOILER: At 38:37 in the DVD commentary, Frank Cottrell Boyce says "On the nature of this heist, where the guys rush the train and raid the train and actually it turns out that that's not the robbery, it's just a distraction, just a way of planting someone in that 'house'. You came up with that idea from Northern Ireland." And 'Danny Boyce' responds "That's right. I heard this story about the troops raiding streets in the Falls Road in Belfast. It was just a distraction in order to drop a couple of men in the attics of the houses for a couple of days, out of contact and just simply eavesdropping, and then they would raid the street again and take the men out and nobody knew that they'd been there."
  
  

Related Links