Assembling A Crewīrendan Gleeson, Cillian Murphy, and Naomie Harris in 28 Days Later. ![]() Universal had first look at 28 Days and passed, which is also incredible when you think about the price and obviously the talent. I had access to some funds through the National Lottery. We replicated that in the look of people.Īndrew Macdonald: My idea was always that we could make it reasonably cheaply. Then we found all these photographs of the medical stages of rabies. The thing he was really interested in was rage.Īndrew Macdonald: I think the first time he read it, he said, “This is about rage.” And I didn’t necessarily think that but I said, “Yes.”ĭanny Boyle: There were extraordinary stories of road rage - social intolerance of each other. What Danny brought to that was a very Danny spin, which was a concept. They’re reanimated corpses that in effect are reanimated by magic. But Alex was very knowledgeable about them.Īlex Garland: Often, they’re supernatural. Michael Putland/Hulton Archive/Getty Imagesĭanny Boyle: I’m not a zombie fan, to be absolutely honest. ![]() I remember reading the script and just feeling scared.Īlex Garland: 28 Days Later, as a script, is very derivative: a twist on Resident Evil and The Day of the Triffids chief among the various influences.Īlex Garland (left) and Danny Boyle pose for a photo in April 2003. He came up with this very very lean screenplay.Īndrew Macdonald (producer): He came back with the idea for 28 Days: a zombie movie but with a couple of crucial things. I thought: what if the zombies moved as quickly as the dogs? “ 28 Days Later as a script is very derivative.”ĭanny Boyle (director): We’d done a film of Alex’s book, The Beach. The tension did not come from the zombies, it came from the fact that you didn’t have many bullets to deal with them. What I found out playing Resident Evil was that, in a funny way, the zombies themselves didn’t pose much of a threat because they were so slow-moving. And then I basically forgot about zombie films for more than 10 years until the video game Resident Evil came out. The BeginningĪlex Garland (writer): When I was a teenager I watched a bunch of zombie films. Two decades on, Inverse spoke to 11 members of the production, including Danny Boyle ( Trainspotting, Slumdog Millionaire, Yesterday) and writer Alex Garland ( Annihilation, Ex Machina, Men), about the making of the iconic film. It made stars of Cillian Murphy and Naomie Harris and it is now considered to be one of the best British horror films of all time. Nevertheless, 28 Days Later came out fighting and punched well above its weight. And, by the end, the film didn’t have an ending because there was no money left to film one. The terrorist attacks of September 11 happened in the middle of filming, putting nerves on edge. Christopher Eccleston, who appears in the later part of the film, agreed to an emergency pay cut. The production was always operating on barely enough money to get by. ![]() “It had started in early-morning glorious sunshine and ended in darkest English countryside in the rain.” “It was a very very difficult shoot by the end,” producer Andrew Macdonald says. The film’s huge success - it ended up making $84.6 million on a tiny $8 million budget - belies how arduous some of the experience was. “You’ve got to be trying to do something with it that maybe hasn’t been done before.” “It's not that interesting to just sit within the genre,” director Danny Boyle tells Inverse. The film’s “zombies” aren’t zombies, but “the infected.” They sprint - athletes tended to play them in the film - and they can be killed in the same way as any human being. Imagining a world in which a “rage” virus has infected almost everyone on Earth, 28 Days Later has been fully embraced as a crucial fixture of the zombie genre despite not strictly being about zombies at all. It’s a stark introduction whose mark on world cinema is still felt 20 years on - all the more so because of the eerie parallels that suddenly came to mind when Covid-19 shut down the very same parts of London. ![]() The opening of the celebrated horror film sees Cillian Murphy’s character, Jim, wake up from a coma to discover that London is a desolate city: he staggers around alone, the only man in existence, finding that the most densely populated parts of the capital are totally empty but for birds. Few films make the audience sit up and pay attention more immediately than 28 Days Later.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |