which irritates me to no end! You could say, "Look, hes ripped that off Day of the Triffids, and that off of Dawn of the Dead," and I accept that and say, "Sure I did." But its not Resident Evil!įilmmaker: And so how did you do this on what Im assuming is not an enormous budget to make, frankly, a huge-scale action-type picture?īoyle: That was one of the biggest factors in making the film. Garland: Yeah, because they all think its ripping off Resident Evil. You always felt that if a virus exploded into our country, our government would be 20 steps behind wherever the virus was.įilmmaker: The film has obviously worked for audiences who are too young to know the things you are drawing upon. Also our governments inability to deal with things like BSE, Foot and Mouth. Danny was particularly interested in issues that had to do with social rage the increase of rage in our society, road rage and other things. Lots of stuff was happening in this country that felt like the right kind of social subtext or social commentary that you could put in a science fiction film. Partly and Danny and I worked closely on this it was just a paranoid story coming out of the paranoid time. There was one other thing, just so it doesnt sound like it was purely ripping off other people. There are references in the film, and people familiar with those things will pick up on them very quickly.
And I loved those novels, I loved the atmosphere. He wrote three novels set after an apocalypse, each with a different premise: no water, lots of water, the world setting into crystal. Garland: Most British schoolboys have read The Day of the Triffids, and also Im a huge J.G. Garland: Yeah, it was a piece of cake! "Oh, any cunt can do this!"įilmmaker: What were your original inspirations for the story? I wanted to get involved in films, and I went out to see them shooting in Thailand with an agenda to learn as much as possible.įilmmaker: And did you feel "I can do that"? Id watched him making The Beach, but I hadnt been working with him. And I showed it to Danny at an incredibly early stage.įilmmaker: Because youd worked together before? Initially it was just an on-spec first draft script. You die for those kinds of ingredients.įilmmaker: Alex, did you just sit down one day and think, Ive got an idea for a science fiction movie?Īlex Garland: Yeah. I knew I was going to do the film as soon as I got past page five.
Then it was followed by this deserted, abandoned London. But this had an original twist, which is that its a psychological virus. A virus outbreak at the beginning of a movie is not original, really. Stills from 28 Days Later, starring Cillian Murphy and Naomie Harris.įilmmaker: So, 28 Days Later, why make it?ĭanny Boyle: Its amazing premise. A box office success in England, it may just be the best British science-fiction/horror film since Death Line in 1972. Shot on digital video by Dogme specialist Anthony Dod Mantle, who gives the devastated cityscapes security-cam-look realism, 28 Days Later grips from the first, with its understandably extreme performances, its terrifyingly swift monster attacks and its underlying melancholy. Scripted by novelist Alex Garland, author of The Beach, this is a terrific s-f/horror hybrid, evoking American and Italian zombie movies but also a very British end-of-the-world tradition that takes in War of the Worlds, The Day of the Triffids and Doctor Who. Having established a reputation with such low-budget, high-energy British films as Shallow Grave and Trainspotting and then become somewhat adrift in more international waters with A Life Less Ordinary and The Beach, director Danny Boyle here returns to his roots with a lively genre picture that manages at once to be both a small-scale character piece and a post-apocalypse epic. However, even if they survive the plague, the future of humanity is in doubt. Our bewildered hero hooks up with several others including a tough black woman (Naomie Harris) and a likeable London cabbie (Brendan Gleeson) on a perilous trip northward, to seek refuge at an army officers (Christopher Eccleston) fortified retreat. Photos: Peter Mountain.Īnti-vivisection activists make a very bad judgment call and uncage an experimental monkey infected with "rage." Twenty-eight days later as the title has it, bicycle messenger Jim (Cillian Murphy) wakes up from a posttraffic accident coma in a deserted London hospital and ventures out to find the quarantined city depopulated and the few remaining normal people doing everything to avoid the jittery, savage, zombie-like "infecteds" who attack on sight.