Danny Boyle Expands On His Goals For the '28 Days' Franchise

When Danny Boyle and Alex Garland created 28 Days Later in the early 2000s, the world was not clamoring for another zombie movie, but they were tapped into something that the world did need, which was an answer for all the recent violence.

Were human beings the virus that had gone too far? Or could we go further?

Danny Boyle recently sat down with The Hollywood Reporter to talk about this and more.

Let's take a look at some of his most interesting quotes.

When it comes to the origins of 28 Days Later, Boyle says of the zombies, "We felt like for a modern audience, they had to be a credible threat. And that came down to mass velocity, visceral impact, to make it a really scary movie. We used different sorts of cameras, which liberated us in many different ways. There were lots of technical problems with those cameras."

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As soon as Boyle and his team adopted digital cameras, they knew they had something. It was a movie of our time and spoke to the way we were seeing the world.

He said, "It helped us with the deserted scenes. We couldn’t afford to close the bridges of London or to CG huge areas. [Editor’s note: The digital cameras helped the team quickly grab shots of deserted streets in the early morning hours, before they became busy.] But on some of the wide shots, the resolution is so bad that Cillian is literally two green squares. You have to cut off the shot before people work out it’s just two squares, not a recognizable human being, moving across this deserted London landscape."

Like I said at the top, to me, this felt like a post 9/11 movie. But the crew was actually filming when 9/11 happened. Boyle recounted what that was like, "We were very high up in the Balfron Tower. And we were shooting a family scene with Brendan Gleeson, Cillian and Naomi [Harris]. It happened over lunchtime. We went back to the tower block, we saw the footage, and all sorts of rumors started happening about planes heading for London. Because nobody knew what was happening. It was very acute. We’d have televisions in the little room opposite the main living room we were shooting in. And everybody would be going in and out there looking at it. It changed the nature of the film without a doubt."

That fear is in the movie, and when I saw the original in theaters, it resonated with the audience, who weren't escaping, but dealing with the emotions of that day, via a zombie movie that takes place in London.

Now, years later, Boyle is returning to the franchise with 28 Years Later28 Years Later. It was a journey coming back, with Sony buying the rights to a new trilogy of these movies in a bidding war.

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As they set out to make this new one, Boyle wants to continue to push the envelope, shooting with 20 iPhones at a time and exploring what humanity looks like today.

In making this movie, they also relied on test screenings to see how things were put together.

Boyle spoke of the process, saying, "This is going to read awful unless you express it brilliantly. I learned I was right. (Laughs.) It’s reads like terrible fucking pig ignorance. Especially as the film hasn’t opened. It could be another Life Less Ordinary! God help us. (Laughs). The experience of sitting with people who know nothing apart from the fact that this is a sequel to a film they may have seen — they’re virgin territory. I would say to young directors, you often want to resist it, because you’re frightened. Because you are locked in the editing, and you’ve got the film the way you want it. You don’t want anybody changing it. Sometimes it’s hard, because you learn really tough things about your own work that you have to respond to. You learn good things that make you hone it better. But on this one I learned 'No, we’re, we’re going down the right path.'"

This attention to detail and to the audience's wants and desires, and a fun and interesting way to make tweaks to the movie. I liked how Boyle used it as an experience to mature and to find his way.

It makes me excited for the movie and for everything else he works on in the future.

Let me know what you think in the comments.