Danny Boyle Teases '28 Years Later': The Return of Cillian Murphy, the Evolution of the Infected, and Two More Sequels

Danny Boyle is having a little bit of trouble with all of this. Mostly, he wants to tell us everything about his upcoming '28 Years Later,' the much-anticipated third film in his gory, juicy, and beloved zombie series, but a few things keep him from spilling his guts. Mostly, that this writer and interviewer has only seen a sliver of the film in question (the first 28 minutes, naturally), as the full film was not available to press on the occasion of our interview.
But even with those 28 minutes, there's plenty to chew on. The third film in the series, following Boyle's 2002 smash hit '28 Days Later' and Juan Carlos Fresnadillo's 2007 sequel '28 Weeks Later,' stars Alfie Williams, Jodie Comer, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, and Ralph Fiennes, and was written by Alex Garland (who also wrote the first film). And, yes, it picks up 28 years after the outbreak of the Rage virus, which destroyed the modern UK, sent scads of bloodthirsty zombies all over the British Isles, and essentially resurrected the genre for modern audiences.
More from IndieWire
'Ready or Not 2: Here I Come' Lands April 2026 Release Date
Sonja O'Hara Has a Queer Existential Crisis After Taking Shrooms with Her Toxic Ex in 'Snare' Teaser
Despite Boyle's delightful chagrin at not being able to open up about everything, there is plenty we already know, including that the film's sequel, '28 Years Later: The Bone Temple,' was shot concurrently with this one and will be released in January. That one is directed by Nia DaCosta, and will include plenty of crossover casting, including Taylor-Johnson and Jack O'Connell, who appears at the end of Boyle's entry. And, yes, there is still one more planned sequel to come (and that's the one Cillian Murphy fans should be getting most pumped about).
As for what we can share of the new film? It opens on the tidal island of Lindisfarne, Northumberland, which is home to a close-knit community of human survivors (including Williams, Comer, and Taylor-Johnson's characters) who have managed to stay safe in the intervening years, even as they've had to fall back on very old ways of living. One such way? Teaching their young men to be fierce warriors (for fans of Rudyard Kipling's war poem 'Boots,' get ready), including Williams' Spike, who is only 12, but has been granted permission to head back to the mainland with his father (Taylor-Johnson's Jamie) to make his first kill of an infected.
While the community is thrilled for Spike, his mother Isla (Comer) is terrified. When we meet her, she's bedridden, haunted, and clearly unwell, and the news that Spike is heading out among the infected seems to rattle her in new ways. As Jamie and Spike reach the mainland, they soon meet different kinds of infected (which Boyle details below), come across a horribly mutilated man (does the word 'Jim' mean anything to you?), and discover new horrors that will likely terrify if the most hardened '28 Days' fans.
Ahead, Boyle teases what's to come in both '28 Years Later' and '28 Years Later: The Bone Temple,' sets the stage for the unnamed fifth film in franchise, promises plenty more Cillian Murphy, traces the icky (and fascinating) evolution of the infected, and gives us a taste at the technological advances that have always set these films apart. And, never fear, we will have much more with Boyle in the coming days and after we're able to see the full film.
The following interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
Danny Boyle: See, the weird thing about showing 28 minutes of it is, obviously I don't know how to talk to you, because I think, 'What's she seeing? What's she not seeing?' I'm not meant to give away what happens in the second half because… [Long pause] It is a great story, and I can understand then… [Another pause] Well, I don't really understand it. But anyway, there you go.
IndieWire: Well, I still have plenty of questions from just those 28 minutes.
Yeah, go for it!
A third film in the series has been talked about for so long, was there any point where you really thought, 'This is not going to happen'?
We flirted with it [for a long time] — that's me and Alex [Garland] — because it was clear that it had sustained its popularity. Not only the original film, but obviously the stuff like that that builds on the popularity of the idea. We always used to joke that we wish we'd got a percentage of 'The Walking Dead' and 'The Last of Us' and all this kind of stuff.
But we'd talk about an idea, and then we did produce an idea. Alex did write a script, which was a weaponize-the-virus script. It's literally the 'Alien' idea, which is that a corporation, a military, a government, whatever, want to weaponize the virus, and that's how it stays alive and comes alive again through that process.
Any script by Alex is a good script. It's a decent script, but neither of us were very… You could tell we just were, 'Yeah, it's good.' And whereas when you do something, it's different. Suddenly, you start talking about what you'd do with it.
So we went away, and then he came back with a much bigger idea, and the idea was to withdraw from Europe and to isolate the island. Much like the first film, I think [we] probably [had some] regrets about threatening Europe with it, in terms of story development, that meant it could only go one way. So, the idea was to retrench, and that allowed us to make weirdly a much bigger film, more mythic. And it spread across three films, and two of which we've shot, all of which connect characters ultimately, which is how Cillian eventually appears.
He's executive producer on this one, and of course, we were shameless, and he was understandably in approval about this, about using his name to try and get the financing and saying, 'You go with his story package, and you'll eventually meet Cillian, and it will become his film.'
And straightaway, as soon as we started discussing it like that, it just had a degree of invention that was much greater than the weaponized idea. It was much more character-committed, because it was built on the scaffolding of these characters.
You didn't get to see Ralph's character in your 28 minutes, but he's a big character in this one and becomes a huge character in the second one. And Jack O'Connell, who's right at the end of this film, becomes a huge character in the second film. And Alfie goes through [both films].
So at what point do you and Alex go from 'we have this idea we love' to 'we have this idea we love, and it's films'?
Weirdly, when we did 'Sunshine,' I remember he outlined two further films. So, the trilogy idea was there on 'Sunshine,' but they were really epic, planetary films. The plan was there from the beginning, and the outlines were there across the three films. They got shorter as they went on, but they were there. He wrote the first script and the second script very closely together. And we knew we had to shoot them back-to-back for financial reasons and actor reasons and all those sorts of things that made a little sense to do it back-to-back.
I couldn't do them back-to-back, so we got Nia DaCosta to do the second one, which was good because if there is a criticism I'd make of us, it's quite a boys' club, and it was good to break that up. And she breaks that up because she's her own person, Nia. She's a lovely, charming woman and everything like that, but she knows what she wants, and she sticks to it.
At the end of '28 Years Later,' how primed do you think audiences will be for what we'll see in 'The Bone Temple'? How obvious will the setup be?
There's a setup that's significant. What can I say? I can't really say anything. It's not sequel-based. It's not like, oh, the story hasn't finished.
Not 'I saw half a film'?
Yeah, it's not that. The film is complete, and then you get this little tail that appears that's, oh, God. Anyway, we'll see what people think of it. It is different.
It is also a different title setup. '28 Year Later: The Bone Temple.' What discussions went into that?
Well, the idea was always to use the 28, obviously, and the '28 Years Later' as the indicative title, as not just as a title, but indicative of the story element and to use. Oh, again, you haven't seen this, but we do use the original title again later [in '28 Years Later'] for the reasons that you'll see when you see it. [There's a location move], it's a geographical… You'll have seen from the trailer what the Bone Temple is, and they put it on the poster now. But what the Bone Temple is very important to the heart of the film, really.
You guys haven't shot what will be the third film of this trilogy within the series. What can you share?
It doesn't take a genius to work out there's going to be a big role for Cillian Murphy in it. Yeah, a significant role. All I can say, because I know the idea of the story, which has been mapped out, it is clever. It is a very smart use of him.
There is a very satisfying introduction of him in the second film, and when I saw it, the way [Nia had] done it, I was like, 'Oh, yeah, that's pretty good.' Because I've seen a rough cut of it. They're doing a test of it in July. The whole Sony Corporation hasn't turned its attention to that film yet.
I remember asking Nia [about this new trilogy], 'What do you think it's about?' It won't necessarily end up being about this because films change, but I said, 'What do you think it's about?' And she said, 'Well, I think the first one is about the nature of family. The second one's about the nature of evil. And the third one is about the nature of redemption.'
That's our ambition. It is ambitious, and it's going to be set in England, and there aren't going to be American soldiers arriving to save it, because we know you're not sending American soldiers anywhere anymore. It's going to be a homeland-made and executed and completed, really. It's a big story, but about these characters who are much as they were in the first film.
Cillian is playing the same character. He will be playing the same character. And, as you've seen, the characters are Jodie and Aaron and eventually Ralph in this film and Jack right at the very end.
Let's talk more about this one. We did get a look at how some of the infected have evolved and devolved; in those first 28 minutes, we do see two different kinds. What are these ideas that you and Alex throw around about who they are, what they look like, how they move?
There is a lot of connected tissue with the first film, and some of it is literal. You see some infected and they look similar-ish. They behave similar-ish. But we did think, hang on, 28 years of that, how have they survived? They are burning up so much energy that they will just evaporate. And we showed them at the end of the first film starving to death. And there's a guy even in the ['28 Years Later'] trailer who appears later in the film, who's emaciated on the point of death.
They have learned to feed. So, it's learned. It's evolutionary behavior. They are hunting in a way. The last shot that you saw with them on the horizon, they're a pack and there appears to be a leader. So, the behavior patterns are evolving. We thought that there would be some that would go that way, and they're eating. Just like in the wild, we started as hunter-gatherers; we'd have been out there doing exactly the same thing, killing meat. Meat gets you growing.
We thought there'd be others that went the other way. It's just that they reduced their energy. They became very passive and just ate grubs in the ground and just became part of the land in a way. As Aaron's character says, 'That's not to say they're not dangerous, but they are passive, and they're easy kills because they're slow.' We call them the slow-lows. And there were an amazing bunch of actors who came in for that.
The virus itself has adapted, and its hosts, the humans who carry it, are changing with it. I think the authorities quarantine the island, isolate it, lock it down, and imagine that it will burn itself out. And it doesn't. Nature won't do that. Ebola does that, apparently. That's one of the ways that we haven't all died of Ebola because when it breaks out in remote villages. It is so virulent that it hasn't got time to spread. It literally just burns itself out. But this one doesn't, and it's learned that its hosts can have behavioral changes, which influences the rest of the story. And you see elements of that in 'The Bone Temple' as well. It grew out of the idea that they expended so much energy, they would just burn out. There'd be none of them left.
That's hinted at in '28 Days Later,' that they're all going to die out and we'll be fine. That's not how this works.
At the beginning, you think, oh, it isn't just like the first film where everyone's like, 'Are they infected? Are they not?' It's a key question, but people have become, not blasé, but they become more accustomed to the danger so that they learn how they can flex and still stay safe like we all did with COVID, just the same.
Let's talk about the people we meet, including Aaron, Jodie, and Alfie's characters and community.
They're a nostalgic society. They look backwards. They do not look forwards. The death of technology and of electricity has made them go [back], they haven't substituted evolution. They look back to the '50s when there wasn't the same technology, and they're nostalgic for an older England and bows and arrows and Henry V, and the boys go out to fight and the girls tend the home and all that kind of stuff. And the sick, you put them in the bedroom upstairs. There's nothing you can do for them.
You mentioned COVID. As you and Alex write the scripts, and look at this crazy thing that has just happened in the real world, what ideas end up in the films?
Yeah, some of it's deliberate, but most of it is, not unconscious, but you're aware that the real world will end up in there just inevitably. There's more of that later. They're not political films, but they do reflect the circumstances. One of the things that had happened in Britain since we made the first film is Brexit, [where] we have chosen this isolation. And it's nostalgic as well.
And it's nationalism.
It's nationalism. It's thinking we could be great again, we were great, and we could be great again. And you go, 'Guys, we are slowly all the time, with setbacks, sure, we are becoming great.' Our evolutionary destiny is that we keep improving a little bit, a little bit. Medicine, science keeps improving. Civil rights keep improving. Society generally moves forward. Yes, there are setbacks, there are lunatics who set you back, but the grand arc—
—the moral arc of the universe—
—bends towards justice. And it does, really. And they back away from that. Brexit backed away from that. That's effectively in the film.
Let's talk about the technology you used here.
Oh, the tech! Sony are desperate for me to talk about the tech.
Well, before we talk about the new technology, when you look back at '28 Days Later' and the way that it looks now and the way that it makes you feel now, how do you reflect on that? If someone had told you back then, 'You'll shoot one of these with phones,' what would you have even thought?
When I did the Steve Jobs film, I did this research, and I remember either he said this or somebody said this about him, that when they invented the television, it took 50 or 70 years for it to reach a billion people, and when he invented the smartphone, it took five years for it to reach three billion people. So, how anyone could have predicted that? You couldn't really.
One of the factors in us doing this again was I went to a screening at the BFI of '28 Days Later' two, three years ago, and they said, 'Would you come along and do a Q&A?' And I said, 'Of course.' I went to it, and I watched the last 20 minutes of it. I sneaked in the back and watched it. I was shocked. It was packed. And the BFI is not a natural home for a film like '28 Days Later.' It's a mainstream film. It's not really an auteur film like the BFI tend to program, but it was packed, and they were rabid for it.
I was shocked how violent it was, and I was very proud of how visceral it was, and I thought, 'Yeah, we did the right thing.' Using those cameras that we did, I felt very liberated by using them for that kind of story because it wasn't trying to mimic big, American action movies, and yet it turned out to appeal to big American action movie fans.
I was very proud of that, and I wanted some of this to have an element of that again, but it would be obtuse to use that low grade of technology now when 4K is available on all our phones. You only have to switch it on in your settings, and you can have cinema-quality recordings. So, we wanted to use that technology. It's very light, it's cheap, and it allowed us to go to places that were very remote and bore very little evidence of human presence for many, many, many years.
Northumbria, where we shot, is an ancient area of the North East. It's not agriculturalized. We use drones. There's very inventive use of drones in it. I think you saw the Red footage; that's this Panasonic camera. So, there's lots of different cameras as well.
Sony are desperate for us to say, 'Don't let everybody say it's just shot on the iPhone.' It isn't just shot on the iPhone, but it is a huge advantage because it allowed us to do these rigs that they've now released footage of. It was lovely to be able to use that, and it's flexible; it's a poor man's bullet time. It's basically 'The Matrix' rig, but flexible and portable, and you can park it in different places. It's an easy technology to switch on. It's a bit of a nightmare for syncing and all that kind of stuff in post, but it's a beautiful thing to use.
Rewatching '28 Days Later' and '28 Weeks Later,' the virus being called the virus, it does hit a little differently now. We have such a different sense of 'rage' as a concept.
I know. I met this guy and he talked to, maybe it was Stephen Fry or somebody like that, somebody really bright who'd said, 'It's a bit like the old days when the trains used to stop at all the different stations, and there were all these different places you could get off, like frustrated, annoyed, all these different places you could get off before you got to full absolute loss of temper. But now, we go direct to it. There's no stops on the way. You just go from zero to it straight away, and we're all there straight away.'
People blame these things for it [points at our iPhones], the empowerment, the fake empowerment, it gives to people's senses of people. But I think you've got to be honest, and I think we all realize now, we're all capable of it. We're all there. It's not some alien thing that these horrible people have and we don't. We're all capable of it, and God help us, really. We've somehow engineered its arrival, its instant arrival, rather than some of the safeguards that used to deflate it or prevent it, or you could get off a stop earlier. The Rage virus, there you go.
Sony Pictures will release '28 Years Later' in theaters on Friday, June 20.
Best of IndieWire
The Best Thrillers Streaming on Netflix in June, from 'Vertigo' and 'Rear Window' to 'Emily the Criminal'
All 12 Wes Anderson Movies, Ranked, from 'Bottle Rocket' to 'The Phoenician Scheme'
Nightmare Film Shoots: The 38 Most Grueling Films Ever Made, from 'Deliverance' to 'The Wages of Fear'

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Learn with AIFact CheckingText to SpeechAI Summary

Related Articles

News24

11 minutes ago

• News24

‘Not guilty': US singer Chris Brown fights UK assault charges in London court

Chris Brown has pleaded not guilty to charges linked to a London nightclub brawl, with his trial scheduled to begin in October 2026. The Grammy-winning singer is accused of causing grievous bodily harm and possessing an offensive weapon. Despite strict bail conditions, Brown is continuing his international tour, including performances in London and beyond. American R&B singer Chris Brown on Friday pleaded not guilty in a UK court to a charge stemming from an alleged London nightclub brawl in 2023. Brown, 36, wearing a dark suit and tie as well as glasses, stood in the dock in London as the charge was put to him, replying: 'Not guilty, ma'am.' The singer, who is on £5 million ($6.7 million) bail, waved to people in the public gallery as he left, following his plea to allegedly attempting to cause grievous bodily harm with intent. A five to seven-day-long trial was scheduled to start on 26 October 2026. The singer was held in custody for nearly a week in May after he was arrested in the northwestern city of Manchester. He was later released on bail. Under the terms of his bail, he will forfeit the £5 million guarantee if he fails to return for court proceedings. He was also given the go-ahead to continue his scheduled international tour, which began on 8 June in Amsterdam. CARLOS JASSO / AFP The star, who had a troubled relationship with Barbadian singer Rihanna, is on the UK leg of his tour, with his next date in London on Saturday. Brown is charged with attempting to cause grievous bodily harm with intent in relation to an assault in which the victim was allegedly struck several times with a bottle before being pursued, punched and kicked. The alleged incident took place at a nightclub in Hanover Square in London on 19 February 2023 while Brown was touring in the UK. Grammy winner Police detained him in the early hours of 13 May at a five-star hotel in Manchester after he reportedly flew in by private jet. Other bail terms include surrendering his passport if he is not travelling. He is also required to live at a specific address known to the court and is not permitted to visit the nightclub where the alleged assault took place or contact the alleged victim, Abraham Diah. He appeared in the dock with co-defendant Omololu Akinlolu, a US national, with whom he is jointly charged. CARLOS JASSO / AFP Akinlolu also entered a not-guilty plea to the same charge of attempting to cause grievous bodily harm with intent. Both men are also jointly charged with assault occasioning actual bodily harm. They will enter pleas to that charge on 11 July, the court was told. Brown also faces a third charge of having an offensive weapon, a bottle, in public. The Grammy-winning singer is known for mid-2000s hits such as 'Kiss, Kiss.' He rose from a local church choir in Virginia to sudden fame with his rich R&B voice and later rap, but his reputation has been tarnished by the allegations of abuse. He is also scheduled to perform in France, Portugal and the US later in the year before the tour wraps up in Memphis in mid-October.

Yahoo

an hour ago

• Yahoo

Billie Eilish Offers A Rare Look At Her Vacation Style With A Red String Bikini in Barcelona

THE RUNDOWN Billie Eilish was filmed on the beach with friends in Barcelona, giving the world a rare look at her bikini style. Although she's known for her signature oversize looks, Eilish has a history of wearing string bikinis and shared a photo of herself in a pink set last year. Eilish is currently on the European leg of her Hit Me Hard and Soft Tour and will resume shows in July. Billie Eilish is currently on the European leg of her Hit Me Hard and Soft Tour and took a little vacation in Barcelona ahead of her U.K. shows this July. She spent a night on the beach with friends—and gave a rare look at her vacation style in the process. The singer was filmed in the Mediterranean Sea, wearing a red string bikini. See footage here on TMZ. This isn't the first time Eilish has been seen in this style of swimwear. Last July, she shared a photo of herself in a pink string two-piece: View this post on Instagram A post shared by BILLIE EILISH (@billieeilish) And in June 2023, she appeared in a print string bikini top in her friend Annabel Zimmer's Instagram. View this post on Instagram A post shared by AB (@annabelzimmer) This April, Eilish answered questions from celebrities for British Vogue. Nicki Minaj asked Eilish about how she views herself, prompting Eilish to reflect candidly on her appearance. 'This may be an odd question, but you seem to be a bit uncomfortable with how beautiful you are at times,' Minaj said. 'I could be wrong. Many women from all walks of life have felt that their work was overshadowed by their beauty or their physical attributes. Was there ever a time in your career, or before you made it, when you wished people couldn't see you and that they could only hear the music, and really get a chance to just listen to the written words?' 'Nicki, this question made me tear up a little,' Eilish admitted. 'Well…like you said at the beginning of that question, I've never really felt very beautiful or seen myself in that way, so I definitely never struggled with the idea that it would overshadow anything, since I didn't even really see it myself. I've had to really convince myself that I am beautiful. Being a woman is hard.' She also spoke about how she unwinds while answering a question from Ariana Grande. 'I realized recently that I think my favorite thing in the world is to hangout,' she said with a laugh. 'Like, I just love being around people that I love, people that make me laugh and make me feel whole. You know: kindred souls. That's the stuff that keeps me sane. Laughing really is my cure.' ELLE Collective is a new community of fashion, beauty and culture lovers. For access to exclusive content, events, inspiring advice from our Editors and industry experts, as well the opportunity to meet designers, thought-leaders and stylists, become a member today Might Also Like Pyjamas You Can Wear All Day 10 Hand Soaps To Make Your Bathroom Feel Like A Fancy Hotel 8 Of The Best Natural Deodorants

WIRED

an hour ago

• WIRED

'28 Years Later' Director Danny Boyle Says Shooting on iPhones Let Him Capture 'Startling' Violence

Jun 20, 2025 7:00 AM The British director tells WIRED nimble cameras are ideal for creating apocalyptic vibes and says he doesn't watch zombie movies, despite his massive influence on the genre. Director Danny Boyle at the Brussels International Fantastic Film Festival in Brussels, Belgium. Photograph: Bernard Rosenberg/Sony Pictures In 2001, Danny Boyle had a problem. To make his new postapocalyptic horror movie, 28 Days Later , he had to capture footage of a then-unknown Cillian Murphy wandering the abandoned streets of London. Shutting down the city wasn't an option for the low-budget production, however, and neither was re-creating it on a studio set. Instead, the 68-year-old director made a surprising choice: He filmed with lightweight, low-resolution Canon digital cameras. The technology, which was cutting-edge at the time, made it possible to record scenes at iconic locations like Westminster Bridge and Piccadilly Circus in under an hour each. It also gave 28 Days Later its unique grainy look that makes the movie stand out even today. Almost three decades later, Boyle faced a similar dilemma. As its title suggests, 28 Years Later takes place exactly 28 years after the initial outbreak of a zombie-like 'Rage Virus.' Abandoned by the rest of the world, a quarantined United Kingdom has returned to its natural state, even as pockets of humans and zombies survive. To bring that vision to life, Boyle once again had to rely on lightweight cameras to film in locations he normally wouldn't be able to. But this time, the location was the untamed wilderness of Northumbria, and the camera was an iPhone. 'Filming with iPhones allowed us to move without huge amounts of equipment,' Boyle tells WIRED. 'A lot of Northumbria looks like it would have looked 1,000 years ago. So we were able to move quickly and lightly to areas of the countryside that we wanted to retain their lack of human imprint.' 28 Years Later is a full-circle moment for Boyle, in more ways than one. The original movie turned its director, best known at the time for dark comedies like Trainspotting , into a genre-hopping auteur. But in the decades since, he has resisted revisiting this postapocalyptic setting, mostly sitting out the 2007 sequel 28 Weeks Later . His return, sparked in part by the Covid-19 pandemic, which brought Boyle's vision of an emptied London to life, takes the franchise in some surprising directions that both set up an entire new trilogy and manage to tell a beautiful story about life, death, and the unbreakable bond between parent and child. For Boyle, these were all valid reasons to reexamine the world he created with screenwriter Alex Garland. But there was never going to be a wrong time to make this movie—even if the timing feels particularly prescient in the context of our own apocalyptic reality. 'There has been no diminishing of the appetite for apocalyptic stories,' Boyle says. 'Whether that's because we're in the worst of times, I don't know. Certainly, the horrors of the world have not diminished since we made the first film. If anything, they've gotten worse, and they bleed into the film, whether it's the horrors of war or the horrors of infection.' Ahead of the movie's release, WIRED spoke to Boyle about why now was the perfect time for a sequel, the advantages and drawbacks of shooting on iPhone, and why he couldn't wait 28 actual years to release 28 Years Later . 'Poor Man's Bullet Time' Earlier this month, IGN published a behind-the-scenes look at 28 Years Later , revealing a massive rig capable of pointing 20 iPhone 15 Pro Max cameras (all outfitted with special accessories) at their subject. Speaking to me over Zoom, Boyle explains how this smartphone array, organized in a half-circle, lets the director capture complex action scenes from multiple angles at once. 'It allowed us to do what is basically a poor man's bullet time,' he says, referencing the effect pioneered by The Matrix . But while The Matrix used bullet time to visualize its physics-defying combat, Boyle's goal was to capture the brutality of his world. 'We use it for the violence. It was startling and unexpectedly depicted at times.' Boyle's use of iPhones wasn't limited to those giant rigs. He notes that the Apple device was the 'principal camera' for the film and praises the 'immediacy' of shooting on a smartphone over a traditional movie camera. 'Although it's a recording device, because of people's familiarity with it, actors are slightly different with it,' Boyle says. In some scenes, he even handed an iPhone to the actors and had them film from their perspective. There were some minor disadvantages to this method, Boyle admits, mostly due to Apple's user-friendly camera software. 'You have to override the working system,' the director says. For example, the iPhone's camera automatically focuses on whatever it assumes is the focus of your photo or video. That's a useful feature for snapping quick selfies, but for a film director it's a problem. 'Drama is often not following necessarily where the brightest light or the largest object is,' Boyle says. 'It's where you want the story to be.' These small annoyances were easily outweighed by the many advantages of filming the movie with iPhones, Boyle says. He praises the high resolution of the device, which is capable of shooting at 4K resolution at up to 60 frames per second and allowed him to capture both gorgeous locations and the brutal violence on a camera that weighs a fraction of the ones used to film 28 Days Later . 'It gives you a recording of beauty and nature that was a huge part of what we wanted to contrast the horror with,' he says. Inspired by Covid-19 Boyle never thought the world he depicted in 28 Days Later would become a reality. Then, a global pandemic swept across the world. 'You saw cities emptied overnight in a way that one would have thought unimaginable outside a movie,' he says. 'Then it literally happened in people's lives.' But while the global lockdowns of 2020 gave Boyle a sense of déjà vu for 28 Days Later , it was what happened immediately afterward that inspired him to make a sequel. 'The big discovery was thinking about our own behavior after Covid,' Boyle says. In the first weeks or months of the pandemic, you probably washed your hands for a full 20 seconds every time you got home, and you wore a face mask outside. You might have even sanitized your groceries. But as lockdown dragged on, you likely stopped some, if not all, of that behavior. 'You start to take risks over time,' Boyle says. 'It was something we could all relate to. We all had stories.' Boyle and Garland applied that same thinking to the world of 28 Years Later . Their sequel follows a community living on an island off the northeast coast of England and connected by a single causeway that floods each night with the tides. The community of Holy Island (a real place in the UK) manages to keep out the Rage Virus completely, and, over the years, they begin to explore the mainland, despite the inherent dangers. 'Twenty-eight years after an infection, there would be risk-taking,' Boyle says. 'There'd be enormous amounts of risk-taking, because they'd have worked out the parameters of how far they can go and still stay safe.' He brings up the dangers of getting the virus if the blood of an infected enters your body: 'In the original movie, if you got a fleck of blood on you, you were hacked to death by your fellow survivors. Whereas in this one, they can operate. That was really interesting, and that came out of Covid for us.' The Legacy of 28 Days Later In the 22 years since Boyle's genre-redefining movie, zombie storytelling has changed dramatically, thanks in large part to screenwriter Garland's vision for fast-moving Infected. (In interviews, Garland has revealed he drew inspiration from the zombie dogs in the Resident Evil video games.) Subsequent movies like World War Z , Zombieland , and Train to Busan all borrowed liberally from 28 Days Later . But while Boyle is proud of his influence on the zombie film landscape, he's mostly abstained from watching any of those movies himself. 'I've tended to stay away from them,' the director says. 'I always thought it was useful that Alex was an expert and I wasn't. That was a good dynamic in the way we'd approach the films. You have to be careful about either being too reverential or too avoidant. They're both equally dangerous instincts.' Boyle adds that he relied on Garland to warn him when 28 Years Later felt too similar to another zombie movie, while admitting that the writer also took some inspiration from more recent additions to the genre. 'I know he's an enormous admirer of The Last of Us game,' Boyle says. 'In fact, I think that was influenced by 28 Days Later . One hand washes the other, in that respect.' Ultimately, 28 Years Later is just one of many movies pushing the zombie genre forward through both storytelling and technological innovations. And while the wait for a proper sequel has been long and winding, it appears to be arriving at the exact right time. Then again, as my time with Boyle comes to a close, I can't help but wonder why he didn't wait a few more years until 2031, when the film's title would have literally described the span of time between the original and its overdue follow-up. When I pose the question, Boyle's answer reveals his unique perspective—dark, witty, and unmistakably British—that made the franchise a hit all those years ago. 'It would have been cute, as the Americans say, and very neat for marketing, but I couldn't guarantee I'd still be alive by then,' he says with a wicked smile. 'So we thought we should move now, just in case.'