Three faint at Boyle movie screening

Danny Boyle's new movie is apparently so shocking that three people fainted during a screening.

They were watching '127 Hours' at the Toronto Film Festival recently.

The film by the 'Slumdog Millionaire' director, whose mother comes from Co Galway, includes a scene were a rock climber, played by James Franco, cuts off his own arm when it gets trapped under a boulder.

Franco has said he found shooting the movie “intense”.

The actor – who plays Aron Ralston, a climber who freed himself from under a rock by cutting off his own arm – confesses he found shooting the movie difficult, but ultimately “very rewarding”.

He said: “It was a very unique, very intense and very rewarding experience. We shot on a stage in Salt Lake City, where they had re-created a portion of the canyon that Aron was trapped. We also shot on the real location in Utah.

“On the set it wasn’t like a normal set, on a normal set you can take the walls out so you can get different shots and angles that you wouldn’t on a normal location. But this set didn’t work that way, it was confined and it didn’t really come apart.”

The 32-year-old also admits it was a “great experience” working with Boyle on the project because of his experimental approach to movie-making.

He told movie website Flicks and Bits: “Aside from it being a very unusual kind of movie and an unusual acting experience, it was a great experience just working with Danny, he really does love the search and the experimentation and finding new approaches to movie-making and he really did it throughout pre-production.”