Irvine Welsh & Ewan McGregor reveal what to expect from Trainspotting 2

Trainspotting. What a film. And after over 20 years, a sequel is finally on the way - but what the world wants to know is, can it possibly live up to the original?

Well, the early signs are good. It was announced in December that the original cast were all confirmed to return, with Danny Boyle at the helm, along with the welcome news that John Hodge would be returning to write the screenplay.

With production beginning in April, Vice spoke to Ewan McGregor, Kelly McDonald and Welsh, to discuss the original and plans for the sequel - and they got some seriously juicy quotes, including the revelation from Welsh that the sequel is based on Porno (the book sequel), but "it's also evolved. We've had to evolve past that, because the actors would have been ten years older when Porno came out, and now they're 20 years older. It has to take into account that reality."

In terms of the plot, he continued: "It's very much telling a story about Edinburgh as it currently is. The main element to the story is basically Renton, Begbie, Sick Boy and Spud getting back together again, and it tells the story of them getting involved in the vice industry in a very innovative way."

Meanwhile, McGregor sounds seriously confident, saying, "It's going to be incredible. It's a very beautiful, brilliant script – and it needed to be; I don't think any of us would have wanted to be involved in something that wasn't going to live up to the first film. That's the danger with any sequel, but especially this one and after such a long period of time."

Kelly McDonald, who played Diane in the original and had not been mentioned before in relation to the sequel revealed, "I'm in talks. I've read the script. I don't know how much I can talk about it, to be honest. It would be so interesting to work with the same people, and everyone will have changed, but I definitely know how to stand on a marker now. Trainspotting was my weird beginning, and I'm so grateful for it because that could have been it, but it's not, and now I'm actually getting to do this job that I really love."

Welsh gave some further revelations, saying: "I think it has some fantastic set pieces and great opportunities for the actors to knock it out of the park, so I'm very excited. I just know that Danny will come up with this amazing visualisation. I think it's going to be excellent. The thing that's going to be interesting is seeing how the young kids in the multiplex cinemas get on with it now, because they're older guys – it's not going to be a youth movie like Trainspotting was. It could be like watching your uncle dance at a wedding. Hopefully it will be fun and crazy enough. It's got the potential for some great, incendiary performances from the actors."

Talking about the most memorable scenes of the original, the two actors revealed their choices, with Ewan McGregor plumping for "the underwater sequences. I loved that. It's so un-busy and quiet, and you work with the camera in a very different way. I love that sequence – I love the idea of it and the sereneness of it. I loved all the scenes with Kelly. I loved the nightclub scene and outside the nightclub scene where [Renton's] trying to get off with her and gets in cab and all of that stuff. Snogging Kelly MacDonald in the back of a taxi, that was fun – I liked working with her very much. Kelly wasn't really an actress at that point; this was her first thing and she turned up and blew everyone away. The withdrawal scene was an incredible thing to shoot, with the extending room and Jimmy Cosmo playing my dad. The park scene with Jonny Lee Miller, shooting the dog – that was good fun. We didn't really shoot a dog, though."

Kelly McDonald explained her choice saying, "The club scene, coming out of it. I think it was my first day filming. That was a whole day and night shoot. All the boys were quite naughty and were drinking, so I was drinking... The sex scene was obviously quite nerve-racking. I was very sexually inexperienced at that stage and limited in that area, so it was all a bit embarrassing. I was so unthinking and so naive and young that that was the day I invited my mum and my brother to the set."

They must have enjoyed that.

[via Vice]