"I wanted to appeal to everyone who's got a mum," he says.

In "Millions," Damien (Alex Etel) and Anthony (Lewis McGibbon) are coping with the recent death of their mother when their father moves them to a new neighborhood. Their life is turned upside down when they discover a bag full of money that must be spent in a matter of days before Britain switches its currency to the Euro.

While it may seem unusually family-oriented fare for the man who made "Trainspotting" and "28 Days Later," among others, Boyle says there are some common threads in his films.

"It's not really a kid's movie, I don't think. I didn't make it as a kids movie. You want it to be for everybody. It's about the world seen through [the two boys'] eyes if you like, and I think it is exuberant. That's what we wanted with 'Trainspotting' . . . it's an exuberant picture of life," he said in an interview during last September's Toronto International Film Festival.

"And the route that we chose to do that is through these kids," he adds, "and through particularly the younger kid's imagination and how he's capable of resisting sledgehammer blows of reality and materialism."

Seven-year-old Damien, the younger boy, is having a hard time adjusting to life without his mum but finds comfort in conversations with various saints. "He's interested in the saints because it's obvious his mum's died, so you tend to, like you do, you'd think your mum's a saint," says the affable Brit.

Boyle, an ex-Catholic, says the role of the saints in the movie - one of them amusingly portrayed as a chain smoker - is up for interpretation. "People who are of a religious inclination will believe in them, other people won't believe in them, and that's fine. The only thing to say really is that the film's about faith but not in the religious sense of the word - it's in the temporal, human sense of the word. It's about having faith in other people and believing in people and trusting that if you do that, that good will come out of them in some way, eventually. And I believe that, yeah."

"Millions" also includes gentle humor directed toward Mormonism, with Scandinavian elders as bit players. Most missionaries in England tend to come from the Nordic countries, Boyle says, but he admits that they may not have had a place in the movie were it not for the fact that he shot "A Life Less Ordinary" in Utah in 1996.

"When we came up with the Mormons, it just felt so right," he says. "We had spent some time there. And it's funny, actually, we were shooting in this place, Widnes [England], and who should come along, two Mormons on bicycles, Scandinavian, with the white shirts cut off there and the rucksack on the back. . . . People were like, this can't be real. It's a setup."

"A Life Less Ordinary" was Boyle's follow-up to "Trainspotting," a cult favorite about a group of young, drug-addicted Scotsmen that he never believed would be a hit in the States. "When we made it people said 'you're mad making a drug movie, nobody goes to see drug movies,' which was true." As with "Millions," he and his writing/producing partners made the film unapologetically British. "It has all the idiosyncrasies and details and particulars of Britain and you don't kind of iron those out for the rest of the world, you don't change things."

His foray into fright flicks with the zombie horror "28 Days Later" in 2002, which grossed more than $45 million in North America, was also made for the British market, although Boyle has a theory as to why it became a hit in the U.S. "As it happened, while we were making it, 9-11 happened and obviously it took on a resonance because of that, because of the fear in the world of attack, kind of something out of control that could sweep through and take you."

Meanwhile, although Boyle won't be directing the planned sequel to "28 Days Later," he will helm "Porno," the follow-up to "Trainspotting" based on novelist Irvine Welsh's sequel, in which the Scotsmen, now middle-aged, try making an adult movie.

Boyle says McGregor and his "Trainspotting" co-stars aren't old enough yet to play the parts. "I think it'll be another five years before we make that film but I think we will make it, 'cause I think the idea of looking at those same characters and they're middle-aged is too good to miss."

bmac@sltrib.com