It has been 23 years since the release of Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s genre re-defining film “28 Days Later,” which has received quite a devoted following over the years. Now, the director and writer have reunited to deliver “28 Years Later,” a post-apocalyptic horror film that continues from “28 Weeks Later” (2007) and stars a new cast of characters played by Jodie Comer, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Ralph Fiennes, Alfie Williams, and Jack O’Connell. Cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle has also returned to shoot the film, predominantly using the iPhone (maintaining a consistent look with how audiences experienced the first Canon XL1 digital video-shot film in 2002), and it will kickstart a new trilogy of films with “28 Years Later: The Bone Temple” being directed by Nia DaCosta, to come next. After viewing the first 28 minutes of the film, Academy Award-winner Danny Boyle was kind enough to spend some time in the Sony offices in New York speaking with me about his work and experience making the anticipated sequel, which you can listen to or read below. Please be sure to check out the film, which will be released in theaters on June 20th by Sony Pictures. Thank you, and enjoy!
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*This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
So first of all, as I said, I’m a big fan. Your films are part of why I fell in love with cinema. When I first saw “Trainspotting,” it was like my mind exploded, and I was in awe. And with “28 Days Later,” I had never seen a zombie film quite like that before, or just a film in general, quite like that before.
Right.
I guess the first question everyone’s going to be asking is, “Why did this take so long?“ I know this has been in development for many years.
Yeah.
And, of course, the industry has gone through a lot of change, and there have been strikes, the pandemic, and many different things have happened. So, was it the story, was it financing? What was the thing that made it so difficult for “28 Years Later” to come together?
It’s kind of weird. It’s kind of like you go off, especially when you do something very intense. Well, every film tends to have its own intensity, but you want to do something that you imagine is different than what came before. And I went off and did a kid’s film called “Millions.” And then I did “Sunshine,” which Alex also wrote. And then, while we were doing “Sunshine,” they filmed “28 Weeks Later.” And after that, we all split up. We all fell off after “Sunshine,” and I went off and did “Slumdog Millionaire,” and they went off and did “Dread” and stuff like that. And then you come back together partly because of retrospective screenings. So if there weren’t any screenings of “28 Days Later,” it’d likely fade away as most films do. They kind of just fade away like “Millions” has faded away with time. Nobody’s really interested in it.
That’s not true!
Well, whether you liked it or not, it’s natural. It’s a natural fading process, Or it just takes its place on the shelf. Up it goes, and it stays there. But there are others that keep demanding attention, and it’s often expressed through these public screenings. And they would invite me to a Q and A after a “28 Days Later” screening, and I’d go, “But it’s on DVD and channel four every other week.” Why are there screenings of it? And I’d go along to these screenings. Sure, I’ll come along and do a Q&A to support the industry generally and just the idea of cinema. And I’d go to these theaters, and they’d be packed with people. And they’d be watching the film *tenses up* like that.
Yeah.
You could really feel it. I was like, fucking hell…So Alex and I began talking and then wrote one script. Alex wrote the script, but it was an automatic response to the problem of a sequel. And it was then that he weaponized the virus. Just like “Alien” does. It’s just a traditional, a very good way of, when you have an idea like a virus, you can suddenly introduce a corporation, military, or government who want to weaponize it. And that allows the story to expand. And it was a good script, but it didn’t really get any traction between us, backward and forward. And then he began to think about a different idea: to isolate the country again in the way it appears to be isolated in the first film. There doesn’t appear to be any hope outside the country. It feels like it’s alone, and doing that and making it a British cast opened the idea up again. He suddenly started talking about writing it as a trilogy, as three films about these characters, each sitting independently of the original film and each other. They’d be satisfying in their own right, but there’d be this connective tissue that gave them an overall character and journey arc that connected all three films. And that’s when we began to get real traction between us, and we began to bounce things backward forward.
And because this community is where they are set 28 years later, it’s taken so long to develop this that we skipped months and went straight to years, haha!
Haha, yes, we did. Someone said, “What’s happened to the months then?”
Well, it’s been 23 years since the release of “28 Days Later.”
It’s actually been 24 years since we shot it. We shot it in 2001, I remember, ’cause 9/11 happened while we were shooting. So that’s 24 years.
That’s wild.
Yeah.
But the characters in this have to resort to medieval ways of living to maintain any kind of order and peace. It must have been exciting to explore that community dynamic and how people would have to survive under these circumstances.
So, world-building is the first question you have to answer: How have they survived? What are the principles by which they live? How does that affect character? How does that affect people who clearly were alive when it happened? And characters who clearly weren’t like the main character? The boy Alfie is about 12 years old, so he doesn’t know anything about what happened before “28 Years Later.”
It was quite interesting because there’s this book, “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind,” by Yuval Noah Harari. It also says that the ideal size for a community is 150 people because that’s as many people as you can learn the identity of and remember their names. Any bigger than that, and you can’t. And if it gets any bigger than that, you need a system to simulate trust. So, you trust in a system rather than in an individual. So you trust in money as a system. You all believe in money and share its values, so you can trust each other and exchange trust through it. Or religion is another one you can use. So then, this community in the film establishes a community of about that size. And then they barricade themselves in, obviously against infection, but also to protect what they have. The only way they can survive is through subsistence farming. So it feels medieval. And the bows and arrows, which are very traditional. It’s a very big part of Brigham’s tradition, which was the English common ball man. And he’d fight with the arrows. Hence, the Henry V bits of film of the boys being trained for war and the arrow men, but it’s all very nostalgic. They look backward. It’s a sort of post-war lifestyle, really. And they’re happy with that. And many people would be, many people would find much to cherish in that, but I’m not sure it is the way forward.
But it wasn’t just about how they survived; it was about how the virus survived as well. So, we began to look at whether these infected people you saw in the first film, if they burnt up so much energy, they would die very quickly because they’re just like this *moves erratically* the whole time. So they need calories to replace the calories they’re burning, literally the nutrients. So we thought they would hunt, they would learn. And that’s evolving. You learn to hunt; you usually must be in a pack because it is the only way. If you don’t have weapons, you can hunt as a pack. The pack hunts, and the pack will often have a leader emerge. So, we began to think about how the virus finds hosts that allow it to survive in this way. And the creatures you see at the beginning of the film, the slow lows…They’ve changed their behavior and live on the ground, where they expend less energy and eat the ground’s nutrients and what’s available: bugs and grubs and snails and worms. And they don’t expend any energy. They’re very passive. So you get this evolutionary chain that’s evolved as well. And then there’s nature itself, green nature, which would take over everything. And I was saying earlier in 50 years, it would take *points out of the window over the city* over this. All you’d see out there is green, and that would be in 50 years’ time, and it would be gone because cities don’t evolve without people in them. They just die. But nature doesn’t. It just keeps growing.
It finds a way.
It finds a way. Haha. There you go.
Your style is so kinetic, and I remember watching some of your earlier films, like “Shallow Grave,” from that point on, you’ve always had this style that contains a tremendous amount of energy, whether it’s found in the rhythm of the editing or the dynamic camera work. How do you then scale back on that to create tension in a film like this? I imagine there has to be a sort of impulse, if you will, in your work to make it kinetic because that’s just what you do. So how do you, for what’s technically a horror film, then find that balance?
Yeah. I suppose it’s the individual circumstances of the particular scene. Or the circumstances that the characters find themselves in. You kind of respond to that. Also, you instinctively understand that you need to change between dynamism and stillness to create really satisfying arcs. And they can be very sudden arcs, which are shocks and surprises.
There were moments in the first 28 minutes, too, that I wasn’t expecting, such as the use of the Rudyard Kipling poem.
Yeah.
The way you used that and the editing to cut back and forth during the scene shocked and amazed me at how well you were able to maintain a level of tension and create jump scares for the audience while retaining the style you’re known for.
Yeah. Well, good! You always try to find a way to tell the story that suits the story itself rather than imposing a style on a story. You’re hoping that it comes out of the story itself. And the jeopardy that’s created or the surprises that are created come as surprises to the characters, but they’re born out of the character’s realities or the realities that the characters are living. So it feels like it belongs in the right place. You take risks, like introducing the soldiers as an idea, which happens in the second half. And that pays off beautifully. But it’s a risk introducing them because they’re such a surprising element to the story. You just try to inhabit and investigate the idea of the script and expand it. And then some of it you try and intensify. You just press. It’s like pressing this moment and squeezing as much life out of it as possible. And another bit you go, no, let’s pass through now. It’s very simple. It’s just characters talking to each other. We just wanna relax, right? And just hear and talk and have a laugh or whatever. And then, it’s time to squeeze again.
Yeah, totally. I’m a big physical media fan, and with the release “28 Years Later,” “28 Days Later” is being released on physical media in 4K UHD.
Yeah.
Given how you shot that film…
Yes!!
H…how exactly is that happening? How is that going to look?
I don’t know, haha. Nobody said anything to me about this.
I’m so curious. I can’t wait to get my hands on it because I don’t know how that will translate into a 4K resolution. I can imagine the final scene…
Well, yeah. Finally, the final scene will look as it’s meant to. It’s incredibly rich and beautiful.
But you shot this one on the iPhone 15 Max.
Well, it was one of the cameras we used. We used a lot of cameras of different kinds, but we used iPhones predominantly. But they shoot now on our setting at 4K. I wouldn’t advise you to shoot your own videos on 4K because of your storage costs. It would just go through the roof. But we used it, partly because of the first film and the technology we used during that. But it also had to do with the lightweight nature. It suggested to the crew that we would be light on foot. Because we wanted to go to very remote places, and once we were there, we didn’t want to mark the places with heavy equipment. So that was an influence on it.
Also, since DCP is projected today versus film stock back in those days, it just makes sense that, yes, this would be the natural format to retain that look.
Yes, indeed.
But let me ask you this, though. What are you guys doing with iPhones that I can’t take my iPhone and go out and do right now? What settings, apps, or extensions are you guys using to capture the film as you do?
We used the Black Magic app to control the aperture, and certain lenses were used at different times on the phone to give greater control and focus. Otherwise, the phone takes control of the focus itself, and you have no control over it, which can be fine for certain things but not good for others. So, there are limitations to using it like that. But these will progress, evolve, and change.
I’ve seen many films shot on iPhones in recent years, and I’m constantly astounded by what we can capture now. It’s come a long way in the last few years alone.
Yes. And it will continue to; there ain’t anything gonna stop that. It’s just gonna keep going, I’m afraid. But it did allow us to work in this ancient description of the area of northeast England called Northumbria. And it’s quite wild. It’s not like Yorkshire; it’s quite manicured, and Scotland has many landowners who look after the land. It’s very much land, but Northumbria is wilder and very green. And we use that in a widescreen format. We use that to create a permanent sense of nature. What would replace this thing out here that has just returned? Without man, it is thriving as it will and will keep doing.
There’s a vastness to it.
Yeah, that was the idea of that. And the cameras—what can you not do with them? For me, it was more about how you can…One of the advantages of using them was how you could physically organize them because they’re so small and cheap. And especially because we got them for free. You can stack them, and we created this poor man’s bullet time “Matrix“-type rig. It was flexible and maneuverable. We could walk with it. It allowed us to capture an arc of movement around a character, which gives you a brief moment of feeling like you’re inside; you roam the other side of a scene and then back on. Because when you watch cinema, no matter what projection it is, whether it’s IMAX or whether it’s a kind of like 16:9 or a 4:3 or whatever you are watching, or like in this case, 2:76:1, you are always watching a screen there like that. Right? And I always want to make you jump inside it for a moment and then come back out again. I’m always trying to do that. I’ve tried to do it a few times using different techniques to put you in there so that the thing flips rather than remaining static there like that. So that’s what I’m always trying to do. It allowed us to do that. And that is available. You can invent what you want with them if you can afford to get hold of enough of them, if you’ve got enough mates, and you can build little rigs with them and do different things with them.
It’s gonna inspire a lot of people, I imagine.
I hope. Yeah.
I have to ask before we go, “Shallow Grave” and “Trainspotting” are both in the Criterion Collection. Are you in talks with Criterion for any of your other films right now? Or is there a film of yours that you would like to see get that physical media treatment?
I just went to the offices. I just did the closet, and it’s great. I got a bunch of films and I’m just like…
It’s awesome.
Oh, it’s absolutely amazing!
I’m a big collector, so that’s why I ask.
Yeah, it’s a wonderful thing. I was so pleased because one can imagine how difficult it must be to run that company these days. And we turned up, and they have a really nice office. It’s a lovely office. And you think to yourself, “I’m so pleased they’ve got a nice place for this.” Because it’s a really treasured thing, how much they love film. So you’d like to know, just in terms of what would they put in the collection? What are the other ones they would put in the collection?
What would you like to see them put in?
Of my films?
Yeah.
Oh my God…
You mentioned “Millions” before; wouldn’t that be a great way for people to rediscover it?
Yes, it would. That’s a lovely film. It’s actually a really lovely film.
I agree.
It’s very, yeah, it’s a very sweet film. Yeah, that would be a wonderful thing. I actually did this television series about the Sex Pistols, which didn’t get received very well because John Lydon hammered it as you’d expect him to do. But it has some fantastic work. Yeah, I know Criterion doesn’t do that. It’s a TV series, so they won’t do it, but I’d love that to appear somewhere again. But anyway, whatever. I’ll be very grateful if they choose any of them.
“28 Years Later” in theaters. “28 Days Later” on 4K
Oh yeah.
Maybe there will be other 4K releases in the future…
Yeah, I hope so.
But for now, Danny, this has been a pleasure.
Thank you very much.
I really appreciate your time here.
No, this was lovely. Thank you so much.
