Spoiler alert: This article contains spoilers over “28 years later”, now playing in theaters.
After 23 years, the producer and director “28 days later” Danny Boyle, the writer Alex Garland and the director of photography Anthony Dod Mantle gathered to make another chapter of the post-apocalyptic franchise. “28 years later”, now in theaters via Sony Pictures that will be released, brought together the trio for a third chapter in the series, after the suite of Juan Carlos Fresnadillo in 2007 “28 weeks later”. In this new feature, Jodie Comer, Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Alfie Williams play a small family that crosses their isolated isolated community on the continent filled with zombies to collect supplies and drive out the living dead. Things start to go south from there.
Various zombie survivors, played by actors like Ralph Fiennes and Jack O’Connell, also move in these dangerous areas and can provide as much anxiety to the family as any of the living dead.
Variety spoke with Boyle and Garland about the writing of another chapter after all these years, turning the film on iPhones and how the horror landscape of the studio has changed “28 days later”.
Alex, what inspired you to write another chapter in this series?
AG: Danny and I have discussed it several times over the years. The original film had not disappeared in the way films can do it. He stayed in the film’s landscape, and he remained in our imagination. So we talked about it, then after Covid, I had a crack in a script, but the script did not work. It was too generic, I think. But in a way, having crossed the bad step released us to think in a more loose and larger way. Then another story arrived that was much bigger, and at that time, we felt: “Ok, that’s what we’re going to work on.”
You mentioned COVID-Has the original script focused too much on it, or not enough?
AG: In fact, it didn’t really approach at all. What was done was to follow a trope of this kind of thing, which had to do with the armament of the virus. It is an easy space in which you can fall with this kind of stories. It doesn’t say they’re all bad. I mean, in some ways, that’s what “Aliens” is – armed from abroad – and it’s a fantastic film. But certainly, in the execution I did, there was something lazy about it.
I think that in terms of relationship between this film and cochem, what I would say is that there are two ways to make or approach films. One is that you make films on other films, you make films you loved when you were younger and you reconfigure them and re -explore them and make your version of the film you liked. The other is that you react to the world around you, in a way more than other films. I think Danny and I would integrate separately and together in this second category. So Covid was something that happened, so in this regard, it would not have been possible to work on this film without being informed in one way or another. But that does not mean that it was the reason or the instigator or the main theme. This was not the case.
Jodie Comer and director Danny Boyle on the set of “28 years later”.
© Columbia Pictures / Courtoisie Everett Collection
Danny, I wanted to ask questions about gore and zombie nudity. Have you obtained notes from the studio to reduce it at all, or did they support this extreme vision?
DB: There was a bit back and forward, but I think we have to pay tribute to Tom Rothman to Sony because he took this. He had a value, the property because the first film was a success, certainly for the budget for which it was made and continued to have an impact over the years. But he has always signed up for a very ambitious trilogy and financed the first two films – the second film of Nia Dacosta -Shot will be released on January 16. I think that one of the wonderful things of horror is that you are supposed to maximize the impact of your story. Everyone wants to do that with a drama, with romance, whatever. But with horror, it will obviously be brutal, part. What we liked was to put it against an innocence which is represented by the different children, as well as the landscape, the beauty of the landscape, nature. Having these two forces stretches your story as far as you can go, if you maximize them. It was our principle and the studio was favorable to that, of course they were.
Alex, I wanted to dive a little on the inspiration behind Jimmy Crystal by Jack O’Connell. At the end of the film, we are reintroduced for him as an adult head of worship, who will lead in the next film. Where did you have this idea of his character?
AG: What is coming is the same thing that the whole film is in a way, which is this film – and in a way that the whole trilogy, if we ever manage to make a trilogy – is partly on the way in a regressive way to the past. Very simply, Danny and I grew up at a time when everything was waiting in some ways, and currently, in the last 10 or 15 years, we are in a time which consists in looking back. What the film is concerned at a certain level is the way we look back, there is amnesia and there is cherry picking. In addition, there are things that are badly noted. What is the film, if you watch individual characters, but you also watch the community that is represented and the elements of communication and the construction of the world is a puree of these things: things that have been forgotten, things that have been selected in the icing and things were badly noted. They are smoquins together, which carries inside a kind of comment.
Danny, I know you found your DP Anthony Dod coat. Was there specific scenes that were very difficult to shoot iphones?
DB: Yes, and what is boring is that we cannot show it on Youtube because of its content. This is the perfect illustration of how we want the cameras to work. There is a scene where the alpha falls into the train. You can see his genitals and then what he did to poor Erik from Sweden at the end of the blow, all in one. It was difficult to install, and we hoped to exploit it a little more in promoting the film. But you cannot, apparently, you have to go to the movies to see it. It’s worth it. I don’t Normally I recommend it directly this way, but this photo is worth it.
How was it to work again with Cillian Murphy for this trilogy?
DB: He is an executive producer on this subject and has been extremely favorable. He briefly appears in Nia’s film. I do not think that it gives too much, and our plan is that he will be a huge character in the third film in the way the character of Jack O’Connell – that you see briefly at the end of the first film – is a huge character with Ralph Fiennes in the next film.
Speaking of the third film, Alex: is the script done on your side? Danny: Do you know when you start production?
AG: The script is not written. It’s strange: there is a story, there is a plan, there is a structure. These three films are in some respects distinct from each other, in other interdependent respects, because there are characters who have a line across all, although they are also essentially separate stories. He does it, in terms of cinema, has something in common with television. Danny and I worked at some point on television, and television has a little more organic element on how things can take place. So that people can write a whole story, but they will then discover in filming how this story is Really Lands.
I think that, after having written the first, in many ways, I did not know at that time what the film would be, because there remains a whole set of discoveries to discover. The same goes with the second film. So I had to understand something about what Ralph Fiennes will create with Danny, to be able to look. There is always a gap between the thing that exists on the page, because it has gone through the filter of imagination and the agendas and the concerns of many people, then again in the assembly. Response if short: I have the idea, I have the plan, but there is no script. I’m waiting to see what’s going on, I suppose.
Danny, have you noticed differences in the state of horror films of the studio system since you made “28 days later”?
DB: Someone pointed out to me that women now form an important part of the horror audience. I remember alive Someone telling me – someone in authority, someone who seemed to know what he was talking about – when we made the first film, they said: “No woman will see this film.” I remember that we try to do big things about the character of Naomie Harris in the first film, and I think it was probably a conversation on this subject. They deduced women who watched horror films. It has changed and I think it’s a very good thing, of course.
It is perhaps also a contribution to the reason why horror has suffered as gender, and why horror is important for us to maintain the experience of common cinema, because it is one of those things that people always want to see in a cinema if they can. Their preference is to see it in a cinema. And we must celebrate this, because of these community experiences, because we live more and more life thanks to the technological power that we have in our pockets. We are in a way encouraged to use it as the first means of communication, the only means of communication in the most extreme. With our fellow citizens to sit together in a dark room and cross fears, fears, the joy of watching a horror film … When they are good, they are happy. I think it is an extraordinary version and not be undervalued.
