DANNY BOYLE: I was very aware of my Catholic, Anglo-Irish roots. My mum came over from Ireland in the 1950s when there was a huge influx of post-war labour to the north-west of England. She was a hairdresser. We had one of those stand-up driers in the house; she’d sit underneath it to curl her hair. She met my dad at a dance in Bury in 1952 and they married in 1954. He was brought up beside a tiny farm where his dad worked, all this in Radcliffe, six miles north-west of Manchester. He left school at fourteen to be a labourer but he educated himself, which he’s very proud of.

When he had kids, he was determined to pass on that gene. In fact, both my mum and dad were desperate for me, my twin sister Maria and my younger sister Bernadette to get into good schools. They got us through the eleven-plus and into single-sex grammar schools that were also really good Catholic schools. They were quite tough schools in certain senses, but they were good schools. Having a decent education changed our lives.

When I was eleven, we moved house. Until that point we had lived in a tiny house with two bedrooms, and I had shared a room with my sisters. But once I was eleven, we were no longer allowed to share. So we were allocated a three-bedroom house on a decent council estate in another part of Radcliffe, and I had my own bedroom for the first time. Moving house was another life-changing moment: we were just far enough from the original house to lose touch with the friends we’d been at junior school with. The new friends I eventually made were what I’d now call middle-class kids, but back then, of course, we didn’t give them that label – they were just mates.

My sisters went to a convent in Bury, while I used to travel five or six miles every day to my grammar school in Bolton. I have a very clear memory of simultaneously moving house and starting secondary school. For a while I didn’t have any mates in my neighbourhood because my old friends lived down in the town and my schoolfriends lived in different towns and villages around Bolton.

Was it a difficult time?

It wasn’t difficult but I do remember it. Then I got absorbed in school. I didn’t rebel against school because we had been brought up to value education.

You didn’t at any point rebel against your parents’ educational directive?

No, no. I never thought about it like that. Part of me hated school, but I worked hard to get O-levels and A-levels. I pushed myself really hard. Because Maria and I were twins, my dad was very comparative. When we were at the same primary school, he used to do this terrible thing of putting our school reports down side-by-side on the table. The competitive relationship forged by my dad benefited me most, despite the fact I always felt my sisters were much brighter than me.

Maybe your father thought you and Maria would thrive on the competition?

I’m sure he did. It’s also important to remember that punishment is the key to Catholicism. When I was growing up, there was certainly very little of the modern ethos we embrace about encouragement. If we fell below a certain level of achievement or behaviour, we had to be punished! We had to feel guilty! I had to try and jettison that with my own three kids.

Lose the guilt or the strictness?

Both. But it’s too easy for me to go round the whole time feeling guilty about everything. I can’t shake it off.

Are you and Maria non-identical twins?

Yes. And I was born a few minutes earlier. We get on really well now, but we didn’t for a long time. You can’t really when your dad is constantly comparing you. There was also that male working-class notion that the son is allowed to do whatever he wants – it’s even okay if he wants to go off and do drama – whereas my sisters became teachers. They’ve both given it up now: Bernadette stopped to have a family, while Maria, being too conscientious, just got burned out. She’s now an administrator for special-needs provision in Rochdale. Going back to the guilt: I have always felt guilty about my sisters doing more important jobs than me and getting paid fuck-all comparatively.

How relevant was – or is – it that you were the older twin?

We used to refer to it a lot when we were younger. I was the slightly heavier one.

Were you close to your parents? How strict were they?

It was quite a strict household. My dad has always been a hardcore socialist, a big Tony Benn supporter, and I was brought up to think like that. My mum’s Catholicism defined everything for her, but she loyally voted Labour as my dad did. When I was growing up, I hated my dad, like you do; my son Gabriel, who is twenty, is going through exactly the same thing with me now. I was very, very close to my mum until she died in 1988. I learned things from my mum that I really value and I inherited things from my dad that you can’t really do anything about: aggression, stubbornness, doggedness. All of which are of great value to me as a director – it means I just keep going and going.

How does aggression help as a director?

I mean in the sense of pushing. Having to be on the front foot. If you want something, you’ll push for it. You’ve also got to be willing to push people around sometimes to get things done.

What did you learn from your mother?

Tolerance and respect. She instinctively had both. She came from the same background as Noel and Liam Gallagher’s mum. Both our mums were uneducated Irish women who came over to the northwest of England. Both were dinner ladies. My mum started working at the primary school I went to, St Mary’s, in 1963 or ’64. There’s a generation of people who came from Ireland to Manchester and got similar jobs. Our family stayed together because they had this ambition for us to be really educated.

Where did that ambition come from?

It was common sense. My dad looked at me and thought, ‘He’s not going to be working where I’m working. He’s going to get a better job.’

What were you like as a kid, before you sat the eleven-plus and moved house?

(laughs) Just a normal kid! My uncle Tom, who sadly died in spring 2009, was mad about football. He used to run the football teams at St Mary’s. When I went home after the Oscars, he brought a framed photo along of me and my mates as ten-year-olds about to win a tournament. Oh my God, this photo!

Is it like a scene out of Kes?

It’s totally like Kes! None of us look as though we’d ever been fed – what were we eating? And of course you realise how conscious we’ve since become of nutrition and diet. But then, for fuck’s sake, we all looked like Billy Casper. Grey, sallow, but beautiful as well. It’s a really beautiful picture. Anyway, I was mad about football. Really mad about both playing and watching. My dad used to take me to see Bury, the team I’ve supported all my life. He was a big Manchester United supporter as well. In the back of our family album there’s a beautiful grey and red photo of the Busby Babes lined up just before eight young players were killed in the 1958 Munich air crash.

I saw Georgie Best play a number of times at Old Trafford; he was such a fantastic player. When I was working as a director for the BBC in Northern Ireland in the late 1980s, I made a film called Scout which was written by Frank McGuinness and inspired by Best. The guy who discovered Best in Northern Ireland was called Bob Bishop; he was Matt Busby’s scout. Bishop used to find these young lads, take them away to a cottage in the countryside and test their character to see if they could cope with a big club. Although I’m not sure the test of character really worked; look at what happened to Bestie.

So you’d go to games on a Saturday afternoon and in between play reasonably well at school?

I wasn’t very good. My dad was naturally ambidextrous but, as was customary at the time, he was brutalised out of writing with his left hand at school. I’m right-handed but I could play with both feet. I wasn’t good enough to be on the right side, so I was on the left, where there was less competition for places.

Were you more academic than sporty? Were you bright and focused...