28 Days Later

How did a scrappy production out of the UK with little more than a dozen DV camcorders revive a decidedly dead genre and spark a renaissance with the recently departed? Join Chris and Lizzie as they explore Danny Boyle's lo-fi technically-not-a-zombie-movie-zombie-movie and learn why 100 buckets is never enough, the terror of Kiwi test screenings and why Danny Boyle couldn't wait to get Cillian Murphy shirtless. *CORRECTIONS: The most violent news footage shown in the film's opening (executions, violence, etc.) was staged by Boyle and co., however, some early news footage of civil unrest is archival. Naomie Harris was nominated for an Academy Award (Best Supporting Actress) for for her performance in "Moonlight", but she did not win. The pilot at the end of the film is speaking Finnish, not American, and (faintly) says "Lähetätkö helikopterin?" which translates to "Will you send a helicopter?". Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Winterbauer?

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• 0:31Lizzie Bassett?

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• 1:15Lizzie Bassett?

  will the most powerful reality contestant in TV history be able to keep the family happy? And if they're overthrown by the mob, who will step up and become the new Don? Let the games begin. Watch The Mob, now streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney+ for bundle subscribers. Terms apply.

• 1:34Chris Winterbauer?

  All right. Lizzie, do you want to kick it off and send it to me? Or do you want me to kick it off to you?

• 1:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, I will do it. Favorite podcast full stop that just so happens to be about movies and how difficult it is to make one.

• 1:46Chris Winterbauer?

  And how it's nearly impossible to make them.

• 1:50Lizzie Bassett?

  Hello and welcome back to What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast that just so happens to be about movies and how...

• 1:57Chris Winterbauer?

  Your favorite podcast full stop.

• 1:59Lizzie Bassett?

  I'm gonna get it.

• 1:59Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. No, it's only been four years.

• 2:01Lizzie Bassett?

  It's not my fault that you made this the unofficial opening. Hello and welcome back to What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast full stop that just so happens to be about movies and how difficult it is to make one, let alone a good what?

• 2:15Chris Winterbauer?

  And how it's nearly impossible to make one.

• 2:17Lizzie Bassett?

  Nope, don't even worry about it. Here I go.

• 2:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Hello and welcome back to What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast full stop that just so happens to be about movies and how it's nearly impossible to make one, let alone a good one, let alone, I would say, a genre-defining great one. I am one of your hosts, Lizzie Bassett, here as always with your other host, Chris Winterbauer. Chris, what do you got for us today?

• 2:55Chris Winterbauer?

  I have the eternally watchable, never dying, endlessly relevant, and now extremely relevant, given the release of a long-awaited sequel, 28 Days Later. As you mentioned, Lizzie, a film arguably most responsible for the zombie renaissance that you either enjoyed or suffered through this 21st century, depending on your sensibilities. Although, is it really a zombie film at all? That's a big question, point of contention.

• 3:22Lizzie Bassett?

  That is a good question, yeah.

• 3:24Chris Winterbauer?

  I think it is.

• 3:25Lizzie Bassett?

  I agree.

• 3:25Chris Winterbauer?

  I think Danny Boyle just needs to get over it and that it's a zombie film, but he does not say that it is a zombie film, so there's some disagreement. We can talk about it. Lizzie, had you seen 28 Days Later before? What were your thoughts upon watching or re-watching it for the podcast?

• 3:41Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, I had, although I did not see this when it came out, which kind of surprises me, maybe because I was a 13-year-old girl and zombies puking blood didn't seem like the most appealing thing to me at the time, but now it does. That's what-

• 3:54Chris Winterbauer?

  Because you have a child.

• 3:55Lizzie Bassett?

  I was gonna say, that's what being a mom does for you. Yeah, I watched it for the first time, I want to say, a couple of years ago with David, because this is one of his favorite movies as well. And I enjoyed it. I didn't love it, I don't know why. And then watching it again last night, actually, for the podcast, I really, really loved it. This is so smart, it's so taut, it really doesn't waste any time. Obviously, the best thing I think about this movie is that they make the people the scariest part and not the zombies. And they use the zombies, or not zombies, Danny Boyle, sorry, pretty sparingly, which is great. Killian Murphy's great. I love Brendan Gleeson so much, just endlessly watchable for me and every-

• 4:36Lizzie Bassett?

  Everything. This is gonna be a bit of a Brendan Gleeson couple of months for us. We have another one of his films coming up.

• 4:41Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, Braveheart, which he had been in in 95. Yeah, this movie features an incredible amount of future Academy Award winning actors and people behind the camera, as we'll get to. And Academy Award nominated as well. I count six.

• 4:56Lizzie Bassett?

  Really?

• 4:56Chris Winterbauer?

  Either actors or people behind the camera who will either win or be nominated for an Oscar after this movie. Should we just do it now? Should we go through it?

• 5:04Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. Okay, Brendan Gleeson, was he?

• 5:07Chris Winterbauer?

  Brendan Gleeson will be nominated for Banshees of Inisherin.

• 5:10Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 5:11Chris Winterbauer?

  Alex Garland will be nominated for Ex Machina.

• 5:14Lizzie Bassett?

  That's right.

• 5:15Chris Winterbauer?

  Danny Boyle will win for Slumdog Millionaire.

• 5:18Lizzie Bassett?

  Yep.

• 5:19Chris Winterbauer?

  Anthony Dodd Mantle, the cinematographer, will win for Slumdog Millionaire. Killian Murphy will win for Oppenheimer, and Naomi Harris will win for Moonlight.

• 5:28Lizzie Bassett?

  That's right.

• 5:30Chris Winterbauer?

  And I almost forgot, Glenn Fremantle, supervising sound editor, who was nominated for his work on Slumdog Millionaire and would win with 2014's Gravity, Best Sound Editing.

• 5:41Lizzie Bassett?

  I'm very excited to hear about this. I'm very excited to hear also how they achieved those shots of London looking completely empty.

• 5:50Chris Winterbauer?

  Again, it all has to do with their overall approach to the film, which enabled a few very unique, specific things, and the timing of the film. And again, Lizzie, we will be tying into September 11th today, which we cannot seem to escape with this run of films that we're doing. I don't know. I also really, really loved this movie. I did see it when it came out. I didn't see it in theaters. I saw it on DVD or VHS.

• 6:16Lizzie Bassett?

  We were too young to see this in theaters, I think.

• 6:18Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, I saw 2004's Dawn of the Dead, the Zack Snyder remake, in theaters. That was my first big theatrical zombie experience. 20 days later scared the bejesus out of me as a kid. Fast zombies were really terrifying. Like you, Lizzie, the horror elements are still fun, but I really like the humanist elements of the film. I think that the horror elements are, and as Garland and everybody admits, they're very pastiche. They're very much just lifted from other movies. And then what they do, I think, a great job of is really grounding the human drama with such good actors in between all. These horror moments.

• 6:47Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 6:47Chris Winterbauer?

  And because of the way this movie was shot, and when I saw it, it really felt like the first time I thought, wow, anybody can make a movie from a technical perspective.

• 6:58Lizzie Bassett?

  Hmm.

• 6:58Chris Winterbauer?

  And you may have noticed that the movie feels a little low resolution.

• 7:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 7:01Chris Winterbauer?

  Or like, you know, CCTV, that's because of the way in which they shot it. We'll get to that shortly.

• 7:06Lizzie Bassett?

  All right.

• 7:07Chris Winterbauer?

  But let's talk sources. Sources for today's episode include, but are not limited to Danny Boyle, In His Own Words by Amy Raphael, Invers' oral history of the making of 28 Days Later, Danny Boyle and Alex Garland's very fun DVD commentary for the film, along with the film's extras, deleted scenes, alternate endings, and then, of course, numerous articles from the trades, you know, interviews, et cetera, contemporaneous to the release of the film and later. The details, Lizzie. 28 Days Later is a 2002 post-apocalyptic horror film, so not technically designated as a zombie film on Wikipedia at least, directed by Danny

• 7:48Chris Winterbauer?

  Boyle, written by Alex Garland, produced by Andrew McDonald and Robert Howe. It stars Killian Murphy, Naomi Harris, Brendan Gleeson, Megan Burns, and Christopher Eccleston. It was distributed by 20th Century Fox through its Fox Searchlight Pictures division. The IMDb logline reads, "Four weeks or 28 days." I don't know why it doesn't say 28 days, but it says-

• 8:12Lizzie Bassett?

  Or four weeks.

• 8:13Chris Winterbauer?

  Four weeks. Yeah. Four weeks later. "Four weeks after a mysterious incurable virus spreads throughout the United Kingdom, a handful of survivors try to find sanctuary." More or less.

• 8:25Lizzie Bassett?

  And then watch as this movie gets repeated 400 times since it's released in 2002.

• 8:31Chris Winterbauer?

  It had been repeated before that as well, but it had been a while since it had been done. So the question remains, how did a scrappy production out of the UK with little more than a dozen Mini DV camcorders revive a decidedly dead genre and spark a zombie renaissance that lasted nearly 20 years? And what went wrong? Very much, as we'll learn. So let's go back in time to February of the year 2000. Do you remember what you were up to in February of 2000?

• 8:58Lizzie Bassett?

  In the year 2000? No, I don't know. I was 11. Actually, I wasn't 11. I might have been 10.

• 9:04Chris Winterbauer?

  I was 11. I was listening to Inside Out by Eve Six a lot. I believe The Sims had just been released. Y2K had come and gone.

• 9:12Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, actually, I do know something I was doing because I was in fifth grade that year. I thought about this recently. It's kind of embarrassing, and I'll share this with you all now. I was in drama class, obviously, and we had to perform a song, I think, or some kind of monologue. And for some reason, I, a 10-year-old girl, chose, maybe this time, from Cabaret, which is neither appropriate for a 10-year-old to be singing, nor for a 10-year-old to have watched. And I had seen it an awful lot. So I rewatched Cabaret recently, and I was like, what was that drama teacher? What must have been going through her head as she was like, where'd you find this kid?

• 9:47Chris Winterbauer?

  Who knows?

• 9:48Lizzie Bassett?

  You know what? I think I nailed it.

• 9:49Chris Winterbauer?

  I'm sure you did. Somebody who hadn't nailed it with their most recent endeavor, English director Danny Boyle, Daniel Francis Boyle, but, you know, we're friends. I call him Danny, was staring down a dismal critical reaction to his fourth feature film. Lizzie, have you seen The Beach?

• 10:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, I have.

• 10:10Chris Winterbauer?

  You probably watched it when you were 11 because it had Leonardo DiCaprio.

• 10:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Sure did.

• 10:13Chris Winterbauer?

  And he was everybody's heartthrob. The movie was very expensive, both literally. It had a $50 million budget, $20 million of which went to Leo.

• 10:22Lizzie Bassett?

  Yikes.

• 10:23Chris Winterbauer?

  And it was also figuratively very expensive. The casting of Leo in lieu of Ewan McGregor,

• 10:29Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 10:30Chris Winterbauer?

  who Danny Boyle has admitted he kind of told he was going to have the lead role, caused a multi-year rift between the director and his younger actor protege muse up until that point.

• 10:44Lizzie Bassett?

  That's interesting timing, too, because Ewan McGregor would then almost immediately go on to break out big time in Moulin Rouge.

• 10:51Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, and Star Wars.

• 10:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 10:53Chris Winterbauer?

  He's shooting it basically during this as Obi-Wan. Now, Danny Boyle called this film his least enjoyable personal experience on a film. And I think it's important that we go through a couple details because it informs the approach to 28 Days Later. So it's based on Alex Garland's novel by the same name, The Beach, and it seems like an obvious fit for Danny Boyle. Lizzie, I'm sure you've seen Boyle's second feature film, Trainspotting.

• 11:20Lizzie Bassett?

  Mm-hmm.

• 11:22Chris Winterbauer?

  That was obviously his big breakout and it zeroed in on a disaffected young man or a group of young men struggling to find meaning in Scotland. And they're shooting up heroin and it's both really darkly funny, but also incredibly disturbing and very tragic. And so that had been adapted by John Hodge from the original novel. And so John Hodge came in to adapt The Beach by Alex Garland. And it was kind of like, oh, this is the same team. And there are a lot of thematic similarities, right? The Beach follows a disaffected young, in this instance, American man going to Southeast Asia, trying to find meaning in this consumerist world. It devolves into Lord of the Flies, basically, by the end. And they had the commitment of Leonardo DiCaprio, who had apparently turned down the talented Mr. Ripley.

• 12:07Chris Winterbauer?

  And Lizzie, I think we talked about this a little bit, that he had been maybe in the running for American Psycho as well.

• 12:14Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, they wanted him. Barry Herron did not, but yeah.

• 12:17Chris Winterbauer?

  I know, and I believe he turned it down for The Beach.

• 12:20Lizzie Bassett?

  I think you're right.

• 12:21Chris Winterbauer?

  This was a very big deal. He was the billion dollar man coming off of Titanic at this point. So the film had way more advanced attention than anything Boyle had directed thus far. Trainspotting was obviously a hit, but it was a surprise hit. It was made for almost no money. So The Beach was a modest commercial success. I think it made 130, 140 million against its $50 million budget. So it's not like it flopped. But fans, critics, the public were very disappointed in this movie. So fans of Trainspotting were kind of confused and disappointed by the tone of the movie, which again, I think would have worked a lot better if you had Ewan McGregor in the lead, because I think that the movie needed the buoyancy of that really dark Scottish

• 13:05Chris Winterbauer?

  sense of humor that he'd proven capable of delivering in Trainspotting.

• 13:10Lizzie Bassett?

  I agree.

• 13:10Chris Winterbauer?

  The voiceover feels so flat with Leonardo DiCaprio, who again, I love as an actor. I just don't love him in this. And then obviously, DiCaprio's fans, many of whom were young women at the time.

• 13:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, it's a weird move for that.

• 13:22Chris Winterbauer?

  It's really confusing. It's like he has an illicit affair, then he cheats on her, then he basically gets a bunch of people killed and, you know.

• 13:29Lizzie Bassett?

  Very, very hard for a young girl to digest. And to your point, that very much was his audience. It's interesting because that was the concern about him playing Patrick Bateman too. But in many ways, I think he would have been a better fit for Patrick Bateman than he was for The Beach.

• 13:44Chris Winterbauer?

  As we learn with The Wolf of Wall Street years and years later. And so this movie, to be clear, it has definitely developed a cult audience and has found its niche, I think, and had been reevaluated in the interim. But it left everybody involved kind of confused and disappointed, including, I think, Danny Boyle.

• 14:00Lizzie Bassett?

  I like it, for the record.

• 14:02Chris Winterbauer?

  I do not, for the record.

• 14:03Lizzie Bassett?

  That's fair. It's weird.

• 14:04Chris Winterbauer?

  So Boyle later said of this experience, quote, "You'd think that all the money in the world would allow you to make the kind of impromptu decisions I like to make, but it doesn't. People used to say a big budget film is like an oil tanker, weighed down with wealth and riches, and yet if you want to turn it around, it takes half a day." And so I think what we learn is Boyle likes to move quickly. Boyle likes to be able to make creative decisions on the day. Boyle likes to be able to feel things out. You can do none of that when you're having to bulldoze a beach in Thailand months in advance to shoot this film and you have a $20 million actor and you can't go over schedule. So Boyle does not get put in director's jail by Hollywood.

• 14:45Chris Winterbauer?

  He effectively puts himself in director's jail and takes a step back and he goes back to his roots. Boyle is actually older than I realized. He directed Trainspotting basically when he was 40.

• 14:58Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 14:58Chris Winterbauer?

  So Trainspotting was his second feature after 1994's Shallow Grave, which I'm not sure if you've seen it. It's Ewan McGregor, Christopher Eccleston and Carrie Fox. It's a really tight, dark comedic feature where three flatmates, somebody else on their floor dies, there's a bunch of money, everybody backstabs each other trying to get the money. It's very fun, very dark, totally similar to Trainspotting. But he was a journeyman director. And so he had basically come up directing theater. He directed five productions for the Royal Shakespeare Company, transitioned into television. He first produced for BBC Northern Ireland and then he directed both TV movies and episodic. And so when Boyle turned away from Hollywood and American spectacle after the beach,

• 15:41Chris Winterbauer?

  he decided to simplify things. And instead of go with like big budgets and special effects, he took a cue from a rising movement in Denmark, which was called Dogma 95. Have you ever heard of the Dogma 95 movement, Lizzy?

• 15:54Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 15:54Chris Winterbauer?

  Lars von Trier and Thomas Winterbauer are the founders of the Dogma 95 movement. It's an avant-garde filmmaking movement, and the goal was to strip filmmaking down, remove excessive effects, distill it to story, performance, and theme, the opposite of what's happening in big-budget action movie Hollywood at this time, where you're having the CGI revolution, the big action star is king, the rise of Mel Gibson, Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger. There were 10 rules included in the Dogma 95 manifesto, and I'd like to read them because they're really fun, and I have a couple, you know, we'll discuss one film in particular. Number one, shooting must be done on location. Props and sets must not be brought in. Number two, the sound must never be produced apart from

• 16:37Chris Winterbauer?

  the images or vice versa. Music must not be used unless it occurs where the scene is being shot. Number three, the camera must be handheld. Any movement or immobility attainable in the hand is permitted. So obviously no dollies, steady cam, tripods. Number four, the film must be in color. Special lighting is not acceptable. Number five, optical work and filters are forbidden. Number six, the film must not contain superficial action, murders, weapons, et cetera, must not occur. Number seven, temporal and geographical alienation are forbidden. That is to say, the film takes place here and now. Number eight, genre movies are not acceptable. Number nine, the film format must be Academy

• 17:19Chris Winterbauer?

  35mm. That's for projection, not for capture. Most of the Dogma 95 movies were shot digitally because it was affordable and you could shoot with low light. Number 10, the director must not be credited. And then finally, furthermore, I swear as a director to refrain from personal taste. I am no longer an artist. I swear to refrain from creating a work as I regard the instant as more important than the whole. My supreme goal is to force the truth out of my characters and settings. I swear to do so by all the means available and at the cost of any good taste and any aesthetic considerations. Thus, I make my vow of chastity. So it's a very intense list. Obviously Boyle doesn't.

• 18:00Chris Winterbauer?

  He's not making a Dogma 95 film, but he saw one of the Dogma 95 films and really fell in love with the way that it looked. And that's Thomas Winterbauer's Festin, or The Celebration, which was the first credited, certified Dogma 95 film. Lizzie, have you seen The Celebration?

• 18:15Lizzie Bassett?

  I have not seen that one. I've seen, I believe, the one he did immediately after that.

• 18:19Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, so I didn't see The Celebration until I was in film school and it blew me away.

• 18:24Lizzie Bassett?

  He's an amazing director.

• 18:26Chris Winterbauer?

  Most recently, maybe Another Round.

• 18:27Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, which I'm obsessed with. Also, The Hunt, if people have not seen it, it's like one of the best movies ever made.

• 18:32Chris Winterbauer?

  So The Celebration is about this upper-class Danish family that gathers in a lavish country home to celebrate the 60th birthday of the patriarch of the family. And the complication, I can't remember if it's the inciting incident or the end of act one, his eldest son, Christian, gives up to give a toast and he makes a very shocking claim of abuse at the hands of his father. I mean, horrible abuse, I don't want to spoil it, that derails the events since, you know, family secrets come pouring out. It's very darkly funny, it's very moving, and it's all shot on a Sony Handycam consumer grade DV camcorder, almost entirely with natural light. It has a very grimy look.

• 19:14Chris Winterbauer?

  It has the look of a home movie, which feels weirdly appropriate, given the subject matter. And Danny Boyle loved it. This was the opposite of The Beach. The Beach is this giant spectacle. This is one location. In some ways, it's evocative of the third act of 28 Days Later.

• 19:30Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 19:30Chris Winterbauer?

  Where they're all trapped in this country manor house.

• 19:32Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, it's also interesting, you know, one of the tenets that you just read is that you can't be using murder or other tactics, that it has to be driven just by these really interpersonal dynamics, which, you know, I haven't seen that one. I have seen The Hunt. The Hunt probably doesn't qualify as Dogma 95.

• 19:47Chris Winterbauer?

  No.

• 19:48Lizzie Bassett?

  But it's the same thing with Winterbauer, I think, where he's really driving these pulse pounding narratives without using any action or...

• 19:57Lizzie Bassett?

  Zombies, as it were, but I can totally see why this would appeal to Boyle.

• 20:01Chris Winterbauer?

  There's a great quote from Boyle. He said, quote, "Of the look of the film, it made you focus on the choice of how you use the camera and how you move it. It simplifies things. You have to get back to basics." So he calls up the Festin cinematographer, Anthony Dodd Mantle, and Mantle assumed it was a prank because Danny Boyle is this huge director from the UK. Quote, "He just left a message on my answer phone, which I promptly ignored for about a week because I was convinced it was one of my friends teasing me," end quote. But Boyle was serious.

• 20:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Is Boyle British, or is he Scottish or Irish?

• 20:35Chris Winterbauer?

  He's British. Danny Boyle is from Manchester, and obviously that ties into Manchester Burning in 28 Days Later.

• 20:42Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, okay.

• 20:43Chris Winterbauer?

  You mentioned the Scottish angle, so when he did Trainspotting, Andrew McDonald and John Hodge, the screenwriter who adapted the book, are both Scottish. And so I believe Boyle had them approach the author of Trainspotting to say, "Hey, look, I'm working with these great Scots. Even though I'm not a Scot, I can direct this movie." So Boyle is very serious about working with Anthony Dodd Mantle. He says, "I'm giving up the $50 million budget. I want to shoot my next films on a camera that families can afford to buy for home movies, and I want to do it for television." So again, and I certainly didn't know this, Boyle actually returned to making two made-for-TV

• 21:23Chris Winterbauer?

  movies for the BBC. They were both written by playwright Jim Cartwright. I believe he actually shot them in the reverse order of how they were released, but they were almost released contemporaneous to one another. So Strumpet, which starred Christopher Eccleston, was about a poet and a musically gifted girl who land a record contract. Complications ensue. And then Vacuuming Completely Nude in Paradise, which was a very dark comedy two-hander. Timothy Spall. It follows a pair of door-to-door salesmen who sell vacuum cleaners. And these movies were cheap, they were very quick, and Boyle could do them entirely on his terms. And he and Anthony Dodd Mantle figure out a way to work together and get all sorts of interesting angles with these digital cameras that would be really difficult or expensive to get with a big 35mm rig.

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• 22:53Chris Winterbauer?

  Danny Boyle wasn't the only one with the post-Beech blues. In a sense, Alex Garland's rise and fall had been even more precipitous than Boyle's, and he was significantly younger. I believe Garland's 14 years younger than Boyle. So in 96, The Beach was published. Garland was 26. It was his first novel. Now, that's the same year that Boyle's Trainspotting was released. So both men kind of broke out simultaneous to one another. And Garland unexpectedly was hailed by many as this key voice of Generation X. And fame didn't sit well with him. And I believe this because, listening to his DVD commentary, he's very soft-spoken, very self-deprecating. He's very critical of his own work.

• 23:35Chris Winterbauer?

  And so even though The Beach was kind of an unexpected hit and obviously got turned into a feature film, his second novel, called The Tesseract, fell flat in 1998. And so many outlets started to report that Garland was facing some sort of critical writer's block. The combination of the second book failing and The Beach not working as a movie. Oh, no, this is why Garland isn't out with another book. And that's just not true. He just wasn't writing a book. Garland decided that he wanted to write a screenplay. So Garland had not adapted The Beach, and he decided that he was going to take a crack at writing something for the screen. And Lizzie, his childhood was filled with a very particular type of monster because he'd come up in the late 70s and early 80s. Any guess as to what that monster might be?

• 24:19Lizzie Bassett?

  A zombie?

• 24:21Chris Winterbauer?

  A zombie! Now, guys, we're not going to get into the history of zombies here today. We did release a little primer on zombies and the origin of the word and how it became kind of this interesting American monster and was then internationalized across the 20th century. So, check that out on our feed. It's right below this episode if you're interested. I believe for the purposes of our story, Romero's, George Romero's Night of the Living Dead, which was released in 1968 and arguably birthed the modern zombie, is what most influenced Garland's world of zombies. So, you then had Dawn of the Dead, 10 years later in 1978, you had Day of the Dead in 1985, Return of the Living Dead, also in 85, kind of like a punk rock, Splatter Gore film. Then you had stuff like The Evil Dead, Lizzie, which

• 25:04Chris Winterbauer?

  we've covered, or Re-Animator. This is the heyday of like practical guts and gore. And then the studios just say, "We're good with zombies." And the 90s are almost zombie-free. So, it's really interesting. You have, I believe, four things happening at once. One, diminishing returns. So, the Night of the Living Dead remake that Romero wrote and Tom Savini, his effects master, directed in 1990 flopped. It was like a small budget film, 4 million, but I think it only made about its budget, 4 million or so. The MPAA was also cracking down on gore. So, Lizzie, we've discussed this. The creation of PG-13 and then making R a little more restrictive and NC-17. You could not have, for example, in Day of the Dead, somebody being ripped limb for limb

• 25:49Chris Winterbauer?

  and their intestines being eaten out of their body anymore. And then you had new horror subgenres that were both cheaper to make and more exciting for audiences, like Silence of the Lambs, which we've talked about. You have meta horror like Scream. And then, of course, zombies were this big Cold War metaphor for the last 30 years, basically, and the Cold War was over. And so, it was unclear what they represented at this point. Now Garland wasn't just a movie buff. He also loved video games. Is there a video game even you, Lizzie, know? That is synonymous with the zombie genre? You've certainly heard the name. It became a movie franchise starring Mila Jovovich.

• 26:30Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 26:31Chris Winterbauer?

  There we go.

• 26:32Lizzie Bassett?

  I know it. No, I know it. Hold on, I can see it. I can see the cover of the fun fact. I did not grow up playing video games, but I know.

• 26:40Chris Winterbauer?

  Right.

• 26:42Lizzie Bassett?

  Resident Evil.

• 26:43Chris Winterbauer?

  There we go.

• 26:44Lizzie Bassett?

  I got it. I got it. I did it.

• 26:46Chris Winterbauer?

  You nailed it. You got there. But that actually is how ubiquitous it was because you didn't even play video games. And yet you can picture that cover in your mind, I'm sure.

• 26:55Lizzie Bassett?

  I can indeed.

• 26:56Chris Winterbauer?

  So Resident Evil was released in 1996 for PlayStation, and it reignited Garland's love for zombie movies. So again, he's 26, he's playing video games. We know he's already in video games because he even made Leo's character in the beach into video games, which didn't make a lot of sense, but it's all good. Resident Evil does two things that are very important to our story, Lizzie. One, a biotech firm is responsible for the zombies. The Umbrella Corporation. Two, the zombies are slow, but the zombie dogs are fast. And Alex Garland wondered, what if zombies moved as quickly as the dogs? Incremental innovations here. We're not reinventing the wheel.

• 27:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Listen, fast zombies. I can't believe it took this long to think of it.

• 27:43Chris Winterbauer?

  OK, well, technically it hadn't. Italian zombie film Nightmare City in 1980 technically featured fast zombies, but I don't think a lot of Americans had seen that. And there were some fast-ish zombies in Return of the Living Dead from 1985. And there are some people that argue that the very first zombie in Night of the Living Dead runs. I think he staggers quickly personally, but let's not split hairs here. The point is Garland wasn't really interested in creating something original. As he admitted, 28 Days Later is a quote "very derivative twist on Resident Evil and the Day of the Triffids." And I do want to point out Day of the Triffids, it's a 1963 sci-fi horror film based on a novel by the same name.

• 28:25Chris Winterbauer?

  Meteor shower blinds the world, at the same time, bioengineered carnivorous plants called triffids, which are able to walk on stilts-like roots and strike with venomous stingers, break free and start attacking people. It's kind of like Invasion of the Body Snatchers meets Little Shop of Horrors meets a zombie film. Okay. It's very unusual. But the key sequence Garland totally rips off from this movie is when Bill Mason, a merchant navy officer, wakes up in a deserted hospital after the blinding event, but he's kept his sight because his eyes were bandaged during the meteor shower, and he's walking around the hospital and he can't find anybody. And so obviously that becomes a keystone sequence in the final film. Mm-hmm. There's one last movie that I think 28 Days Later owes quite a bit to, and that's

• 29:08Chris Winterbauer?

  another not technically zombie movie, George Romero's The Crazies. Did you see this or the remake with Timothy Olyphant? No. It's from 1973, basically, small town Pennsylvania, military plane crashes, contaminates the water supply with a bioweapon codenamed Trixie, and it does something not dissimilar from the Rage virus in 28 Days Later. It either kills the victim or drives them violently insane. It's very similar to like a rabies metaphor, and they remade it with Timothy Olyphant in 2010, I believe. According to the film's production notes, Garland finishes a 50-page version of the screenplay, and he sends it to producer Andrew McDonald. So Andrew McDonald had produced Trainspotting, he'd produced The Beach, and so Garland had worked with him.

• 29:51Chris Winterbauer?

  McDonald liked it, and he thought Boyle would be a perfect fit for the material. He thought, oh, Danny's got this really energetic filming style, he'll bring a lot to this very lean, as you mentioned, story. The only problem, Danny Boyle didn't like zombies. Not a big fan of the genre. He said, you know, it's fine. They, I've enjoyed them as much as anyone. But it's clear he's not that into them. But he did love the idea of rage. And I think this is a common theme across his filmography up to this point. And I did re-watch Trainspotting and The Beach before this episode. So across his movies, you can see how he's really interested in how seemingly normal people can be compelled to acts of extraordinary cruelty, violence, intolerance, destructiveness.

• 30:34Chris Winterbauer?

  And not from like a moralizing perspective, but just from an observational perspective. And so even though I think zombies didn't really intrigue Boyle, rage became this lodestar. So as he later said, "My vision of 28 Days Later was a film about social rage. It had something to say about how we've all lost patience with one another." And he references often instances of road rage in particular. Like, why would somebody throw their life away over this tiny little inconvenience that happens on the road? They did look at rabies as kind of a reference point, which makes a lot of sense for the film. And Boyle has described the virus as a psychological virus. So he has said specifically like, it's not supernatural, but almost supernatural.

• 31:19Chris Winterbauer?

  Like as if they've infected the chimps with the idea of rage through increased stimulation.

• 31:25Lizzie Bassett?

  They set it up like that in the laboratory at the beginning.

• 31:28Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. And another obvious reference is Ebola with the way that they vomit their blood out. And this was right around The Hot Zone, the book about Ebola. And Boyle called that a reference. Now, Andrew McDonald offered a more science-based description. Quote, "Scientists are trying to develop a cure for rage, a suppressant drug similar to Valium in respect of depression. As part of the research process, chimps are infected with a virus which promotes a permanent stage of psychotic rage." So I guess his idea is like they're trying to elicit rage so that they can then see if they're able to suppress its most virulent form.

• 32:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Which they also explain at the top. I actually feel like all of that comes through.

• 32:05Chris Winterbauer?

  I agree. And what's funny is I love the DVD commentary because Boyle and Garland are basically, their approach is, let's get out as much exposition as we need to in the first 15 minutes and then not deal with it again after this, because neither of them are interested in the exposition. So Boyle decides to approach the material as a complete newcomer. He does not watch zombie films to prepare. He says, Garland, you're my zombie expert. I am not going to watch other movies as reference. So he actually didn't understand, like, the shopping sequence is a reference to Dawn of the Dead. The military, you know, at the end is a reference to Day of the Dead. All of that was new to him after the film had been released. And I think that's actually why there are certain homages, but they actually feel like they are referencing other films and other genres more than necessarily the

• 32:47Chris Winterbauer?

  zombie genre. So Andrew McDonald takes the script to Universal. They had a first look deal with his production company, but they passed. And I think, obviously, a few reasons. One, it's a zombie film. The studios don't want zombie films at this point. Resident Evil was in development, but outside the studio system. It was Konstantin Films, a German company. Two, Boyle wanted to shoot it on a camcorder. So I'm sure the studio was thinking-

• 33:12Lizzie Bassett?

  They're a top sell, yeah.

• 33:13Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, they're like, you know, we have cameras you could use. And no, no, no, use this one. It's fine. And despite persistent internet rumors, they did not have a star attached. Now, some people online have claimed that Leonardo DiCaprio or Ewan McGregor were attached or being considered. That has been debunked by Boyle himself. Neither were ever interested, attached, or strongly considered Leonardo, because I don't think he would ever do it. I don't think Boyle wanted to work with Leonardo again, not because he's a bad actor, but because it overwhelmed the film.

• 33:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Right. He was, was and continues to be unbelievably expensive.

• 33:48Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes. And again, he is bigger than the movie. If you've seen the poster, it is Leo, huge, of the beach. His name, huge, then the beach, and then in tiny letters underneath it, from the director of Trainspotting. And again, Ewan McGregor and Boyle had unfortunately had a falling out. And so I just don't think that was going to work either. I don't even know if they were really speaking at this point. So, Universal passes, the brain trust Boyle, McDonald and Garland decide not to take the package around town. They do not pitch the other studios. And I couldn't confirm this, but this suggests to me that they maybe didn't even want Universal to take on the projects and that they were probably interested in doing it their own way from the beginning.

• 34:31Chris Winterbauer?

  And they just had to do it because of McDonald's first look deal. So, they set out to make a zombie movie on their own terms, not unlike George Romero did, basically 30 years earlier with 1968's Night of the Living Dead. I mean, they have a little bit more money than George, who basically had $115,000, I think, when he started that movie. Because McDonald was one of a handful of producers with access to financing through the United Kingdom's National Lottery Film Fund. So, this is a film fund supported by the lottery, which awards producers financing for films that are going to be shot in the UK, using UK talent, etc. They get a gross award for 3.25 or so million pounds, and that's publicly

• 35:14Chris Winterbauer?

  available information. Now, that was not enough money to totally finish the film, but it was enough to get started. Early 2001, Boyle, McDonald and Garland reworked the script and budget. They make a ton of changes, and there are a lot of ways in which this movie changed during the shoot, after the shoot. We'll talk about that during production, not now. Since Boyle wasn't dependent on a star for financing, he decided to go with unknowns for the two lead roles to heighten the tension for the viewer. Again, a lot of rumored what ifs. I want to put some to bed. Ewan McGregor, no. Leonardo DiCaprio,

• 35:52Chris Winterbauer?

  no. Ryan Gosling, no. I don't even know where that one came from. There are two also-rans who did audition and were considered that Danny Boyle has confirmed. British actors, one was about to be in a Star Trek film and one was just in Black Hawk Down. Any guesses, Lizzie?

• 36:12Lizzie Bassett?

  British, uh, Tom Hardy.

• 36:14Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes. Young British actor, very handsome.

• 36:18Lizzie Bassett?

  Orlando Bloom.

• 36:19Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes, you nailed it. Well done.

• 36:21Lizzie Bassett?

  Thank you.

• 36:22Chris Winterbauer?

  Both were considered. It's funny, Killian is like, has the outsider quality of Tom Hardy for me, but also the prettiness of Orlando Bloom, but he's a little more unusual looking. He kind of splits the middle of him, I think.

• 36:32Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 36:33Chris Winterbauer?

  Boyle has stated that he auditioned, quote, "a lot of guys before he got to Irish actor Killian Murphy." Killian was brought in by casting director Gail Stevens, who was Boyle's spouse at the time they separated in 2002. Gail Stevens had seen him in a stage production of Disco Pigs, which would go on to become a movie. Let's listen to Murphy describe the process of being cast in 28 Days Later on the Happy Sad Confused Podcast.

• 36:59Speaker 03

  So, of course, this is your collaboration with Danny Boyle. And as I understand it, he put you through the paces on the audition, in the audition process.

• 37:06Speaker 04

  Yes, he did. But I mean, that's what, that's what I was going through all of the time there at that stage in my career was like, auditioning for things and not getting things. But I desperately wanted this one because I had a Trainspotting poster in my bedroom as a kid. I went to see that movie when it first came out, you know, the first day we were, we were all there. And similarly with Shallow Grave, you know. So I realized this was significant because he was a proper world-class director. So I think we did, I did five or six auditions for that.

• 37:42Speaker 03

  Is that a happy day? Do you remember when you actually got the role?

• 37:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, I do. I was in the, I was in an airport queuing up for a Ryanair flight. And I remember jumping up and down.

• 37:51Speaker 03

  The finest airline.

• 37:52Speaker 04

  Yeah. And I was jumping up and down.

• 37:55Lizzie Bassett?

  Honestly, if there's anywhere you're gonna get some kind of zombie virus, it's a Ryanair flight.

• 37:58Chris Winterbauer?

  Absolutely.

• 37:59Lizzie Bassett?

  He has the loveliest voice, just beautiful.

• 38:02Chris Winterbauer?

  That's partly why I wanted to play the interview was because I wanted to hear him say it and not me.

• 38:06Lizzie Bassett?

  And shout out to that podcast, by the way, it's great.

• 38:08Chris Winterbauer?

  It is. So Murphy was obviously very, very new, very green. And Boyle, I mean, Trainspotting is, was rated as one of the top 10 greatest British films ever made by the end of the 20th century. And so this is a very, very, very big and unique opportunity. And Murphy was the first person cast. And for a decent period of time, he was actually the only actor under contract. I'm gonna go through the rest of casting right now and then we'll dive into production, but just understand that some of this is a little bit out of order. So Naomi Harris was arguably greener than Murphy. That's debatable. She had acted as a child in a TV series and a television film, and her mom had worked as a screenwriter

• 38:52Chris Winterbauer?

  on EastEnders, which is the long-running British soap opera.

• 38:55Lizzie Bassett?

  Uh huh.

• 38:55Chris Winterbauer?

  But she was only nine months out of theater school when she read for the role of Selena. Harris says that she was desperate for the part, but her agent didn't want to get her hopes up, so he told her, quote, "You haven't got a chance in hell of getting it," end quote. She then went back, she did the audition, called her agent, she said it went really well, and he said, quote, "Yeah, but they'll want a star, Naomi," end quote.

• 39:18Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow, this agent's the biggest bummer.

• 39:21Chris Winterbauer?

  Then Danny Boyle calls her at home and asks her to come back and read with Murphy, and she says, "I think this is a good sign." And I think the agent even then was saying, "No, it's never gonna..."

• 39:31Lizzie Bassett?

  No.

• 39:32Chris Winterbauer?

  And then she booked it, even though she was not a zombie fan. In fact, she didn't care for horror movies at all. According to Harris, the scariest thing that she'd seen at this point was Jaws.

• 39:41Lizzie Bassett?

  Which is very scary, but yeah.

• 39:43Chris Winterbauer?

  It is. Now Boyle remembers this a little bit differently. Quote, "She," meaning Harris, "was interested in the role of Selena, but like many of the actors we approached, thought it was a bit trashy doing a horror movie. Serious actors aren't really interested in horror movies," end quote. And I do wonder, again, infection, zombies, this is a genre that hadn't really been done, certainly not in a mainstream way, for close to 15 years at this point.

• 40:11Lizzie Bassett?

  Also, you're coming out of drama school in London. I'm assuming you've spent probably a lot of that time doing Shakespeare, doing classical work. Like, there can be a tendency, I think, to think that these sort of genre films are beneath you when you're coming out of that. I don't know that, but I wouldn't blame her if that were the case.

• 40:27Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. Now, Meghan Burns joined as Hannah. Meghan had just won Best New Actress at the Venice Film Festival for her debut role in the movie Liam and was also selected by Boyle for the part. Boyle, though, didn't want to rely entirely on newcomers. And so we discussed him briefly, but he specifically reached out to Brendan Gleeson for the role of Frank because he wanted to make sure that he had somebody that the young actors would be surrounded by, that they could play off of and would protect the film.

• 40:59Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 41:00Chris Winterbauer?

  He said, quote, of Brendan Gleeson, "He's the kind of wonderful guy you feel okay around until he gets killed. He didn't hesitate at all. He thought it was a great script." End quote.

• 41:09Lizzie Bassett?

  I love him.

• 41:10Chris Winterbauer?

  And so I think what's interesting is there's a meta layer to his casting, right? He gives both the audience comfort and the characters comfort and the actors comfort as they're working with him in the story. I love when he's this giant killing machine in body armor, knocking zombies down the tower, and then he comes inside, "Oh, hello there. Nice to meet you." And he's just the sweetest guy once they come inside.

• 41:32Lizzie Bassett?

  He's the best.

• 41:33Chris Winterbauer?

  His like dad breakdown when they get to the blockade and he realizes the soldiers aren't there. And then he apologizes to Hannah when he's infected.

• 41:41Lizzie Bassett?

  It makes me sad.

• 41:42Chris Winterbauer?

  It's such a great performance. And then, of course, Boyle brought in Christopher Eccleston. He'd collaborated with him already twice, Shallow Grave and Strumpet. And so I think he definitely knew Eccleston can do this part to a T and will really help sell the third act.

• 41:56Lizzie Bassett?

  Had he already been Doctor Who at this point? Because he may be the most recognizable person in this.

• 42:02Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, so he wouldn't go on to play Doctor Who for a few more years. But you may be completely right because I was just looking at his credits and I'd forgotten he was the main villain in the amazing Nick Cage film Gone in 60 Seconds. And of course, he was also in The Others with Nicole Kidman, which was an extremely successful movie. So he absolutely might have been the biggest name, certainly was a much bigger name than Killian Murphy and Naomi Harris and likely, like you said, more than even Brendan Gleeson.

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• 43:30Chris Winterbauer?

  Boyle also wanted pros for the zombies, Lizzie. So what's the problem when you ask an actor to do something athletic in a movie?

• 43:39Lizzie Bassett?

  They can hurt themselves?

• 43:41Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, or they just can't do it. Like, you're watching Tom Cruise through a baseball in War of the Worlds, and you're like, have you thrown a ball before? For the love of God.

• 43:48Lizzie Bassett?

  No, but he's dangled out of a helicopter.

• 43:50Chris Winterbauer?

  He has. Boyle has a great quote, "Actors running is not unlike them riding horses. They tend not to be that good at it, and you end up having to cut around the action." So instead of actors playing the infected, I wanted to use athletes. The only time I'd ever been in the room with an athlete, I believe he means a professional athlete, not like, "I'm athletic."

• 44:11Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 44:11Chris Winterbauer?

  "I had an immediate sense of their physical power. They are different to me and you." End quote. So casting director Gail Stevens found a London-based agency that worked with recently-retired athletes. They brought them in for a physical workshop with Boyle. Quote, "It was amazing, really scary. They can bounce on you without hurting you. So all the zombies are athletes. There's a genuine tension, a muscular power in them."

• 44:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, that's cool.

• 44:36Chris Winterbauer?

  I mean, the way they run, the way they launch themselves through the space. And again, specific to the way they move, that goes to Toby Sedgwick. He was a veteran British movement director and mime artist. And he choreographed the movement style of the infected. And you see him in the film, Lizzie. He plays the priest.

• 44:54Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, yeah, at the beginning.

• 44:56Chris Winterbauer?

  Who Killian whacks with the bag of cans in the very beginning of the film.

• 45:01Lizzie Bassett?

  The Brits love their mimes and clowns, by the way. They really do.

• 45:04Chris Winterbauer?

  They do. Now, the zombies weren't the only ones in training. The soldiers did go to a boot camp. Selena, Naomi Harris, went into kickboxing and sword fighting with a personal trainer. So she could learn how to, I mean, she wields the shit out of that machete. When she hacks up Mark, which apparently they had a much more graphic version of that scene that they had to cut, it is gnarly. The physicality wasn't the only thing she brought to the role. Her character's backstory was worked out between her and Boyle during rehearsals. Now Garland, as you mentioned, wrote a very stripped down script. So Jim is given a backstory, but Selena is not given a backstory at all. So she asserts that she and Boyle agreed that she had killed her parents, protecting her 14 year old brother, who then got infected and had had to kill him too.

• 45:45Chris Winterbauer?

  And so that is why she is so committed to forming no emotional attachments whatsoever at the beginning of the film.

• 45:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 45:53Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, I did not know about this, Lizzie, but as Boyle and the company ramped up towards production, an infection broke out in the United Kingdom. On the 19th of February, 2001, the foot and mouth disease virus was detected in pigs at the Chiel Meads Abattoir in Little Warley, Essex. Now, foot and mouth disease is an infectious and at times fatal viral disease that affects even toed ungelates, like cows, pigs, sheeps, goats. Infections spread across that spring. Over 2,000 cases were detected on farms across the English countryside. And over 6 million cows and sheeps were proactively culled or slaughtered in an ultimately successful attempt to halt the spread of the disease. It was the biggest breakout since 1967.

• 46:35Chris Winterbauer?

  And there's all this imagery that is so evocative of the film of them lining up dead cows and sheep and just burning the bodies in the countryside.

• 46:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Like.

• 46:44Chris Winterbauer?

  It's. Brutal. Tourism took a hit and there was this eerie feeling in parts of the United Kingdom that they were being quarantined during an outbreak that was unavoidable. So this is all coloring, I think, the way in which they're approaching the rewrite. So that May Cannes rolls around, and if you guys are unfamiliar, the Cannes Film Festival is not just where films screen, it's also a huge film market. So a lot of films are sold at Cannes. It could be maybe a finished film, but oftentimes film packages. So Andrew McDonald goes to the Cannes Film Market, seeking a 50% backer to match DNA's contribution to the budget. So another three million or so pounds, let's say. He shares the script with Peter Rice, the head of Fox Searchlight, 20th Century Fox's indie division, and Rice agrees to put Searchlight behind the film.

• 47:29Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, I want to be clear, I couldn't figure out if he gave them three million pounds or if he just gave them a modest advance on the worldwide distribution rights. Regardless, it was enough money to start. And so even though the bulk of principal photography wouldn't begin until September, they had one opportunity to capture arguably the most unique portion of this movie that you mentioned right at the top, Lizzie.

• 47:53Lizzie Bassett?

  These are the streets of London completely devoid of people, cars, everything.

• 47:58Chris Winterbauer?

  So they weren't going to start principal photography until September 1st. So why might they shoot those deserted scenes in the middle of July?

• 48:07Lizzie Bassett?

  I don't know. I don't know how they did this.

• 48:09Chris Winterbauer?

  Because of the latitude of London, for about a week in July, there's a period where the sun rises before morning rush hour starts.

• 48:20Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, so it's super early in the morning?

• 48:23Chris Winterbauer?

  It's incredibly early in the morning. So that sequence, which according to Alex Garland was originally just four lines of Jim walking through empty London in the screenplay, would become the centerpiece of the first reel and arguably the entire first act of the film.

• 48:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 48:41Chris Winterbauer?

  And they pulled it off because they were using mini DV camcorders. So according to Danny Boyle, for seven consecutive mornings, I also read four at a different source, but let's go with seven, a splinter unit would begin at 3:00 AM or 4:00 AM, sometime in that range, to capture Killian Murphy wandering alone. Again, Murphy was the only actor under contract, but he was, of course, the only actor in these scenes. So they didn't have full lockdowns with the police. They couldn't afford it.

• 49:09Lizzie Bassett?

  What?

• 49:09Chris Winterbauer?

  So instead, they brought in students wearing traffic uniforms to politely ask people to halt traffic for two to 10 minutes so they could allow Killian to walk through these iconic settings.

• 49:24Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 49:24Chris Winterbauer?

  And capture him without anybody around. Danny Boyle's daughter even allowed them to capture some additional stuff when she saved the day in an unexpected way. Quote, "My daughter Grace, who was 18 at the time, turned up with a few mates. They were all attractive girls. There was a heatwave. They weren't wearing many clothes. And of course, the drivers around that time of day were mostly men. If I asked them to stop, they'd tell me to fuck off. A beautiful girl leaning into the car did the trick. The next day, we hired more girls until we had a rather beautiful gang of traffic marshals and the traffic stopped."

• 49:58Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 49:59Chris Winterbauer?

  End quote. So because they were shooting mini DV, Lizzie, they could pre-place the cameras, hide them in plain sight, leave them rolling without anybody operating them, and then send Killian through the scene, collect the cameras later, and then just delete all the extra footage that they didn't need.

• 50:15Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow. I can't believe that that's real. I was like, they must have been removing cars or something in post.

• 50:21Chris Winterbauer?

  They mention a few other instances where they painted something out digitally, but that sequence, they have said, you know, there's no CGI there.

• 50:30Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 50:30Chris Winterbauer?

  Again, it's possible they made a tiny alteration here or there, but I think they accomplished it almost entirely in camera.

• 50:36Lizzie Bassett?

  That's amazing.

• 50:37Chris Winterbauer?

  So like on the Westminster Bridge, they hid 10 cameras. He walks across the bridge. They collected the footage and that was it. Now, it sounds a lot easier than it was. Anthony Dodd Mantle had to pre-visualize the placement of every camera. These angles are wonderful.

• 50:53Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 50:53Chris Winterbauer?

  He placed all of them and then he had to direct all these operators via walkie-talkie. And a lot of them weren't actually camera operators. Like he had his gaffer, Thomas Nivelt, operate one of the cameras. Even Andrew McDonald, the producer, was operating a camera for some of these sequences because they would just run 10 of these $1,500 camcorders. And they had a couple of more expensive Canon XL2 cameras as well, but they're all mini. They all shoot that kind of new style footage.

• 51:18Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, and the shots are so clever and they have to be too, because if you look at them carefully, it looks very expansive, but they're actually not showing that much sort of street level content, which now makes sense because they couldn't block it off.

• 51:32Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, a lot of great long lens wide shots where they compress the distance between him in the background, which actually limits the frame, but makes it feel really big at the same time.

• 51:41Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 51:42Chris Winterbauer?

  According to location manager, Pat Karim, production designer Mark Tilsley's work was so effective that it attracted an unwanted visitor. So when he's walking the bridge, it's covered in rubbish, Lizzie, and then obviously money is another big point that they reference. And then basically the A D turns to Pat and says, hey, there's someone on the bridge. And this is the quote from Pat. I could see coming over from the north side, there was this Westminster Council rubbish guy with a trolley going along sweeping all the rubbish up that they had placed. I ran onto the bridge with everyone really tense because the clock's ticking. And I said, look, excuse me, we're filming. Don't worry, that isn't rubbish. It will be cleared up. And he just wouldn't believe me. I started thinking I was gonna have to throw him off the bridge. And again, because they didn't have like some big film shoot there, he's probably thinking, am I like getting pranked

• 52:27Chris Winterbauer?

  or something like that?

• 52:28Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 52:29Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, they did break the rules. It seems like not infrequently. And one big instance is the Westminster Council wouldn't let them lay a smashed bus down on Downing Street. They insisted that it be further up the road.

• 52:40Lizzie Bassett?

  That makes sense.

• 52:41Chris Winterbauer?

  But then they also said that they could only have it there for 20 minutes. So they had to get the bus into position and get it out and get the shot inside of 20 minutes.

• 52:49Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 52:50Chris Winterbauer?

  So on the morning of, at 4 a.m., nobody from the Westminster Council showed up. So they just set the bus on Downing Street, got it the shot in 20 minutes, got the bus out and moved along. That whole shot with that bus flipped over was pulled off in 20 minutes.

• 53:06Lizzie Bassett?

  That is wild. Also, I mean, I would imagine the reason they don't want it on Downing Street is because 10 Downing Street is where the Prime Minister lives.

• 53:13Chris Winterbauer?

  Exactly. Yeah. People were not thrilled. And so commuters would often get angry. And in fact, that scene of Killian coming up to the car in kind of the center point where he touches the car and the car alarm goes off, if you remember. That was apparently shot later in the morning between eight and nine AM and commuters were just howling the most obscene things at them. So I believe that entire scene's ADR because none of that audio could be used.

• 53:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Must be.

• 53:38Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, production halted until September 1st, 2001. So they shot that sequence, then they went into prep, they bring in the rest of the cast. And from there on out, according to Danny Boyle, they basically shot the movie sequentially because it's almost a road trip movie. And so there are a few fun facts from the DVD commentary to share. So the opening scenes with the chimpanzees were not shot in the UK. They were the only portion that weren't. They were shot at a primate training compound in Stuttgart, Germany, which is where one of two working chimp troops for film was available. And I also read that Germany had more permissive regulations for working with animals. So that might have been why they shot there.

• 54:15Lizzie Bassett?

  I don't know if I want more permissive regulations when it comes to chimpanzees. I am so scared of monkeys.

• 54:20Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, you can't work with them anymore. And one of the reasons is they become so difficult to work with. They live till they're 40 or 50. Boyle explains this in the commentary. And then they become extremely dangerous to work with after they're about seven or eight.

• 54:34Lizzie Bassett?

  That's what I thought. There's only like a three year window you can work with them.

• 54:37Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. And then, so people historically would then, they would put them down, right? Because there wouldn't be anyone to care for them, which is obviously extremely inhumane and unethical. And so obviously Jordan Peele riffs on this with Nope with the chimpanzee, which is a CGI chimp.

• 54:51Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. Scared the absolute shit out of me. That was enough. I don't care if it's a little one. Don't care. Leave it alone.

• 54:58Chris Winterbauer?

  It's either gonna poison you like that little Indiana Jones trickster monkey. It's either gonna be a Nazi monkey or it's gonna be a chimp that'll rip your face off.

• 55:05Lizzie Bassett?

  Yep.

• 55:05Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, Lizzie, I did not realize this. All the violent footage played on screen at the beginning of the film is original. That was captured for the production.

• 55:12Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, wow.

• 55:13Chris Winterbauer?

  That is not actual news footage.

• 55:14Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow. Okay.

• 55:15Chris Winterbauer?

  So, yeah, Boyle and Garland decided against using actual journalistic footage. They thought it was unethical. And so they decided to shoot their own for the movie. And they were referencing a lot of things happening in Bosnia and the Sudan, but that is all created for the film. And one of the reasons they liked the mini DV is that it evoked, you know, war torn news footage from conflicts at the time.

• 55:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 55:36Chris Winterbauer?

  They move back to London. They shoot Jim meeting with Mark and Selena. That church scene at the beginning, Lizzie, that is not filled with extras. Again, those are student volunteers lying down everywhere inside that church.

• 55:47Lizzie Bassett?

  Nice.

• 55:47Chris Winterbauer?

  The explosion of the petrol station was the most expensive set piece of the film. It cost 250,000 pounds, according to Boyle, and everybody wanted to be on set to see it. But everything changed 10 days into principal photography. We are here again. On September 11th, 2001, the crew learned that two of four hijacked passenger planes had collided with the World Trade Center towers in the United States. And even though the attacks took place across the Atlantic, it obviously changed the context of the film in both the context in which it was being made and the context in which it would be released. So as Danny Boyle said, 9/11, quote, changed the film, not least because post 9/11, we'd never, ever have been given permission to film scenes like we did in London.

• 56:29Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 56:29Chris Winterbauer?

  Again, they're hiding cameras. Like, you can't leave a backpack unattended after 9/11. "In the week before 9/11, we were pushing our luck a little. We'd be filming somewhere. Someone would eventually spot us on CCTV, come and find us and ask us what we were doing. Did we have permission? We'd say, sort of, but it was 7:00 AM and nowhere was open to check, and so we were just left alone." End quote. So they really lucked out with the timing of capturing those isolated scenes of Jim. You wouldn't have been able to do them after. And further, his idea of social rage as a form of pandemic kind of felt insufficient in light of 9/11. And so whether or not he was aware of it at the moment, he's gone on to say that kind of the movie's core theme had shifted and instead was trying to capture,

• 57:11Chris Winterbauer?

  quote, "how we all felt vulnerable to something happening, whether it be an epidemic, a pandemic, an attack of some kind. It became about how vulnerable cities are." End quote. And so that obviously ties into them fleeing the city.

• 57:23Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 57:24Chris Winterbauer?

  You know, the images of Manchester burning at the end. Now, the guerrilla tactics, GUE, guys, again, after V for Vendetta. The guerrilla tactics allowed 28 Days Later to achieve a lot, but they left a lot to be desired for the actors. I'm sure, Lizzie, you remember Sam Raimi's The Evil Dead, a lot of fake blood, very cold, very sticky. Well, that's very much the case of 28 Days Later. So they're shooting in the UK, heading into the late fall and winter of 2001. The actors have to share trailers, not only the primary actors, but with the infected too. And so Naomi Harris would find it frustrating, she'd be trying to eat something, and then one of the infected would come in with bile and blood dripping off of them everywhere.

• 58:09Chris Winterbauer?

  September turns into October, October, November, and even though it doesn't rain until the climax of the film, it did rain because it's London. There is, in fact, at least one scene, they shot it in an abandoned railway car as they're making their way to Jim's parents' house, that had to be cut because it was so obviously raining outside of the car, and they had no way to cut around it, and they needed the story point that Brandon Gleason brings up, that it hasn't rained in X number of days.

• 58:34Lizzie Bassett?

  Right, yeah.

• 58:36Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, Naomi Harris did have it a little easier than Killian Murphy, because Danny Boyle was not obsessed with her body, but he was obsessed with Killian. So, if you notice, Lizzie, he shows up nude quite a bit in this movie.

• 58:49Lizzie Bassett?

  I did notice, yes. I mean, the opening shot is just full frontal, completely nude of Killian Murphy on the hospital bed.

• 58:56Chris Winterbauer?

  And then showering later, and then running shirtless through the entire third act. And Boyle has this very funny quote where he says, "I had never seen Killian shirtless until production started." Basically, he didn't audition Killian shirtless, or his body. And then when he saw him, he thought, "Oh my god, this guy looks great. I'm gonna take his shirt off as much as possible." He's basically taking credit for Murphy becoming a bit of a... His character became a bit of a gay icon after this movie.

• 59:24Chris Winterbauer?

  Boyle says he had this Iggy Pop quality, he was skinny but like iron.

• 59:28Lizzie Bassett?

  Very sinewy, yeah.

• 59:29Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, it's true. That's why the entire climax is shirtless in the rain.

• 59:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Which I love.

• 59:35Chris Winterbauer?

  Miserable. So apparently Murphy and Harris would cover themselves in Vaseline, which was what swimmers would do going across the English Channel. Because the Vaseline would create a small insulating layer across your skin, but you could still be filmed. Garland was apparently very frustrated with his own writing throughout this entire thing, and he's very funny to listen to on the commentary because the scene will come up and he'll be like, "It's too bad this scene sucks." "It's too bad the dialogue is so bad." "Danny did a great job, but like, god damn it, this is a piece of shit." He's very funny. Couple other fun facts. So when they showed up for that rooftop scene where Brendan Gleeson's explaining that the rain has just not been coming and they're gonna run out of water, they get up there and there were only 100 buckets, which on a roof that big apparently looked like three buckets.

• 1:00:18Chris Winterbauer?

  And not only were there only 100 buckets, Lizzie, they were all black and gray. So it just looked like a bunch of black and gray dots on the roof. And so Boyle says, "I need a thousand colorful buckets." And so the art department had a matter of hours to go to all the bodegas and collect as many buckets as they possibly could. And that's what you get in the final film. The bird that initially infects Frank was supposed to be a dog.

• 1:00:39Lizzie Bassett?

  How'd it get up there?

• 1:00:42Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, I think it was gonna be an actual infected dog, and it was again-

• 1:00:45Lizzie Bassett?

  Mmm, a dog on the ground, I see.

• 1:00:47Chris Winterbauer?

  A much more direct Resident Evil reference, but then they decided, "Well, then the other animals would be infected." So they made it a primate-only infection. Speaking of other ideas that got tossed, apparently at some point, they did consider the idea that the zombies were incredibly horny and that the men zombies would have massive erections while running around.

• 1:01:07Lizzie Bassett?

  I am glad they let go of that one.

• 1:01:09Chris Winterbauer?

  That may have been a joke made in the DVD commentary, but it is something that they say.

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• 1:01:56Chris Winterbauer?

  As they make their way north to Manchester, the film finds itself running perilously thin on money. So, Lizzie, you mentioned the third act, house sequence. This is, according to Boyle, a very direct reference to the French plantation sequence in Apocalypse Now, which was deleted from the original film, but is in the Redux release. And it's, you know, this idea of finding civilization at the end of the world, but there's something surreal about attempting to play in this Garden of Eden as hell breaks out around you. They're supposed to originally shoot at Luton Whu. Lizzie, you've seen this location.

• 1:02:32Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:02:33Chris Winterbauer?

  So, Luton Whu, if you've never heard of it, you've definitely seen it. It's an English country house and estate. And when I say country house to our American listeners, I mean palatial 200-room mansion, surrounded by carefully manicured gardens. And it has been featured across dozens and dozens of films over the last 30 to 40 years, including Eyes Wide Shut, which we covered in January, The Secret Garden, Never Say Never Again, Four Weddings and a Funeral, War Horse was shot on the estate, Netflix's Enola Holmes, Sexy Beast, and so many more. So, an incredibly famous location, obviously far more Jane Austen

• 1:03:17Chris Winterbauer?

  and nicer than the eventual location of the film. But they got outbid by another production. I couldn't confirm which production it was. I believe, based on the release date, that it was the Colin Firth and Reese Witherspoon adaptation of The Importance of Being Earnest, which was released in 2002. But again, I couldn't confirm that. They ended up instead with Trafalgar Park, which is near Salisbury, which was designed in the early 18th century. And they used it exactly as it stood. So, the Cipriani painted music hall, the statue of the athlete and serpent, everything in there was basically shot as is. They just brought in the military equipment.

• 1:03:57Lizzie Bassett?

  That's great.

• 1:03:58Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, it looks amazing.

• 1:03:59Lizzie Bassett?

  I like that it's smaller, too.

• 1:04:01Chris Winterbauer?

  I do, too. And there are some Alice in Wonderland references, and it's darker and more ominous through the third act. The geography becomes a little easier to follow, I think, because it's smaller. But again, that was more by necessity than choice because something truly terrifying had shown up on set, Lizzie, the Bond guarantor.

• 1:04:21Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, we've talked briefly about completion bonds in the past on this podcast, but think of them as a form of insurance, especially on an independent film. So on a movie as small as 28 Days Later, a bond company takes a portion of the budget as a fee, let's say like 2% to 5%, and they say, "This movie's going to be finished properly, or we will step in, assume responsibility for it, and make sure it gets finished, and it becomes our responsibility to complete it." Now, the tension there is the bond company might come in to ensure that it's going to be finished, but they're not going to spend a dime of their own money to actually get it done the right way. It's almost like mob muscle coming in, saying like, "Time to finish this movie, Danny Boyle, and we're not going to spend another dime on it."

• 1:05:04Chris Winterbauer?

  And so there are some concessions that make it into the film. So for example, they gave the soldiers a functioning generator, which is a specific point that Christopher Eccleston's character makes.

• 1:05:15Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:15Chris Winterbauer?

  Not because it was part of the script, but because it would make it easier to light the film in the third act. So if they had a generator, they could just put lights outside the windows and put lights inside the house, and they could move more quickly. They could basically just pre-light everything and then shoot the sequences. It was grueling. People were getting worn down. Multiple hats needed to be worn. So for example, Danny Boyle is one of the attacking zombies during the yard raid scene.

• 1:05:43Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:05:43Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, during the dinner sequence. And even writer Alex Garland let go of a couple of things. For example, it took only 20 drafts, according to Danny Boyle, but he finally wrote in the kiss scene that Danny Boyle wanted, which Garland apparently did not want to write. I like the kiss. It's fine.

• 1:06:00Lizzie Bassett?

  I'm team Alex. I'm always team no kiss, but...

• 1:06:02Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. I think it works in this one because it's not played as like catharsis in that way. You know what I mean? It's played as a, like a desperation.

• 1:06:10Lizzie Bassett?

  No, this makes more sense. I'm, I'm fine with it, but...

• 1:06:13Chris Winterbauer?

  And even Cillian Murphy and Christopher Eccleston went to Alex Garland asking for a rewrite of their scene in which Eccleston kind of lays out the truth of the, you know, "I promised them women to Jim." The originally written version apparently really didn't work, and the actors agreed, and so they went to Garland. That scene as presented was rewritten the night before.

• 1:06:30Lizzie Bassett?

  It's great.

• 1:06:31Chris Winterbauer?

  And there were some really ingenious solves that were precipitated by just a lack of money and a lack of time. Like when they were going to drive the car through the gate, they realized that chain link fence is going to go straight through the windshield and decapitate our stunt driver. So art department member Johnny Bly runs off, doesn't tell anybody what he's doing, comes back and he's got what looks like a chain link there that he's spray painted with copper and it was made out of Haribo's. And so they used that and they did not decapitate their stunt driver. Thank God.

• 1:07:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Kids and grownups love them. So the happy world of Haribo.

• 1:07:03Chris Winterbauer?

  Wow.

• 1:07:05Lizzie Bassett?

  I know their slogan.

• 1:07:06Chris Winterbauer?

  Wow. Somebody send her a chain link Haribo and we'll.

• 1:07:12Lizzie Bassett?

  Please.

• 1:07:13Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, there were some sacrifices made. Christopher Eccleston did take an emergency pay cut to free up funds to try to finish filming, but the 28 days later team ran out of money without an ending. So the last thing filmed was the freeze frame of Killian and Naomi Harris in the back of the car as they kind of leap forward or, you know, jolt forward as they flee the house. As Andrew McDonald remembered, quote, "I just had to say one day, we haven't got any more money and we packed up and left. We didn't finish the film. It was a very, very difficult shoot by the end. It had started in early morning glorious sunshine and ended in the darkest English countryside in the rain." Heading in December

• 1:07:56Chris Winterbauer?

  of 2001, as Alex Garland put it, there literally wasn't an ending. So Fox Searchlight says, "Show us the movie and show us how you want to end it." And the ending that they had written, Lizzie, was very, very, very different. You can watch it online. I'm not going to play it because I want to describe it so our audience can hear it. But they did shoot this. Fox Searchlight paid for it. Selena and Hannah drive Jim not to the countryside, but to a hospital. Despite their best efforts to save him, he dies on an operating table of his gunshot wound.

• 1:08:35Chris Winterbauer?

  They then, holding each other, exit the hospital as we stay in the room with Jim, much the way that we first met him when he wakes up from his coma, and the doors close and we cut to black, and Selena and Hannah's fates are left unknown at the end of the film.

• 1:08:53Lizzie Bassett?

  Let me guess, somebody was like, "There's no franchise potential in that. You get him off that hospital bed and you put him in the countryside."

• 1:09:00Chris Winterbauer?

  Kind of. So, this ending was tested, and according to Alex Garland, quote, "It tested really badly. Not just badly, but really badly." And the consensus seems to be, not a concern about franchise potential because it was an indie film, but that the movie itself was so bleak.

• 1:09:20Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, it would be too rough, I think.

• 1:09:22Chris Winterbauer?

  And things had taken such a dark turn with Frank's death, and then the soldiers having the ulterior motive of rape in the third act, that this felt like the third step down into hell with no chance of hope at the end.

• 1:09:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:36Chris Winterbauer?

  And it was just too, too brutal. So, Andrew McDonald says that after Fox saw that ending, they then freed up, quote, "A lot more money to shoot the alternative ending in the Lake District." That's the ending that we actually see, that's in the Lake District at this cottage.

• 1:09:52Lizzie Bassett?

  What I like about the actual ending, though, is that in some ways it is just as bleak, because, you know, it seems like, oh, they're gonna flag down this plane that we've just seen, and it's gonna save them, but then the very last moment in the film is, I think for sure he saw us this time, meaning they've clearly seen them before. They've flown over them before, they haven't stopped, they haven't come to get them. That's my interpretation of it, is that they are just leaving them on the island, which they kind of insinuate.

• 1:10:19Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, man, I did not read it that way, but that's a really interesting reading.

• 1:10:23Lizzie Bassett?

  I think it's flown over multiple times, and that's why they keep making the sign bigger and bigger.

• 1:10:27Chris Winterbauer?

  I agree.

• 1:10:28Lizzie Bassett?

  And they're not gonna stop for them.

• 1:10:29Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, I felt like because they showed the POV of the jet, and like you hear the communications.

• 1:10:34Lizzie Bassett?

  But you don't hear what they're saying. I think it's intentional. I could be wrong, but my interpretation at the end is that...

• 1:10:40Chris Winterbauer?

  They call it the hopeful ending, so I...

• 1:10:43Lizzie Bassett?

  Because they're alive, Chris. I don't think, I don't know, I don't know. I don't think they're coming for them.

• 1:10:49Chris Winterbauer?

  I don't know. Selena's smiling, that's why I take it as hopeful, but, well, it's great. I'm glad it's open to interpretation. I never had that interpretation.

• 1:10:56Lizzie Bassett?

  Hey, there's two more sequels, so they must not really come to get them.

• 1:10:59Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, let's talk about those in a minute, so. This ending required some interesting changes and pickups, Lizzie. So the basement scene in which Jim is chained up to the radiator and the sergeant is talking about, "Y'all have gone insane. They're doing normal things across the world." Like that whole beat, that was added because they needed to come up with the idea that the rest of the world was not infected. Because if you remember, when Selina is explaining the infection to Jim earlier, she makes the comment, "There were reports of infected in Paris and New York."

• 1:11:28Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 1:11:29Chris Winterbauer?

  And so they needed to clarify, "Wait, wait, wait, maybe the whole world is not infected." Because the original plan was the whole world was infected. And it was then a cross-production that they thought, "Oh, maybe only the UK is infected and we have been quarantined as an island."

• 1:11:41Lizzie Bassett?

  I love that.

• 1:11:42Chris Winterbauer?

  So that was developed across production. They then added the moment of Jim seeing the jet after he's gone over the wall in the third act. That POV of the jet was shot by Boyle in his back garden.

• 1:11:53Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, wow. Just a random jet?

• 1:11:55Chris Winterbauer?

  That's a random jet. He just went out for a few days and shot jets. And that's another key advantage of shooting on Mini DV.

• 1:12:00Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 1:12:00Chris Winterbauer?

  He could just go and shoot it himself. So, speaking of jets, they could not afford to create a CGI fighter jet flying over the characters for the final cottage sequence that ends the film. Instead of spending 70,000 pounds that they didn't have on a visual effects shot that they couldn't afford, production designer David Bryan decided to get a real jet. Quote, "So I made lots of phone calls and I found a Hunter jet in Nice."

• 1:12:26Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 1:12:26Chris Winterbauer?

  "That jet that flies over is real, although it is not an American jet. Despite the pilots being ADR'd with what sounds like American English, that plane is actually Finnish." There was one other ending that they considered very late in post-production, and it's very different. I'll walk you through it, but you guys can see it on YouTube, read by Alex Garland and Danny Boyle. Danny Boyle does a fantastic job reading the dialogue. And it is fully storyboarded with music and everything. In this version, Frank gets infected, Selina screams at Jim to kill Frank, and the soldiers never show up.

• 1:13:07Chris Winterbauer?

  Jim subdues Frank, traps him and wraps him inside of a tarp with the hope that the answer to infection means a cure and that they can cure Frank. They then all arm themselves with rifles and machine guns. They drive on to a deserted hospital. They realize it's an animal testing facility. In fact, it's the chimp testing facility from the very beginning of the movie. They hole up, they discover a man barricaded inside. There's some character stuff and basically we reveal a full body blood transfusion can cure the infection. And this is where Danny Boyle says this version doesn't work at all because we specifically say earlier, one drop of blood is enough to cause infection.

• 1:13:51Chris Winterbauer?

  How could you get every drop of blood out of somebody's body? But in this storyboarded version, Jim decides to basically transfer all of his blood into Frank's body and then Frank's blood into his. So Jim becomes infected and you end the movie with Frank, Selena, Hannah leaving and Jim is strapped to the same table that the chimp was at the very beginning of the movie, infected. And the TV monitors turn on and start playing that footage that the movie opens with again. So it's like a perfect bookend to the very beginning. Hmm. It's really interesting. It's like a very interesting, you know, alternative version of the movie. I don't think it works super well emotionally, you know, necessarily. But if you watch it, one thing that's really interesting is that it feels very cinematic. And I think a big part of that is the music.

• 1:14:35Chris Winterbauer?

  I personally have found that the music from this movie has always stuck with me, like specifically that main 28 Days Later theme. It's shown up kind of in a lot of different things to like. Yeah. Right. So Danny Boyle reached out to composer John Murphy with a really compelling pitch. Quote, "I think I'm going to make this zombie home movie. No one is really that interested and maybe no one will go to see it, but it means that we can do whatever we want on it. Are you in?" End quote.

• 1:15:04Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 1:15:05Chris Winterbauer?

  It sounded bold. It sounded unconventional. It sounded like John Murphy. So John Murphy was a Liverpool-born multi-instrumentalist. He'd been a session musician. He was a songwriter. And early in his career, he crossed paths with director Vadim Jean at this pub. And Vadim was editing a documentary for a mutual friend. They get to talking and Vadim says, you know, I'm gonna direct a movie. And Murphy's like, well, I write, I write music. And Vadim was like, well, you just send me some songs. And it's, it sounds like it's kind of just two guys, you know, bullshitting in a pub. But Murphy and his partner, David Hughes, they record a few tracks. They send them over. And they figure, we're never gonna hear from this guy again. And then a few months later, a producer calls and says, hey, we like your music. Can you guys score this movie for us? We have a budget of 250 pounds.

• 1:15:49Chris Winterbauer?

  And they say, yeah, of course. So we know how to score a film. Then they buy the book, How to Write a Film Score. They get drunk. They don't read the book. They score the movie, Leon the Pig Farmer, and it is a surprise festival hit. And so by the late 90s, they scored Guy Ritchie's Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. And then Murphy himself scored Ritchie's kind of bigger breakout film, Snatch, in the year 2000.

• 1:16:12Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 1:16:13Chris Winterbauer?

  So Boyle and Murphy originally tried to do something that's a score that's not really a score. And Liz, you covered this film. What they're trying to do is evoke the birds. Which, quote, wasn't even music. Bernard Ehrman was using The Sound of Birds to create this collage. So they used old mics and radios. They create this kind of crazy lo-fi collage. And according to John Murphy, it was unwatchable. He said it was so cool and unwatchable. So he tries to get set up at Parr Street Studios in Liverpool, where I think he'd worked as a session musician. And this is a pretty famous studio. Maybe most famously or most broadly known would be Coldplay's, Parachutes, and Rush of Blood to the Head were both recorded at Parr Street. But they have no recording rooms available. All they have was, quote, a beer room.

• 1:16:56Chris Winterbauer?

  It is a storage closet. So Murphy says, that's fine. He sets up a tiny studio in this windowless room. And he said that it was so depressing that that allowed him to create the final sound that they were working for.

• 1:17:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Nice.

• 1:17:08Chris Winterbauer?

  For the movie. So I'm gonna play a brief clip of John Murphy talking to Spitfire Audio about the unexpected inspiration for the last bit of music that would become kind of the most iconic 28 Days Later theme.

• 1:17:23Speaker 06

  At the end, that, you know, the whole climax to it. Came about because I'd already written a couple of versions for it and it just wasn't working and I was kind of grabbing at straws really and I remembered this song I'd written

• 1:17:39Speaker 06

  a few years earlier that had a really cool backing track to it and the bit of the film that I needed to do was, you know, the big scene where the soldiers are in the house and it builds up to the mayhem and Jim comes out. So I started laying up bits of music and I found this song I did and so I laid it up against picture. I literally just pressed go on the CD player somewhere in that bit of the movie and it was just one of them crazy, insane, lucky things where it just, it landed on all the right moments, it landed on hit points, it built up there and I was watching it going, oh, this is gonna be perfect, you know?

• 1:18:22Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 1:18:22Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, so he basically, he literally just takes one of his old songs and that becomes "In the House" in a heartbeat. That is the defining track that has been used across all of these films. It was, it's actually been sampled for a number of other movies as well. And again, what I love about that track, as you're a musician, Lizzie, is it's just rhythmically kind of unrelenting. It just goes, goes, goes. It's like a zombie. It just keeps coming and builds and never speeds up, but just layers more and more instruments on top of it. And there's just a couple of other musical things I want to point out that are really fun. Obviously, Brian Enoz, they use his "An Ending Ascent", and there's a really beautiful rendition of "Ave Maria" that they made for the movie that I'm sure you remember, Lizzie, from the road trip sequences. That's really wonderful.

• 1:19:08Chris Winterbauer?

  There were a couple of songs Boyle didn't get that you guys should check out. Laurie Anderson's "Oh Superman", which is very on the nose about mom and dad and that was gonna play when Jim discovers his parents. It's a really wonderful song. Check it out. She declined, actually. She passed on the project for personal reasons. And he also wanted "Hitzville UK" by The Clash, but Boyle was persuaded against using it, unclear if for creative or financial reasons. And that's the one song where he's like, I really kick myself for not using that song. Can you guess, Lizzie, the most expensive piece of music used in this movie? You're not going to guess. It is Frosty the Snowman, which plays in the background as they come into Frank and Hannah's apartment. And so he said that that is actually the most expensive piece of licensed music that

• 1:19:53Chris Winterbauer?

  they have in the entire movie.

• 1:19:54Lizzie Bassett?

  Interesting.

• 1:19:56Chris Winterbauer?

  So what's interesting is that the first piece of music put in the film, East Hastings by Godspeed You, Black Emperor, it's what builds under Jim desperately searching London. They actually experimented with not having that music in the film, and they had him walking through London completely silent. But when the car alarm went off, when he went up to that car, it was such a big jump scare that it was too jarring for the audience. So they laid the music back in, and they actually cut that scene of Jim on the bridge with that music playing before they'd begun principal photography. And that's the moment that Boyle knew this movie is going to work, because that song and that scene worked so well. He may not have felt that way after the first test screening. They had a test screening in Soho. According to Boyle, it was like 10 people who had worked on the film, and then 20 supposedly random people, who are apparently all just friends from New Zealand.

• 1:20:41Chris Winterbauer?

  And so the person who was supposed to pick random people just went to a pub, got 20 Kiwis, and brought them into the movie, and they all hated it.

• 1:20:48Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:20:49Chris Winterbauer?

  They said it was terrible. They, it was so bad, there's nothing you could do. Like, this is like, there's no way to fix it. It's terrible. And that might have helped Boyle, because Peter Rice of Fox Searchlight was actually at the screening, and he knew the movie was better than this reaction and that they shouldn't freak out about it. So, the cottage ending wasn't shot until October of 2002. So that Lake District ending, they shoot it in October of 2002. That is shot on 35mm film. By the way, it's the one part that's not mini-devious.

• 1:21:17Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, it looks different.

• 1:21:19Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, also, the flashback with his parents is super eight. Murphy had to shave his head. Again, he wasn't happy about that, because he was on other projects. Naomi Harris is wearing a wig. They shoot that sequence. They did also try a different version where they mashed up the hospital and the Lake District. So like, Jim dies in the hospital, but then Naomi Harris and Hannah survive, and they, you basically get the scene with the jet without Jim.

• 1:21:41Lizzie Bassett?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:21:41Chris Winterbauer?

  They tried a bunch of versions of it. They locked the most hopeful version, or according to Lizzie, the darkest version, right before a November 1st premiere in the UK. So they were shooting this movie within weeks of its release date.

• 1:21:54Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 1:21:55Chris Winterbauer?

  It does modestly well at the UK box office. Six million pounds against a roughly five million pound budget. They screen it at the Sundance Film Festival in January of 2003, and then it goes wide in the United States for the summer of 2003. And even though Danny Boyle says this isn't a zombie movie, audiences were actually primed for a zombie movie because Resident Evil had released spring of the prior year and had made a hundred million dollars against a $30 million budget. So 28 Days Later was a surprise smash hit in the United States. It released limited 1,500 theaters, but it grossed $45 million in the United States. Fox Searchlight even did a second run in July on 840 screens where they screened the second alternate ending.

• 1:22:38Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:22:39Chris Winterbauer?

  In the hospital where Jim dies as like a what if after the screened ending. Reviews were generally positive. On the one hand, Variety said, "It is a, quote, 'faux low-budget zombie pick that shows a rather arrogant disdain for its audience in between occasional flashes of flair.'" But the New York Times was a lot more positive. "When 28 Days Later is not scaring you silly, it invites you to reflect seriously on the fragility of modern civilization," end quote. And I find myself in line with Fangoria's position. "Pastiche's aren't supposed to work this well, but the humanity Garland brings to the writing and the ferocity of Danny Boyle's direction allow 28 Days Later to live up to that oft-used claim. It reinvents the subgenre. For all the moments when it puts you in the mind of Romero's films and other antecedents,

• 1:23:23Chris Winterbauer?

  28 Days Later leaves you with the feeling that it couldn't have been made at any other time than today," end quote.

• 1:23:28Lizzie Bassett?

  Agree.

• 1:23:29Chris Winterbauer?

  I kind of liked that review the most. Now, Lizzie, we lived through it. The legacy of this film was obviously massive. Any zombie films you remember from your adolescence, pubescent years that may have been inspired by this?

• 1:23:43Lizzie Bassett?

  I don't know. All of them. Everything.

• 1:23:46Chris Winterbauer?

  Shaun of the Dead, I Am Legend, the Dawn of the Dead remake, Doomsday, Dead Snow, Zombieland, World War Z, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Warm Bodies.

• 1:23:57Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, they're really reaching at a certain point.

• 1:23:59Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. And of course, The Walking Dead. Now, really quick note, The Walking Dead also opens with a character waking up from a coma into the-

• 1:24:05Lizzie Bassett?

  I was gonna say.

• 1:24:06Chris Winterbauer?

  They didn't rip each other off. They were basically written contemporaneous to one another, one in the United States, one in the UK. Both of them ripped off other things, you know what I mean? But they didn't rip off each other.

• 1:24:16Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 1:24:17Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, of course, as we mentioned, Boyle goes on to win an Oscar for Slumdog Millionaire, along with Anthony Don Mantle, Killian Murphy for Oppenheimer, Naomi Harris for Moonlight, Brendan Gleeson nominated for Banshees of Inisherin, Alex Garland, Best Screenplay, Ex Machina. John Murphy has scored bigger and bigger movies. James Gunn's Superman reboot, most recently.

• 1:24:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 1:24:36Chris Winterbauer?

  Megan Burns retired from acting, and oddly enough, Fox Searchlight was the entity that did not survive. So let's talk briefly, Lizzie, about the sequel, as folks are about to see it, hopefully. Fox and DNA Films both control the rights to the franchise, 50/50, basically. In 2006, Fox launches Fox Atomic. It's a youth horror label. It's kind of, let's try to get young people to come see horror movies that are cheaper to make. Think Blumhouse before Blumhouse.

• 1:25:06Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:06Chris Winterbauer?

  Kind of the idea. So its first big job is to co-finance and release 28 Weeks Later with 20th Century Fox. So if you guys haven't seen it, 28 Weeks Later is the sequel to 28 Days Later. Boyle and Garland are only tangentially involved in the film. It was directed, I think Juan Carlos Fresnadillo directed it, Jeremy Renner, Rose Byrne. Garland, at the time, says that they've mapped out a story for a third film, but by 2009, Fox Atomic goes defunct after a series of flops. So the franchise splits. 20th Century now owns 28 Weeks Later, and Fox Searchlight slash DNA owns 28 Days Later. So in 2010, Garland says, nobody can agree what to do with a sequel because neither entity can agree with the other on

• 1:25:51Chris Winterbauer?

  what this third movie should be. So Garland allegedly sent Boyle a draft for a movie called 28 Months Later in 2014 or early 2015, but they can't do anything with it since Fox won't play ball. In 2019, Disney buys Fox, and so Disney now owns 28 Days and 28 Weeks Later, but they're each under their own contracts. And Disney isn't exactly known for horror.

• 1:26:14Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 1:26:15Chris Winterbauer?

  So it seems like with this purchase, the 28 franchise is dead. But the pandemic hits, and all of a sudden, there's this renewed interest in 28 Days Later because of all these images of empty public spaces that are so evocative of Killian Murphy wandering London. So in 2022, the 20-year distribution license on 28 Days Later expires. The movie falls off Disney Plus and digital stores, and Andrew McDonald sees an opportunity. He buys out the remaining Fox Searchlight stake and sells the 28 Days Later rights and sequel rights to Sony and Columbia Pictures. And so now, this summer, we get a direct sequel to 28 Days Later,

• 1:26:57Chris Winterbauer?

  23 years later, that has to completely skirt 28 Weeks Later, which is still owned by Disney.

• 1:27:05Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:27:06Chris Winterbauer?

  But having just seen 28 Years Later, they pull a shot from 28 Weeks Later and include it in the opening scenes of this film. And the way that they set up the movie with the text on screen allows 28 Weeks Later to technically still be canon, even though it's not really a continuation of that story. If you're interested, we are going to release a bonus episode at the end of this week in which Lizzie and I discuss 28 Years Later and the creative ways in which Danny Boyle and Alex Garland continue the legacy of the 2002 original. That will be available on the ad-free feed for our $5 Patreons.

• 1:27:47Chris Winterbauer?

  So if you're interested in listening, head to www.patreon.com/whatwentwrongpodcast and sign up. And that is the story of 28 Days Later. Thank you, Lizzie, for venturing back into the moldy, crusty, zombified early 2000s with me. And I have to ask you, what went right?

• 1:28:06Lizzie Bassett?

  I think a lot went right. I mean, there's so much that went right here, and I imagine you're going to give it to someone behind the camera, so I will hold off on that. I think the actors, the casting, particularly Killian Murphy and Brendan Gleeson. I think maybe most of all Brendan Gleeson. In order for something like this to work, and I think often in order for these more sort of found-footage-y type films to work, I think you have to rely so much on the strength of your actors because there's really no hiding any hiccups in their performances, and they are just all pitch-perfect in this. And I've said this before, I am a huge, huge fan of casting unknowns, particularly in movies like this where you need to have the question of whether or not people are going to survive.

• 1:28:50Lizzie Bassett?

  I don't need to see, you know, Brad Pitt, Leonardo DiCaprio cast at the beginning of this because I assume they're not going to die. I would like to be on the edge of my seat, wondering who's going to survive. So I will say, really, I guess the casting director, they did an incredible job in this movie.

• 1:29:05Chris Winterbauer?

  Gail Stevens. Yeah. Fantastic. Shout out to Gail Stevens. I, yes, you're right, Lizzie. I'm going to give mine, although I, I will just also add Naomi Harris, who I also really like her character in this film and the way she plays her. And I like that they kind of invert some stereotypical gender expectations where there's, there's actually a comment in the DVD commentary where Garland makes the point that in the beginning of the film, Selena and Christopher Eccleston's characters are actually kind of more morally aligned than in terms of like, they'll do anything to survive than Jim's character, which I think is interesting. And anyway, I think her performance is really wonderful. I will give mine to Danny Boyle. He's such an interesting guy. I really liked listening to his commentary

• 1:29:50Chris Winterbauer?

  on the DVD commentary. He's very well spoken. He has a really lovely voice. And I think it takes a lot of introspection and a good understanding of self to step back and say, hey, I am perhaps not succeeding in the way I would like to succeed in this type of film with something like The Beach, a big budget movie, and say, I'm going to go back and make something small and that is not beneath me. And this is what the work is about and I'm going to make something great and I'm open to doing something different. And I think he's a director who's consistently challenged himself to try new things throughout his career. And I am just very glad that he did. And I think that this is a movie that plays within a very well-established sandbox. And even though it is a total pastiche,

• 1:30:34Chris Winterbauer?

  it also is strikingly original in the way that it approaches the visuals. And that's thanks to Danny Boyle and Anthony Doddmantle, who's a fantastic cinematographer. So I'll give it to them.

• 1:30:44Lizzie Bassett?

  I really enjoyed this. Thank you, Chris.

• 1:30:46Chris Winterbauer?

  Of course. Thank you.

• 1:30:47Lizzie Bassett?

  And I'm excited for 28 years later. I'm going to go see it.

• 1:30:50Chris Winterbauer?

  All right. What do we have coming up next week?

• 1:30:53Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, Chris, the hills are alive with the eyes. The hills have eyes. The Hills Have Eyes the Musical, so what we will be covering.

• 1:31:03Chris Winterbauer?

  That's a great idea.

• 1:31:04Lizzie Bassett?

  Somebody write it. No, we will be covering The Sound of Music, which I originally thought was gonna be our first full-fledged musical here on What Went Wrong. It's not. Our first ever episode, of course, was Andrew Lloyd Webber's Cats, which, say what you will about it, I believe it is technically a musical. So The Sound of Music is our first, let's say, successful live-action musical that we will be covering.

• 1:31:29Chris Winterbauer?

  Because we also had Snow White, which is kind of a musical as well, but it's animated.

• 1:31:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, we'll come back for three hours with Julie Andrews in the Alps.

• 1:31:37Chris Winterbauer?

  As the Von Trapps realize, "It's a trap!" And they escape Austria. I'm very excited. Thank you guys so much for sticking around for our coverage of 28 Days Later. We hope to someday cover 28 Years Later, because they're doing a lot of really interesting things with that movie from a filming perspective, shooting on the iPhone, et cetera. If you guys are interested in supporting this podcast, there are four easy ways to do it. Number one, you can just hit the follow button on whatever podcatcher you are using to listen to us. Number two, you can leave us a rating and review on that podcatcher. Number three, you can follow us on social media, Instagram. That's actually the only place we are, so feel free to check out What Went Wrong Pod on Instagram. Number four, you can join our Patreon.

• 1:32:18Chris Winterbauer?

  Patreon is a platform that connects podcasters like ourselves with audience members like you. You can join for free. We post additional information, corrections, occasional musings, announcements. You can join for $1 and vote on films that we will cover in the future. The Sound of Music, the winner of a poll, a musical poll.

• 1:32:35Lizzie Bassett?

  That's right.

• 1:32:36Chris Winterbauer?

  For $5, you can get an ad-free RSS feed, and for $50, you can get a shout-out. We're gonna read them normally this week, because next week, we are going big. But our deepest thank you to Kay Cabana, Cameron Smith, Suzanne Johnson, Ben Scheindleman, Scary Carrie, The Provost Family, Where the O's Sound Like O's, Zach Everton, Galen, David Friskelanti, Adam Moffat, Film It Yourself, Chris Zaka, Kate Elrington, MXodia, CGraceB, Jen Mostromarino, Christopher Elner, Blaze Ambrose, Jerome Wilkinson, Rural Jur.

• 1:33:22Chris Winterbauer?

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• 1:34:02Chris Winterbauer?

  Rosemary Southward, Tom Kristin, Jason Frankel, Somon Chinani, Mike McGrath, Lon Relod, and Lydia Howes. We could not make this podcast without you. Thank you again for your continued support, and I promise, next week's shoutouts are gonna take you to the top of the Swiss Alps.

• 1:34:25Lizzie Bassett?

  All right. Thank you. And we will see you all next week for The Sound of Music.

• 1:34:31Chris Winterbauer?

  Hello, goodbye, until we meet again.

• 1:34:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Are those even the words?

• 1:34:36Chris Winterbauer?

  Nope.

• 1:34:43Speaker 07

  Go to patreon.com/whatwentwrongpodcast to support What Went Wrong, and check out our website at whatwentwrongpod.com. What Went Wrong is a Sad Boom podcast presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Editing and music by David Bowman. Research for this episode provided by Jesse Winterbauer, with additional editing from Karen Krebsaw.