They say Danny Boyle saved the British film industry in the mid1990s with two of the most iconic home-grown movies of the era, Shallow Grave and Trainspotting. His latest picture, Sunshine, attempts a more ambitious task — to save the planet — and succeeds in matching anything that Hollywood can produce on larger budgets.

The 50-year-old Mancunian director took three years to craft his visually arresting sci-fi epic, released this weekend. It is the gloriously improbable story of eight astronauts charged with delivering a massive bomb to the dying sun in the hope that the explosion will relight the solar system and spare humanity. Refreshing switches of plot, rather than Bruce Willis heroics, have won over the critics.

To get the biggest bang for his squibbish £20m budget, Boyle approached the project with typical parsimony by shoving his international cast into a student dorm in Mile End, east London. By serendipity, this is close to the director’s home. In the same street lives his former companion, the casting director Gail Stevens, mother to his three children Caitlin, 15, Gabriel, 17, and Grace, 22.

Boyle, a Morrissey lookalike with an engagingly boyish manner, claimed he was trying to get the cast to bond in “a siege mentality”. Their preparation also included scuba-diving and experiencing zero gravity in an aerobatic plane. But the “small is beautiful” approach was the only viable alternative to making the film in Hollywood and losing control. “If you take £150m, I guarantee £50m of it will just dribble away through the cracks in the floorboards,” he said recently.

It is not the first time Boyle has spurned Hollywood over a sci-fi movie. He was asked to direct Resurrection, the fourth instalment of the Alien franchise, and went as far as discussing it with Sigourney Weaver, the series’ star. They liked the “psychological and quite sexy” script, reminiscent of the first episode, but he balked upon realising that it would be another alien-chasing movie. Besides, he was not ready: “I wouldn’t have known how to handle all the special effects.”

His reputation for discovering young stars makes him sound like Simon Cowell, he is apt to say. But few people had heard of Ewan McGregor, Kerry Fox and Christopher Eccleston before they were united on the set of Shallow Grave, a gripping drama of three arrogant flatmates’ descent into hell when they are stuck with a dead body and a suitcase full of loot. Ditto Robert Carlyle and Jonny Lee Miller in Trainspotting, an electrifying study of Edinburgh heroin addicts that echoes the black humour of Irvine Welsh’s cult novel.

Much has been written of Boyle’s rift with McGregor, who was sorely aggrieved when dropped from Boyle’s film The Beach (2000) in favour of Leonardo DiCaprio. The film, adapted from Alex Garland’s bestselling novel about a deceptively idyllic community of sun worshippers, was a critical failure that Boyle puts down to the Americans’ refusal to buy the notion that “Leo lies” in a twist of his character. They were not alone in feeling betrayed: when asked if he had made up with the director, McGregor replied: “Danny who?”

This poses problems for Boyle’s planned reunion of the Trainspotting cast for a sequel, Porno, based on Welsh’s novel. “If any of the actors won’t do it, we won’t do it,” Boyle has declared. Yet he remains optimistic: “I’m sure we will get back together again. He’s one of those guys who can do it, who has got that magic thing that people love.”

He knows there is plenty of time for McGregor’s anger to cool. Although Porno is set 10 years after the climax of Trainspotting, Boyle has decided to allow another eight years for the actors to age. “It’s scary the way that actors kind of stay frozen in time,” he lamented. “They moisturise, they go to bed early and they look after themselves so they look good on camera.”

The hallmark of Boyle’s films is a unique visual style that matches the storylines — and setpieces that enhance the characters. McGregor had two notable such sequences in Trainspotting: he seemingly dived head first into a public lavatory and gave a harrowing depiction of a heroin addict experiencing cold turkey. In Sunshine the first glimpse of the spacecraft, behind its huge heat-deflecting shield, is dazzling.

Boyle’s law is that as fewer people go to the cinema, films “should be as much like a car crash as possible — extremes of beauty and violence.” He disdains elitism: “I hate films that exclude people. I hate that about art cinema, it has that quality, ‘You won’t understand this, f*** off ’.”

Yet each new film fills him with terror: “Suddenly I get a panic attack. It’s genuinely fearful, thinking: I’m not going to be able to do this, am I?” He rationalises that it is like an athlete’s adrenaline rush before a race.

Another Boyle constant is the team around him. Garland wrote the script for Sunshine, his third collaboration with the director. Then there is the “gang of three”. In 1993 Boyle teamed up with the producer Andrew Macdonald, grandson of the great screenwriter Emeric Pressburger, and John Hodge, a doctor turned writer, for Shallow Grave. Ever since they have been almost inseparable.

Boyle was born on October 20, 1956, in Radcliffe near Bolton in Lancashire, to Irish Catholic immigrant parents who were working-class. He still accompanies his father, Frank, to watch Bury football team. His mother wanted him to be a priest and at the age of 14 he was about to transfer to a seminary near Wigan when a priest took him aside and dissuaded him. “Whether he was saving me from the priesthood, or saving the priesthood from me, I don’t know,” he reflected. “But quite soon after, I started doing drama.”

His inspiration was Frank Unsworth, a lay English teacher at Thornleigh Salesian College in Bolton, who took him on his first visit to the theatre at 16. It was a production of Richard II, starring Ian Richardson, after which a starstruck Boyle discovered acting skills in school plays. Thanks to Unsworth, English became his favourite subject. “I was reading Ian Fleming novels before he started teaching me, but he made me appreciate the artistry in writing,” he recalled.

At the University of Wales in Bangor he met Frances Barber, the pneumatic future actress, and later they set up house together in London. “Danny was from near Bolton and I was from Wolverhampton and there we were entering this world that was exciting and exotic,” Barber said last week. “We were just rootless.”

After university he directed at the Joint Stock Theatre Company before working as artistic director and then deputy director under Max Stafford-Clark at the Royal Court in London. The theatre put on “difficult” work that played to empty houses, he observed. Boyle drew a lesson: “If you’re going to work in the public arena you have to take on board the public.”

The answer, he realised, lay behind the camera and he began shooting for television with episodes of Inspector Morse and the acclaimed Derek Jacobi drama Mr Wroe’s Virgins.

Then, with a tiny £1.5m budget scraped together from Channel 4 and a Glasgow film grant, he made his feature film debut with Shallow Grave in 1994. Two years later, when Trainspotting became a hit in Britain and a cult smash in America (despite needing subtitles there), Boyle was proclaimed a miracle worker. Critics rubbed their eyes: here were British films that were not only daring and socially aware but also seriously commercial.

Everyone wanted a piece of him: “Once you’ve had anything like a hit in the movie business it’s easy to get lost. All these people are scuttling around trying to get you to make things and offering deals. The pressure of what to do next is horrible.” Which perhaps explains what happened next.

His third film, A Life Less Ordinary, was a whimsical comedy that stalled at the box office despite starring McGregor and Cameron Diaz. Then, with The Beach, Boyle seemed to lose his way and retreated to television drama. After making a couple of short features for the BBC — Strumpet and Vacuuming Completely Nude in Paradise — he made a triumphant return with the small-budget postapocalyptic zombie movie 28 Days Later, scripted by Garland. His 2004 film Millions, a warm story about the world of children, bore more than a passing resemblance to Shallow Grave, featuring a suitcase of stolen money and a villain in the attic.

His next project is something completely different: filming Slum Dog Millionaire, based on the true story of a boy who wins the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire but faces accusations of cheating.

For a man who has spent his career confounding expectations, Boyle harbours a monstrous ambition: to work with Hugh Grant. Could the Fulham smoothie possibly fill McGregor’s boots in Porno?