A dream team reunites to bring zombie horror home again in '28 Years Later'

When Danny Boyle, the Oscar-winning filmmaker behind such movies as "Trainspotting" and "Slumdog Millionaire," makes a horror film, it often has a way of landing close to home. His 2002 thriller '28 Days Later' was actually in production when the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 occurred, and its haunting postapocalyptic imagery of empty streets and a world turned upside down made it a key movie to convey the fears of the post-9/11 era.
A new sequel, '28 Years Later' (in theaters Friday), captures the anxieties of right now in much the same way that the original spoke to its moment, evoking a contemporary sense of isolation, despair and a world long past saving. As with '28 Days Later,' the visual style of '28 Years Later' is an inseparable part of the experience, giving it a disconcerting, disorienting energy. Where the original used consumer-grade digital video cameras to innovative effect, much of '28 Years Later' was shot using iPhones.
'One of the interesting questions with an apocalypse movie is: What do you look forward to? What do these people have to aim for?' says Boyle, director of both "Days" and "Years." "They're not aiming for a holiday or a good job qualification. So all their focus probably goes into the lineage, the child being brought up in a certain way and taking their place. And the value that's expressed is how precious their homeland is, its status. So we wanted something that suggested that intensity."
The new film reunites much of the original movie's core creative nucleus, bringing together Boyle with screenwriter Alex Garland, cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle and producer Andrew Macdonald. In the years since their first zombie breakout, Boyle and Mantle both won Oscars for their work on 2008's 'Slumdog Millionaire' and Garland moved into directing, making films such as 'Ex Machina' and last year's 'Civil War.'
Though they keep in touch and frequently show each other their works-in-progress, Boyle and Garland have not officially collaborated since 2007's 'Sunshine,' written by Garland and directed by Boyle. It was the making of that film that precluded them from participating more deeply in the 2007 sequel '28 Weeks Later,' directed and co-written by Juan-Carlos Fresnadillo (though Boyle did shoot some second-unit work).
'It was a feeling of: Oh, my God, this is original and different and ambitious,' says Boyle of his first time reading Garland's script for what would become the new film. 'Because it's also an especially English film, and the first film was as well — that was one of the very unusual things about it.
'Obviously COVID had happened and Brexit,' he adds. 'Traumas that were unique to Britain, and some that were worldwide, that can't help but bleed into the film.'
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Boyle, 68, has a playful gregariousness that often masks the ferocity of his commitment and vision. Already deep into a worldwide publicity tour and accustomed to talking extensively about '28 Years Later,' he's joined on our Zoom call by Garland. 'You'll notice I'm in complete flow mode,' he tells Garland with a laugh.
Garland, 55, is at home in London, while Boyle is in a hotel room in Rome. 'Those are definitely not your curtains,' cracks Garland while examining his friend's tastefully nondescript surroundings in a Zoom window.
If '28 Days Later' is often credited with popularizing the idea of 'fast zombies' — bloodthirsty creatures that move with superhuman speed as opposed to the lumbering beings of the George A. Romero classics — the new film introduces some additions to the mythos.
Now we get the 'Slow-Lows,' bottom-feeders who slither on the ground and survive off leftovers from other creatures: earthworms or other easy-to-catch prey. More terrifying are the Alphas — zombies on steroids, big and strong, with a penchant for ripping the heads off people with their spines still attached.
"We were just sort of kicking stuff around and it was like: What would have changed?" says Garland. "How might the infection have played on different people with different physiologies? Some kind of acknowledgment of evolution — that maybe some kind of latent predisposition or a mutation or something would push some in one direction and others in another direction."
In "28 Years Later," the British mainland, overrun by infected monsters, has been quarantined from the rest of the world due to the viral outbreak from the first film. Survivors have been left to fend for themselves. On a small island off the northeast of England, connected to the mainland by a causeway that becomes uncrossable with the daily tides, a largely agrarian community of those not infected with the world-killing "rage virus" has banded together, creating something akin to normalcy in their new society.
A father, Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), takes his teenage son Spike (Alfie Williams) on a journey to the mainland where the boy can kill his first infected, a crucial rite of passage in this new age. Spike's mother, Isla (Jodie Comer), has been overcome by a mysterious illness that causes her to be overcome by disassociative spells. Having heard rumors of a mythical doctor (played with a chilling calm by Ralph Fiennes) who could possibly help, Spike sneaks off with her for a treacherous expedition to the mainland.
Finding just the right story that felt worth telling took some time.
'It was a few years ago that we talked about a script," says Boyle, looking at Garland, "and you actually did a script, which was a very good script, but it didn't get any traction between us, did it?'
Garland recalls crafting a "Years" script in which Chinese Special Forces attempted to get to the source of the original outbreak in order to find a cure, only to encounter another military force there intending to weaponize it.
'And really what happened,' recalls Garland, 'Danny's probably got a softer way of stating this, is I handed that script in, [and] it was a perfectly serviceable script, but it was generic. There's a funny thing that happens when you offer something up to people, which is that if they make a criticism that you half know, you get this sort of sinking feeling because you think, 'Yeah, no, that's true.' And so I dropped it and then started work on another script, which was the one that Danny ended up making into a film.'
What Garland created was in fact a new trilogy of films, with scripts completed for two and an outline for the third, which is still to be written. The second film, titled '28 Years Later: The Bone Temple' has already been shot by director Nia DaCosta and, according to producer Macdonald, is nearly finished. It is expected to be released early next year. Cillian Murphy, the wandering survivor of the original film, is an executive producer on '28 Years Later' and is said to have an expanding role across the next two films. ('He's coming,' says Macdonald. 'We've done some filming with him, let's just say that.')
Having the new story land as a trilogy was unexpected but not unwelcome.
'I remember asking Alex, 'Define the three scripts, go on then,' because I like having a reminder of where we started,' says Boyle. 'And I remember Alex saying the first film's about grief and the nature of family, and the second film's about the nature of evil, and the third film's about the nature of redemption. I remember that vividly. And you cherish that — and then you investigate.'
That investigation included finding a style to match the tone of Garland's new three-part story. Even before "28 Days Later," cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle had already established himself as a leader of digital cinematography with his inventive work on films such as Thomas Vinterberg's 'Celebration.' Coming to the '28 Years Later' project, Boyle knew that they would again have to find a way to use current technology in an innovative way to harness contemporary feelings of unease.
'It was such an unusual method we used with the first film," recalls Boyle. "It felt wonderful to reunite with Anthony on it and to again challenge how the film would be recorded, how the film would be evidenced for people. That would be an ingredient in the experience, which it certainly was in the first film.'
'He had a lot of these thoughts going on way before he phoned me up,' says Mantle during a Zoom call from London, where he is shooting a film directed by producer Macdonald's brother, Kevin Macdonald. 'And he had that in mind, how could we be light on our feet? There are many ways of doing that. But he just kind of settled into this idea of: Throw this phone at Anthony and see what we can find out. So the testing began on this film with that in mind.'
Once Mantle came on board, he had about six weeks of prep — 'a mixture of heaven and hell,' he recalls — to figure out how to do it. Mantle explains that likely 75% to 80% of what is in the film was caught on iPhones. The production also made use of drones and other small lightweight cameras. Mantle used adapters to fit various other lenses onto the phones, including a telescope.
'It's a very small package of equipment, which I don't want to bore you with,' says Mantle. 'It's a very small handful of tools plopped onto two versions of the iPhone 15.'
Shot mostly in the northeast of England, the production also moved to locations in Wales, Scotland and southern England to capture pastoral, nonurban landscapes as Spike and Isla make their journey. The production designed special rigs onto which upwards of 20 iPhones could be mounted together — at first they each had to be turned on individually until software could be created to bundle them — to create distinctive bursts of images that would give Boyle and editor Jon Harris unique choices on what to use.
'What was great about the script is that although you were inheriting some DNA from the original film, it was a completely original story,' says Boyle. 'And deserved to be treated like that.'
In bringing together such distinctive creative personalities as Boyle, Garland and Mantle, there is an inevitable getting-the-band-back-together vibe to the new film, though all involved seem set on pushing themselves into new territory rather than just relying on the aura of past successes.
'The truest thing I could say is that at the core of the film is Danny," says Garland. "It's not a team. It's Danny. That's a complicated thing for me to say, because I've got all sorts of feelings about the collegiate nature of filmmaking and the role of a screenplay.
'And this is in conflict with lots of things I've said in the past, actually, but I have seen the process of this film being made,' says Garland, who has spoken often about what he regards as an overemphasis on the director in discussing the overall filmmaking process. 'I can see very clearly from my perspective what happened and what that process was like. There was a team that was brought together that was the team that worked on the old ones. And that was a support structure, but it's not the Beatles.'
For his part, Boyle is quick to credit the contributions of Gareth Pugh and Carson McColl, the design team who worked as both production and costume designers on the new film, giving it a unified look that is both grimy and unexpectedly beautiful.
'In the end, Alex is a pure writer and Danny is a pure director,' says Macdonald on a Zoom call from the offices of his production company DNA Films in London. Macdonald has worked extensively with Boyle and Garland both together and separately over the years.
'I'm a great believer that, in this case, there are two creators of this franchise that are absolutely crucial,' Macdonald adds, noting that the movie's posters prominently feature the names of both Boyle and Garland.
An extended teaser trailer for the film, created by the film's distributor Sony and released at the end of last year, featured an intense 1915 recording of the Rudyard Kipling poem 'Boots' read by the actor Taylor Holmes, with its hypnotically repeated line of "Boots — boots — boots — boots — movin' up and down again." Boyle came to include the recording in the film itself, along with footage from Laurence Olivier's 1944 adaptation of Shakespeare's 'Henry V' as well as a few images from '28 Weeks Later,' to root the film in a specific exploration of traditional Englishness and a return to a more tribal way of life.
'We had the idea of this looking back and valuing of these supposed English virtues of this heroic defiance — you know, 'We few, we band of brothers,' ' says Boyle, quoting Shakespeare. 'We thought at one point about using the St. Crispin's Day speech [from 'Henry V'], but that was too much. And then we saw the trailer, and I remember we saw it together. We were in Soho and we just saw it, and we both looked at each other and said, 'Whoa, God, I'd go and see that.''
For anyone looking to extend the metaphor of the film to an examination of the real-world aftereffects of Brexit, which saw the United Kingdom leaving the European Union, Garland says there is one important distinction.
'Well, it's about Britain being closed off, so it's not by choice,' says Garland of the movie's story. 'Brexit was an idiotic thing we did to ourselves. This has been enforced by other people.'
Moving forward while looking back is a good way of describing the process of making the new '28 Years Later,' a film with an emotional energy that is somehow both terrifying and mournful. Reuniting key creative players from the first film after more than 20 years, the new movie interrogates ideas of memory, legacy and what gets left behind.
'We don't sit down and say, 'Let's make an allegory' — that's not it,' says Garland. 'But what happens is just in the act of making a story, the things you are preoccupied by on whatever level just drift in there. They just arrive. And it becomes retrospectively quite a good diary entry of the things you were thinking about at that time.
'It's broadly true with me and Danny, both separately and together, that there's something subversive in the way we approach stories, themes, structure, whatever it happens to be,' said Garland. 'There was something subversive about where this film was heading and what was actually going to happen at the end. It does something else.'
Within the structure of a ripping postapocalyptic horror-thriller and laying the groundwork for two more stories, Boyle and the creative team have crafted a story that explores questions both big and small, from the specifics of personal survival to the origins of a society.
'Notwithstanding little setbacks, we feel like we're moving forward," says Boyle of civilization at large. "Then one of the questions that comes up is: Is that feeling of moving forward linked to technology? Because if technology is stopped dead, which it is in this case for these people, would we be able to keep moving forward? Or would we automatically, as these people do, look to the past?"
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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.

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