Time is running out in 28 Days Later, director Danny Boyle’s digital video-shot vision of Britain after a devastating viral outbreak. Words: Genevieve Harrison

What’s the story of 28 Days Later all about?

I guess, very simply, it’s a story of a group of survivors trying to make their way to safety after the outbreak of a terrible viral infection in Britain. This virus is so virulent, it sweeps through the whole population and leads to a kind of apocalyptic landscape, where no one appears to be left apart from this tiny group of survivors who make their way north, hopefully to safety.

Now, a viral apocalyptic movie isn’t particularly original, but what’s interesting about [28 Days Later] is that although the virus is sort of based on Ebola – it manifests itself in the most appalling physical sickness – the root of the virus is psychological.

Instead of killing those it infects, the virus turns them into vicious killers – not zombies, not vampires, but ‘the infected,’ as the film calls them...

Imagine yourself in your worst moment of road rage and multiply it by a million – that’s what these people are like. Interestingly, the virus is only carried by primates, so it begins with these chimps in a lab. It’s hideously virulent and it’s spread by contact with the blood, and it leads to a permanent, appalling state of aggression, where the simple sound of a human voice makes you want to kill that person.

So Jim [Cillian Murphy] wanders round London at the beginning and he’s shouting, “Hello! Hello!” – and eventually it will activate the infected because all they want to do, as soon as they see another human being, is to kill it. That’s the kind of appalling unstoppable aggression that it creates in these people.

You worked closely with Alex Garland while shooting his novel The Beach, but how did you end up filming his first screenplay?

A friend of mine gave me The Beach a long time ago when it wasn’t very well known and I gave it to Andrew [Macdonald] to read and we eventually made the film of The Beach. Then, Andrew and Alex were talking about this idea for a kind of sci-fi/zombie horror movie, you know, something that was kind of stolen from John Wyndham and J. G. Ballard and that TV show Survivors – we borrowed from all that, really.

28 Days Later does feel like the bastard son of Day of the Triffids and I Am Legend. Were you a fan of that kind of classic material?

I’m not a big kind of aficionado of that kind of stuff. I mean, I like it, but I think the strength of the film is that we didn’t make it as absolutely devotees of this particular genre. I think you hope to freshen up the genre by being... not disrespectful to it, but not too intimidated by it, which I think that’s the danger of being an aficionado – the rules are there, you know? “We’ve got to do this, we’ve got to do that.”

One of the best things about 28 Days Later is that it is set in the UK, and much of its power derives from images like a deserted Piccadilly Circus, or a red London bus on its side in the middle of the street…

Yeah, what we tried to do is find iconic images, particularly for London, that did the work of a huge, huge budget. And this amazing idea that London is empty – which is an impossible idea for us all to imagine, because the longer you live in London, it just becomes more and more crowded – is a brilliantly attractive one, you know?

There are certain technical problems with achieving it, but you don’t have to have huge technical expertise to actually do it – you just have to figure out a way, a time on a particular day, when you can manage to get an angle on Tottenham Court Road where you can see it without people.

Your decision to shoot parts of the film on the digital video (DV) format gives it a documentary feel, an immediacy missing from other post-apocalyptic movies. Was this an aesthetic choice more than a budgetary choice?

There’s currently lots of shooting on DV, and there’s always a practical reason that is useful. When you’re making films in Britain which don’t have huge budgets, you can, to a certain degree, do things cheaper or make your resources go further with DV.

Nevertheless I think there has to be an organic reason, in addition to that, to make it really work. Because audiences are not familiar with it yet – mainstream audiences certainly – I think you have to find an organic reason in your story that supports it.

Also, when you do a film that features monsters of some kind or other, you have to be very clear about how you’re going to present them. [You need] a very clear way that you’re going to manifest them on the screen. 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, and I’d always wanted the monsters – the people enraged – to be moving at an almost inhuman speed.

And the digital cameras snatch at this information in a slightly unnerving way that isn’t fluid in the way that you expect film and your visual entertainment to be. It’s sort of like staccato, and that was a big factor – I thought, “That’s how we’ll do them.”

The other idea I thought was to hire athletes to play the parts [of the infected], so that physically they’re able to do things [normal people can’t]. You know, when you watch an athlete actually perform, you think they’re doing things that you should be able to do but you know you’ll never be capable of. I thought if that became an aggressive thing – if an athlete turned on you – that would be frightening as well. So it was a combination of those things.

Another choice that gives the film a sense of stark realism is the casting of relative unknowns in the leading roles, even though Brendan Gleason and Christopher Eccleston turn up later on. Was this a deliberate choice, to give the lead character, Jim, a kind of ‘everyman’ sensibility?

Yes. The star of the film is the idea of the film, really, so we were convinced that when the guy wakes up, you should not feel any familiarity with him other than him being an ordinary person – you know, one of us. We didn’t want it to feel like it was a star, or a personality, or a celebrity, anything like that, because it felt absolutely right that you’ve got to take this journey with this person as though it’s you yourself who could be waking up in that hospital.

Rather than Will Smith waking up to metal ships over the city…?

That was true of all the characters really – that they should feel like absolutely ordinary people thrown into this nightmare. We hadn’t intended casting [Jim] as Irish, but we found this guy, Cillian Murphy, and he’s fantastic. He’s very childlike in the beginning; he’s obviously bewildered, like any child would be, thrown into circumstances where their world has changed completely.

He has to map this journey, which is almost a physical as well a mental journey... He has to travel there from this newborn child, literally, waking up in London – albeit with a beard! By the end of the film, he’s arrived at some kind of place for himself.

Although it has many horror elements, the film is not just for horror fans. What do you think audiences will make of it?

I wanted it to be a surprisingly emotional film, really. I think what we tried to do is take a genre idea and make it a mainstream film that will appeal to as many people as possible. It should feel like an emotional journey, [so] that it’s not just simply a series of visual effects – you have some emotional commitment to the film. I think there are two or three places in the film where you do feel that, you feel that connection, as a fellow human being with these people and what they’re going through. So I hope, because of that, it’ll appeal to everybody.

This interview was originally published in Dreamwatch Issue 99 (December 2002).