“In 28 Years Later, we tried imagining how a world would rebuild itself after an apocalypse,” director-producer Danny Boyle explained in this exclusive behind-the-scenes video, which you can watch via the player below. (Check out the latest trailer here.)
Boyle and writer-producer Alex Garland teamed for the original 2002 film 28 Days Later but skipped its 2007 sequel, 28 Weeks Later. “It doesn’t feel like a sequel. It feels like an original film,” said Boyle.
Returning to the world he created, Garland considered the effect the passage of so much time would have not only on Britain but also the infected.
“Initial conversations were often about imagining what does 28 years later mean? If the infection is still in Britain, what does the infection look like?,” said Garland. “How does the rest of the world respond to that? Has the country been quarantined, essentially abandoned?”
Garland continued, “When countries collapse for one reason or another, they’re often abandoned. There’s a ruthless, pragmatic, dog-eat-dog dimensions to the way these things play out.”
That abandoned Britain is represented in the early portions of the film by Lindisfarne (aka Holy Island), a tidal island on the Northumberland Coast. While that isolation offers some safe haven to the married protagonists played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Jodie Comer, it also robs them of any 21st century advantages.
“Holy Island, which is where our film begins, it’s protected by a causeway that you can defend, but there’s the lack of machinery, no electricity or fuel,” explained Boyle.
“Everything that surrounds our life now, suddenly it’s useless. The mainland then becomes somewhere over there, which has both promise and threat.”
That threat, of course, is the infected, who Boyle referred to as “extraordinary creatures.”
As he did with imagining a Britain nearly three decades after an apocalypse, Garfield also considered how the passage of time would affect the infected who are not zombies per se.
“They haven’t died and come back to life. They’re living people who’ve got sick and been infected with a rage virus. That dictates some stuff,” said Garfield.
“They need to drink, they need to eat. If they’ve survived 28 years infected with this disease, what would they look like? Are they similar to anything in the animal kingdom? What would they be similar to?”
Fans will have to find that out when 28 Years Later hits theaters June 20th.
