based on a 1993 novel by irvine welsh, it was a low-budget affair, boyle's second feature film, withn little-known actors, that became a smash hit. one of the most successful films ever made in britain, with a large, almost cult-ish following in the u.s. and worldwide. >> we believed in it very fervently, very passionately, in the book and how we wanted to make it as a film. this is irving welsh's extraordinary voice, that he creates for these people, and that we inherit in the movies. he gives a voice to people who are marginalized, and they are from an extraordinary city, edinburgh, but they're from the fringes. >> reporter: the first one was about this youthful experience of, you know, i can almost do anything, and they do, heroin and all kinds of antics, but you feel immortal. but now, this is inevitably a kind of meditation about aging and mortality. >> the first film is really boyhood, or you know, when you emerge from childhood into those late teens, early twenties and you feel reckless and careless and you can take all the risks, the terrible risks you take with yourself and

and -- so, you know, we never received the script until about two years ago even though irvine welshled "porno" some ten years after his first novel. and, but it just took them that long to sort of find the right tone. and for john hodge, our script writer, to write this beautiful script. >> seth: i felt a great amount of nostalgia, because i was, we were talking backstage. i was the age of those characters when this movie came out. >> yeah. >> seth: when i first saw it. i mean the feelings of nostalgia, i had, i can only imagine were so small compared to what it was like going back to those same sets for you. >> yeah, there was a moment every day, some -- there was like a 20 years have passed moment every day on set. and yeah, we shot in some of the same locations. probably the most profound one was when we went up to the highlands. in the first film i do -- there's a bit where renton talks about being scottish and that it's [ bleep ] to be scottish. and we're ruled by the english and there's little -- i was sitting on a bridge when i did that speech, and we went back to that very,

>> the sequel is set 20 years later and irvin welsh wrote a sequel to his novel which came out aboutvel is scotland was sort of a book of my generation. it was an enormous success and a wonderful book that sort of defined that time and when a sequel -- when he wrote his -- i'm not going to say the name of his second book because i'm on breakfast television but came out ten years later and at that point, i don't think there was a script that came out of it that was good enough for danny to send to us so it took another ten years really for them to nail it and what the film has in it which is really deep, i think, is this sense that man in this case because it's primarily about four boys in their mid-40s approaching their 50s so start looking back on their lives and then in our case looking back on our youths and that is the "trainspotting" film we all know and love. >> powerful? and through that sort of retrospective looking back trying to figure out how they're going to move forward. what was my life going to be like and i'm starting to sense that a little bit at my age. >> right. >>