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28 days later
“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.
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