|
|
| DAYS of RAGE
The ‘infected’ in full pursuit of Jim’s black cab. “I thought if an athlete turned on you, that would be genuinely frightening,” says Boyle.
|
28 days later
It’s a long way from Thailand to Deptford, but it’s not that far if you’re Alex Garland. For the writer of The Beach (the best-selling novel turned into a hit movie by Danny Boyle in 1999), anywhere can be dangerous. The big difference is that, whereas the beach looked idyllic but turned out to be hell by another name, Deptford never looked that great in the first place. And it is certainly not improved, in Garland and Boyle’s latest collaboration, 28 Days Later, by an apocalyptic virus which infects its victims with a deadly rage and spreads at an exponential rate.
IN DANNY BOYLE’S
NEW FILM,
28 DAYS LATER,
BRITAIN HAS BEEN OVERRUN BY A PSYCHOLOGICAL VIRUS. BUT, SAYS SAM CONNOLLY, THE FILM IS
A LOT MORE THAN JUST
A MODERN-DAY
ZOMBIE MOVIE.
|
Deptford comes into the story because it is (or was) home to Jim (Cillian Murphy), the film’s central character, a cycle courier who thinks for a while that he is the only person in Britain not affected by the virus, which was unleashed when animal rights activists broke into a primate research facility and released some chimps. It is now 28 days later. Jim awakes from a coma in a deserted London hospital and soon finds that the city, too, is empty. “I see it as a sort of oblique war film, relayed via seventies zombie movies and British science fiction literature,” says Garland, “particularly JG Ballard and John Wyndham.”
In point of fact, the last great era of zombie movies - and the era of Wyndham’s string of post-apocalyptic novels, from The Kraken Wakes to The Death of Grass - came a little earlier, fuelled by fifties fears of a nuclear war. But they share with 28 Days Later that all-important sense of a familiar environment - contemporary Britain - suddenly rendered terrifying by taking away all the people and adding a murderous threat for good measure.
The new film - which also stars Naomie Harris as Selena, another ‘survivor’ whom Jim eventually meets; Christopher Eccleston as Major Henry West, the leader of a group of soldiers organising themselves further north in Manchester; and Brendan Gleeson as Frank, a father holed up in an East London tower block with his teenage daughter - comes out of the determination of Andrew Macdonald, producer of The Beach, to work with Garland again.
“Alex is just a natural storyteller and I wanted to make a film which had the same energy and excitement as reading one of his books,” says Macdonald. “When he writes a screenplay, you can visualise it and you want to know what happens next; for me, that’s the absolutely crucial thing in storytelling, and Alex has it in spades.”
Macdonald had always envisaged 28 Days Later as a Danny Boyle film - which meant, among other things, that it was never going to be a straight genre movie. “I like zombie movies, but they come out of a particular period, a society paranoid about what might be the dirty result of nuclear weapons and power,” says director Boyle, whose pre-Beach titles include cult movies Shallow Grave and trainspotting. “I love that Alex gives us a twist on the viral apocalypse theme - that this is not a clinical virus but a psychological one – so, in the long run, I feel there is respect for the genre but I hope that we have freshened it up in some way.”
The purpose of the experiment on the chimps which created the virus had involved subjecting them to a non-stop flow of violent images to see whether a cure for rage could be invented - a process not unlike the sexual aversion therapy to which Alex is subjected in A Clockwork Orange, but with results on an altogether larger scale. It has a built-in obsolescence: the ‘infected’ live only to kill, not feed or look after themselves.
“The idea of a psychological virus felt completely contemporary,” says Boyle. “Rather than being a physical infection, the virus taps into the modern phenomenon of social rage. We see the manifestation of it every day in road rage, air rage, hospital rage - even supermarket rage! It’s great copy for newspapers, but there’s a truly disconcerting side to it. When you talk to older generations, they say there was nothing like that at all in their time. There was certainly violence and fighting, but social rage is very much a symptom of modern times.”
28 Days Later was made, like The Beach, for Fox Searchlight, whose head, Peter Rice, was given the script at Cannes 2001 and committed immediately. In order to make the story - and its vision of a deserted, ravaged city - the centre of the film, Boyle and Macdonald cast mainly unfamiliar actors: Murphy had appeared in Irish film Disco Pigs, while Harris was recently seen on British television as Clara in the adaptation of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. The exceptions are Eccleston, who plays the driven army officer, West; and Brendan Gleeson as Frank. “Having seen The General and all Brendan’s other films, I wanted this big, warm, beautiful man, this true father figure,” says Boyle. “You can feel the change in the film when Brendan comes on. His warmth and generosity comes out, both on film and off. He is one of those guys you would have on every film if you could!”
Working with half-Danish/half-Scottish director of photography Anthony Dod Mantle (who shot Thomas Vinterberg’s Festen and had worked with Boyle on his two recent TV movies, Strumpet and Vacuuming Completely Nude in Paradise), Boyle opted for digital video for a number of reasons. It would give a more appropriate image of the post-apocalyptic urban landscape, since cities today are under constant video surveillance. It would enable them to work with the lower levels of light caused by the disappearance of electricity along with all other social facilities. And its speed of operation would allow them to get every second out of those precious minutes when London streets - and, for one memorable sequence, sections of the M1 Motorway - were shut down for them to shoot.
But there was another reason, too, which had to do with the way that Boyle decided to portray the ‘infected’ who pursue Jim and Selina through the streets of the city and are a constant, terrifying threat.
“When you do a film that features monsters of some kind or other,” he says, “you have to have a very clear idea about how you’re going to manifest them on the screen. I’d always wanted the monsters - the ‘infected’ - to be moving at almost inhuman speed. I’d already made a couple of digital films for television in Manchester, and I kind of uncovered this way that the camera works, which is a particular way of recording fast motion. Digital cameras snatch at this information in a slightly unnerving way. It isn’t fluid in the way that you expect film to be: it gives a staccato effect, yet it’s not like step-printed film - it’s half-way in between.”
In order to achieve this notion of the infected closing in on their prey at breakneck speed, the director cast mainly athletes in the roles. “When you watch an athlete actually perform, you realise that they are doing things that you should be able to do but that you know you’ll never be capable of,” he explains. “I thought if that became an aggressive thing - if an athlete turned on you - that would be genuinely frightening.”
The film was shot mainly in London (it has a very urban feel) in the early autumn of last year, but some of the empty-London scenes were shot slightly earlier - in July - because that was when it was easiest to get deserted city streets in daylight. “The filming of the London sequences was absolutely fantastic,” says Macdonald. “Before we started the main shoot, we took a week in July, beginning each day at three or four every morning, and would wait for the sun to come up. We were able to shoot for an hour or so before the city got too busy for us to hold back the traffic. It was very exciting; when you see the whole of Westminster Bridge and the embankment all closed for you and the traffic stopped and you can’t hear anything… it was thrilling, but strange as well.”
Although 28 Days Later is entirely fictional, Boyle reckons that the virus scenario is well within the bounds of possibility - and has become frighteningly more so since they started work on the film on September 1, 2001.
“A virus is something that you cannot necessarily put up a defence against,” he says. “This particular virus was to be something so virulent as to be uncontrollable - something that can’t be defended against because it’s actually part of us: rage.
“At the present moment, there’s no such thing as a psychological virus, but who knows what can happen? Just recently, two German scientists were able to create a totally synthetic polio virus within a matter of years with materials bought over the internet. Whilst polio has a relatively simple genetic structure, the knowledge is there to be able to create a more complex virus - smallpox, for instance. It’s more a matter of time rather than of technical capability.”
|
|
