Hello, this is Danny Boyle, the director of 28 Days Later.
I'm Alex Garland, writer.
(Danny) I don't know whether Fox ever noticed this,
but we shifted the timing of the music
on this opening credit sequence on their logo.
(Alex) This is stuff we mocked up.
(Danny) When we first started this,
Alex wrote all these images for the beginning,
a lot of which were based on Sorious Samura's footage from Sierra Leone.
We debated at one point about using real footage
of terrible civil unrest and death and violence.
We decided, rightly, I think, that we wouldn't use anything that involved any real deaths.
The footage that is in there that does involve deaths, like the necklace thing,
it was all mocked up.
- (Alex) In London. - (Danny) On a very nice day in Docklands.
We tried to make it look like real footage from the past.
We shot the film on DV and the news footage at the beginning
helps you into the slight different quality of the visuals.
This is Johnny, who's a chimp from Stuttgart
which is where we had to go to film this sequence.
There are only two working troupes of chimps for use in the film industry.
One's in Los Angeles and one's in Stuttgart.
It's a kind of family circus. Amazing people.
They were very kind to us when we shot there over three or four days.
We did debate having different nationalities.
For instance, we were gonna make them German.
At one point we were gonna make them Scandinavian. Then Japanese.
Even at point, we thought of making them American.
(Alex) But the quarantine idea eventually locked them down to the UK.
This was really where we were gonna try and get as much exposition as we needed
out of the way in this opening sequence.
I suppose we've got a little bit dropped in later,
but we had this idea which was to set the premise up as quickly as possible,
And then return to it as little as possible.
(Danny) It looks very distressing for the chimps,
the cages that they're in and the bed that he's lying on.
But we were guided completely,
and took in what we were allowed to do and the sizes of the cages,
by the guy who looks after the chimps.
He breeds them. He brings them up from birth and keeps them until they're in their 405.
Interestingly, one reason there are so few working chimps any more
is that because of recent legislation, they're not allowed to put down chimps any more.
You can only work them until they're seven or eight years old
and they live to about 40 or 50.
But for the last 20 or 30 years of their life they're very difficult to work with.
This man works with them right through. And they adore him. They were wonderful.
This is the setup, as Alex was talking about.
When I first read this scene, I thought what a wonderful premise it was for a film,
this idea of a psychological virus.
We've all seen movies with viruses escaping,
but they're usually some kind of biological or chemical agent.
But the idea - which is fantasy, which is a slight sci-fi premise - of a psychological virus
I just think is a brilliant original idea and a fantastic premise to start the film on.
(Alex) This sequence is interesting for me
because I think this scene more than any other is pure genre in the way that it's written.
But in the way that it's shot and the way that Danny executed it,
it pulls it away from that.
It was quite strange for me watching this for the first time
because I had to get used to that different approach.
With the rest of the film, it was supposed to be moving away from genre,
but this felt almost like a set piece.
But the execution of it, I think, is terrific.
(Danny) It's always useful to remember the very first time you read a script.
That's the last time you're as close in experience to the audience's, seeing it fresh.
This was the thing that stuck in my mind, the use of the title - as a subtitle.
There was no title. I thought that was brilliant. I love that.
So we were determined not to have any names up front.
(Alex) That's our Tootsie cut.
(laughter)
In Tootsie Dustin Hoffman realises,
in order to make it as an actor, he has to dress as a woman.
Then you just cut to him walking down the street as a woman.
You never show him dressing up. I think they show that later.
That's what we did here. We tried to cut to the chase.
(Danny) But we put him in green pyjamas instead.
(Alex) Or no pyjamas.
(Danny) There are two types of hospitals in Britain.
There's the more Victorian type.
Then there's the modern type, usually associated with private healthcare.
But this is a National Health hospital in Acton.
It's a day hospital, for day operations. It had a wonderful modern quality about it.
We always try to emphasise the modern in British life.
It's just a choice, rather than looking backwards.
It has a feeling about it almost of a hotel, somehow, a modern hotel,
especially in the wider shots coming up.
Cillian was very worried about doing these scenes naked.
We had the usual closed set.
Nobody was allowed to make any jokes all day in case they were misinterpreted.
We made a big choice about whether there were gonna be bodies.
Indeed we did shoot some bodies in this opening sequence,
but we decided to follow one of our instincts which was that,
rather than trying to litter the world with corpses,
we were better to make it almost symbolic.
The emptiness of the place stood for something that had gone wrong
rather than specific reality of corpses lying around and blood everywhere.
(Alex) Atmosphere and surrealism over plot requirements.
It's like an aesthetic decision.
But it's something we've been picked up on. "Why aren't there more bodies around?"
There's not really a good logical reason for it in storytelling terms,
it's just because it feels more interesting.
Hopefully, that's a legitimate reason.
(Danny) My life, since I've become involved in making films,
has centred around two questions so far.
One was "How did you get Ewan McGregor to come out of the toilet in Trainspotting?"
The second was "What was it like to work with Leonardo DiCaprio?"
I'm grateful that both of them have been replaced by
"How did you shoot the London scenes on this one?"
The answer is in the most obvious way you'd expect.
We managed somehow to close the streets down, albeit only for brief moments of time.
We used multicameras - the digital cameras.
We filmed for maybe 90 seconds or two minutes
where the traffic was held back by these wonderful traffic marshals that we used,
who were students and friends.
My daughter Grace was one of them.
Holding back the traffic at different times.
And we managed to get this footage that is a great advert for the film.
It's one of things that's helped us sell the premise of the film enthrallingly, I hope.
(Alex) I think, somewhere around here, there's one of our deliberate mistakes.
I've always imagined that there's a car moving in the background.
It's not here. Where is it? It's along the Embankment.
- (Danny) Alex is convinced there's a car. - (Alex) It was while you were talking.
We think he's just trying to undermine the film. (laughs)
(coughing)
- I've got a terrible cold. Sorry about that. - (Alex) He's had a big weekend.
You wouldn't be allowed to do this. We did this before September 11th.
To put a bus on its side in Whitehall,
outside Downing Street where the prime minister's residence is,
you wouldn't be allowed to now.
We only just got away with it, helped by the inventiveness of Mark Tildesley, the designer,
who swore blind to them that he could get it in and out of there in 15 minutes.
And he proved himself right. I think they were surprised that we kept to our word.
We said to these places "We'll go in and we'll shoot
and we'll be out of there by 7.30 or 8 o'clock in the morning."
They're used to the bullshit that film people are full of,
where they end up taking 18 hours to shoot it.
But each day we kept to our word.
This stuff is based on a photograph out of Cambodia,
after Pol Pot was driven out of Phnom Penh.
There was money all in the streets because it was useless.
There's various references like that that we had,
which just gave us a visual image to add to details of the story
as he makes his way through the city.
This is a very busy part of London - Tottenham Court Road.
And Centre Point, the famous empty building. Or partially empty now.
We didn't use music at first in this sequence
and that moment, with the alarm going off, used to give you a heart attack
if you didn't have some background music.
We used this track from Godspeed You! Black Emperor,
French Canadian anarchists who allowed us to use their music,
this driving, apocalyptic, climactic music
which I think is a wonderful addition to the film.
(Alex) This is this image that became...
Prescient is not the right word because it's after the fact,
but this was shot pre-September 11th.
What was it from? Was it Peking?
(Danny) It was an earthquake in China years ago,
where they'd done the same thing of trying to contact each other
when normal communication breaks down.
But we came up with the idea because there were billboards around Eros,
the statue in Piccadilly Circus.
We thought "How can we use that?"
If you're flowing, something good comes out of things.
Good ides come out of problems.
I have to thank the girl who spent three months writing up all those notices.
We did a lot of filming in East London.
This is a church in... not in Spitalfields, in Limehouse in East London.
It's one of the famous Hawksmoor churches.
There are seven of them, which are supposedly in the shape of a pentangle.
(Alex) Something like that.
(Danny) Some Satanic thing. Don't know whether it's true.
(Alex) If you read From Hell by Alan Moore, he goes into a lot of detail about those churches.
(Danny) This was fun, telling the church warden what we were gonna write on his wall.
But we were honest and he gave us permission.
You can just about read it, which is how we wanted it to look.
What we were saying earlier about the bodies in the street,
when you decide on that and clear them out,
we came up with this idea that we'd put all the bodies in a church.
That was sort of influenced by stories that we'd heard
about Rwanda and places like that, with corpses ending up in churches.
We thought it'd just be a dumping house for corpses,
some kind of mortuary or makeshift cemetery for the corpses.
It felt like the film was evolving then, out of the circumstances,
and that he was understanding as he went along in the way that we are.
He knows nothing like we know virtually nothing.
All those corpses that you see in the church are actually volunteers who turned up for us.
I think we gave them a free cup of tea or something.
A generous offering for them to come for a few hours. They were students.
We couldn't afford to hire extras in the conventional way. We didn't have the money.
They were people who just turned up and helped us.
The man who played the priest was an enormous help.
He did lots of workshops with us about movement.
He's a brilliant movement artist.
I did all these different states, showing the actors...
I haven't got time to go into it here, but he was an enormous help
in developing the physical movement of the Infected, which he starts off there -
and is an erratic, frenetic, violent, impatient gesture,
a bit like the feeling of rage, really.
(Alex) This was the day everyone wanted to be on set, to see this petrol station blow up.
200 grand. It was the most expensive single thing we did, wasn't it?
(Danny) Apart from your fee, Alex, yeah. No, I'm only kidding.
(Alex) Was I earning over 200 grand? I'll have to bring that up.
(Danny) Actually, I think it cost L250,000 in total.
It seems like, and is, an enormous amount of money, obviously.
But what we always feel is that when you put the film out to be for a mainstream audience,
they're not gonna say "It's a British film, we don't mind if the explosions aren't good."
They want it to be as good as a Mel Gibson film,
as whatever's out there, that you're competing with in the multiplex.
So I think it's money well spent and it's the end of our first reel,
so there's an extraordinary sequence which starts with London empty
and builds to this incredible explosion across it.
We used many cameras. It's brilliantly cut by our editor, Chris Gill,
who did some wonderful cutting on the film to make the best of our limited resources.
That's based on a famous photograph from Northern Ireland
of people escaping from a bomb blast
by just happening to be in the gaps between windows as the bomb goes off inside.
This is Canary Wharf tube station on the Docklands Light Railway
which is a modern piece of infrastructure in London.
The idea of this - although we partly built some of this in the studio -
was that it was a shop in a tube station where they hide,
where they live for a bit, these two other survivors that he's meeting.
(Alex) It was a weirdly difficult scene, this one.
I never felt that, from my end, I cracked it really.
It was a tricky one because, like the opening scene, it required exposition.
Fitting exposition into conversation and dialogue is a nightmare.
It's an art and I was really struggling here.
Danny did a shot from Jim over to Selena, which is coming up quite soon,
that allowed for us to play around a bit in ADR,
to mess around with what was being said.
It never felt quite right to me.
In fact, we shot this scene twice, didn't we?
(Danny) Yeah, we reshot a whole section of it.
We rebuilt half the shot in the studio later and reshot a section of it,
to take account of a slightly different exposition.
(Alex) I think a couple of lines work.
One is when Jim starts asking where people's parents are, and they say "They're dead."
If you can convey information as simply as that, that's the best way to do it.
It gets a lot across very quickly. The audience fills in all the gaps around that quite quickly.
I think it's something to do with confidence,
knowing how much and how little you can put in.
What do you call this? It's not a tracking shot.
(laughter)
- You left me space to piss around in. - (Danny) It's a pan.
- It's an interminable pan. - (Alex) I'm gonna call it a tracking shot.
(Danny) I love the idea of them living off Maltesers and Coke
and junk food that would remain, that has an endless best-by date.
So they end up living off that kind of stuff rather than fresh food.
I thought it was a great image. I loved that.
There was a different joke at the beginning of it, when the guy with the mask came in.
Wasn't it Luke said to Darth Vader "I know what you got for Christmas"?
He said "Why?" "I felt your presence."
- It's like that one, but it was too short. - (Alex) A better joke, actually.
(laughter)
(Danny) That was a different one.
Cill's very good here because he has to take on board so much information,
and keep you rooted in his world.
Your instinct would be to think these people are bullshitting.
"It's some kind of mighty trick that's being played upon me by..."
Who's that guy who plays that trick on you? You've Been Framed?
(Alex) Beadle.
(Danny) That must go through his mind, that it's some mighty TV reality stunt,
but he keeps you rooted in his own dilemma.
This thing about a father figure for him is crucial.
He will not believe that his father, especially, is dead.
That will have to be proved to him.
Through the film, he has a whole series of different father figures that he relates to,
as he searches for himself, in some way.
We had lots of rules for the Infected,
which we thought were terribly important, then ignored them whenever we wanted.
You don't travel at night, you only travel during the day.
(Alex) I don't know. I never saw that as a rule, that night one.
We took lots of liberties with the things that we set up for ourselves.
A big sequence is missing here, it's in the deleted scenes,
where they go through a railway train that has been turned into a hospital.
We cut it eventually because it absolutely poured down that day,
and we couldn't film it in any way that disguised the fact that it wasn't raining.
It's important to the plot that it doesn't rain in London for quite a long time.
We got permission from Docklands Light Railway to let us walk on the railway,
which is very unusual in Britain.
Very grateful to them for that.
This is his parents' home, with the nice Volvo,
which was insisted upon by Anthony Dod Mantle,
the cameraman who lives in Denmark.
Any product placement car-wise has to be a Volvo with him.
I don't know whether he has some deal with Volvo. Perhaps he'll let us know about that.
So this is his family home, which we wanted to feel like it was the ideal family home.
Comfortable and warm.
A place that you would want to, even as an adult, always return to,
as part of your childhood.
Hence it's lit to be yellow, the feeling of warmth -
the way you remember your childhood.
The music here is "Abide With Me",
which has just stopped, actually.
It starts up again in a minute.
We wanted to give some way with the music
that you thought about the history or the culture in Britain, what had gone.
We thought these haunting songs, these hymns, would be a nice way of doing it.
John Murphy did the music for us.
Got this singer he knows in Liverpool to sing them for us,
who gave us very beautiful renditions of that and "Ave Maria" later.
Those two bodies are prosthetics, which are just dazzling.
The prosthetic guys, what they're capable of now is incredible.
They're very unnerving things to be with when you're in the same room.
They're so real.
We invented this later. This wasn't in the original script.
Alex wrote this when we inserted it.
We wanted to connect with him more emotionally, to feel his loss more,
so that you're more moved by him, really.
Something I feel that you learn as a filmmaker
is not to be frightened sometimes of being emotional.
You have a tendency sometimes to be quite cold. You're scared of being sentimental.
But there's also a danger that you don't give people the emotional trip they want,
especially with a story like this.
(Alex) And Cillian was playing it quite blank, in a way, which is a strength,
but there just needed to be something to give it a point of contact with the audience,
so that they were in his head in some way.
(Danny) I love the way this scene is shot. It's always a problem with...
This is a huge dialogue scene, with a vast amount of information in it about the past.
And it's static - people in a room.
You've got that thing: "What do you do? Do you track round?"
We just gave this impression of these faces being crushed into the screen,
just so that you went right inside the people's minds
about what has happened, the scars that are on their brains,
because of what's happened in those 28 days.
And performed very well by Noah and Naomie.
Before things begin to really move on.
(Alex) Selena being tough and pragmatic.
There was a kind of idea that we had
that if Selena had met the character played by Christopher Eccleston,
who appears later in the film, if they'd met at this point, they'd be quite compatible
because they're both these pragmatists
who don't give emotion and humanity much leeway in their pragmatism.
In traditional storytelling terms, she's got a character arc that by the time they do meet,
those two characters are in a different place.
(Danny) Although there's a hint at the end of that scene
that Selena is not sleeping with Mark,
we wanted to give the impression that they were an indispensable couple
so that you felt like you were gonna go forward with three people, all indispensable.
That was one of the reasons why Mark, who is shortly to die -
I hope I'm not spoiling it for you, anybody - has such a long speech,
because we wanted to make you feel totally attached to him,
because of what's gonna happen in a moment.
(Alex) I was just gonna say I think this is one of the most successful sequences in the film.
It just all seems to work so perfectly, this flashback.
I always think flashbacks are very difficult, but it felt so right here.
You shot it on... What?
(Danny) This is shot on Super 8 to give it a different quality.
(Alex) I've gotta be very careful about trying to use technical terms.
(Danny) We wanted to put him in that world as well.
He's literally there as well, in his pyjamas.
That's my back garden at home!
There's my back garden! And there's my door!
The first time he came in through the window, he tripped and fell, which was pretty funny.
We had three balsa wood doors for him to come through.
- Bit of gratuitous violence for everybody. - (Alex) Or not gratuitous.
It says something about the stakes, this sequence.
It makes the audience feel that this won't be entirely comfortable.
(Danny) Yeah.
(Alex) If they haven't felt that already.
I think quite a few won't have felt that until this scene.
We had a Tootsie moment earlier and this is a bit of Psycho,
where you get rid of someone who you think is gonna be a key player.
The next minute they're gone.
It's the shower scene.
(Danny) There's a longer version of that which is pretty unwatchable.
The prosthetic guys can just do anything now. It's very scary.
They can almost do anything and convince you...
somebody's arm is being chopped off.
There's a lot of blood around, and there's a madness around.
She says "Did any of it get in your mouth?" It's a warning about how infectious it is.
Yet there's an abandonment on her part -
she doesn't shield herself from blood.
I always thought that had been a decision she had come to.
If it happened to her, it happened to her,
but the only way that she could protect her life
was being as extreme as possible in the way that she dealt with threat.
She wasn't gonna be inhibited by fear of infection itself.
This is the Docklands. We did a lot of filming down here cos they're very friendly.
Or they were, before September 11th.
It's possible at the weekends to make it feel deserted.
Also, it gives a sense of a different kind of London,
a slightly more plastic, modern London
rather than some of the more traditional stuff you saw at the beginning of the film.
We didn't stop the clocks. They are stopped. Don't know why, but they are.
That was a useful, cheap addition to the film.
Paper drifting through shot is always a good way of suggesting...
- (Alex) Desolation. - (Danny) Apocalypse.
It's very cheap as well!
(Alex) This was one of the scenes that was part of the casting process.
It was Selena's "fall in love and fuck" lines.
There's a bit of Danny's writing here.
Did we keep that ADR line, as they're climbing over the shopping trolleys?
What was it? It's not "Hope we don't have to get out of here."
"What is it about supermarkets and shopping trolleys?"
(Danny) "What is it about tower blocks and shopping trolleys?"
Here it comes. It's about to come now.
(Alex) Don't know why I chose that one to highlight. You've got lots of lines.
I just always remember that one. It was a brilliant line.
(Danny) She just wants to get on with it.
This is a tower block which has since been pulled down.
Just south of the river.
When we got there, there was just the security guard,
but he was letting about a dozen people sleep on the ground floor of it.
Obviously charging them rent too, before they pulled it down.
That was an amazing moment, a glimpse into inner London life there.
(Alex) We spent hours with this scene,
trying to figure out a way of her saying that she was a chemist.
- Do you remember? - (Danny) She says it later.
There are a few hints that she knows what she's talking about.
Although I think you can pick all that stuff up from Elle magazine,
and Prima Donna or whatever it's called.
This is exhausting, running up and down these stairs.
I think this is the most knackered they ever got,
especially Naomie who had to carry this battery pack up to power that lamp.
There was a '50“) battery pack 'm her backpack.
But she had to keep running up and down stairs,
while the endless filming goes on.
Martin Amis once said that filming is a series of delays interrupted by repetitions.
I think it's very true. As a stranger watching a film being made, that's what it looks like.
She could not understand why we wanted to do it again and again.
This is the first sight of this merciless butcher,
who's the wonderful man, Brendan Gleeson.
He really wanted it to feel merciless, how he dealt with them.
Then when you meet him, he's the most gentle, amiable man, or appears to be.
He's the next father figure that Cillian comes to depend on.
That's "Frosty the Snowman" you can hear.
That's the most expensive bit of music in the whole film.
It cost a phenomenal amount of money to pay for that.
Really bizarre, the way these things trip you up.
Late on, you suddenly find out something's hugely expensive.
(Alex) Suddenly, there's just this big injection of warmth into the film
as soon as Brendan Gleeson appears.
Big, smiling guy.
(Danny) With his daughter, played by Megan Burns - his lovely, shy daughter.
Already you get this feeling of this oddball foursome.
Bit of an odd mixture of characters.
They're gonna be together for a bit of a while.
If you wanna see Brendan in something else, he did an amazing film called The General,
a John Boorman film, where he plays Martin Cahill.
You wanna see that for a performance. Fantastic performance by an actor.
This is a tower block. This is where we were filming during September 11th.
It was very bizarre doing a scene with green créme de menthe and salutations
on the day when the world was turning around.
But you just carry on. You'd never know. Look at them - that's actors for you.
The world was turned upside down but you get on and do the script.
This is the realities of life without water, really.
We did have a long sequence in here which I don't think made it into the deleted scenes.
It's just bits where he cut all his hair off and shaved his beard,
which were real at the time.
Of course, it being a film, we had to go back later and make a wig for him
cos we had to pick up some stuff that was shot before we cut his hair.
Sally, our make-up designer, did a great job to coordinate all that.
We were able to film almost sequentially,
those moments excepted where we went back for occasional things.
Everything was done in sequence, which is very unusual for a film.
I think it was the nature of the story that enabled us to schedule it like that.
Bob, our production manager, and Richard Styles, our first, scheduled it like that.
It's a great opportunity for actors.
Ken Loach does that religiously on all his films.
He's a brilliant director,
but one of the reasons he gets brilliant performances out of amateurs
is they can work sequentially so they know where they are each day.
The fish have got the last of the water.
(Alex) Now he reappears as Johnny Depp. Very handsome.
(Danny) This scene, we did shoot in two bits.
There's a moral moment here that Alex wrote in later, between them.
This bit now, these close-ups,
where he basically says "I think they're decent people and I would wait around for them...
She says "You'll get yourself killed."
He won't back down on it, really.
He's growing a bit. He's been lost, really - not surprised, waking up like that.
He's just finding a sense of himself and standing up for himself.
(Alex) It was a setup for one of our potential endings,
where she says "If you think like that you'll get yourself killed."
In one of our endings, that's exactly what happens.
(Danny laughs)
(Danny) Yeah, we'll come onto those. We've got all those different variations to talk about.
(Alex) That's back to the old scene, isn't it? Seamless.
(Danny) That's the old scene and that's the new scene.
- Is it? No. I can't remember now. - (Alex) I dunno.
Then we've got this scene on the rooftop where there's these buckets.
When I turned up in the morning there were only a hundred buckets,
and it looked like three on the rooftop.
I don't often get very insistent about things,
but I insisted on a thousand buckets being got by the afternoon.
That's why some of the buckets are a bit dodgy for collecting water.
There's a laundry basket with huge holes in it, which wouldn't be very useful.
You have to forgive the art department. They got a thousand buckets in a couple of hours,
ready to shoot the scene.
It's a wonderful idea for a scene, I think.
That was why it was important that it hadn't rained yet...
for this scene.
(Alex) I think, on the bad writing front,
this scene has some of the worst, probably the worst in the whole film.
Every time I see Megan, who plays Hannah, doing her lines here,
I feel a terrific surge of guilt for having given her these impossible lines to say
that come straight out of the worst kind of TV drama.
As opposed to good TV drama - there's lots of that.
There's also bad TV drama and some of this would be right at home there.
It's towards the end of this scene where it begins to collapse.
(Danny) This was originally set inside the house
but, because we were shooting sequentially,
we were really bored by the inside of the house.
We just thought "Let's put it out on the balcony."
There was this storm coming and we didn't want it to rain, obviously,
so we had to shoot it very quickly before it started pouring rain.
We would have been forced inside then. We'd have had to invent a reason to go inside.
But they are beginning to bicker and bind together, as a unit.
They don't really have a choice. They've got to stick together.
They're being stuck together without them knowing it.
This is the second hymn that's used here, very craftily snuck in by Murphy.
This is "Ave Maria".
Which actually is a steal from the end of Fantasia.
I don't know if you've seen that. You should watch it. Have you seen the end sequence?
- (Alex) No. You keep telling me to watch it. - (Danny) Absolutely unbelievable visually.
- (Alex) It's nearly Christmas. - (Danny) A good time to see it.
(Alex) No, I meant as a present.
(Danny) There's lots of taxi-driver cab jokes.
I think I gave you a book of taxi-driver jokes! That wasn't in it, that was one of his own.
(Alex) There was a line where he said "I won't go south of the river."
That was the one we should have kept, but, of course, they were south of the river.
This was filmed in Croydon. Then this is back to the Blackwall Tunnel,
which is one of the main routes under the river in London.
The actual tunnel itself is not one of the real tunnels.
It was an unopened - it's since been opened - section of tunnel in Limehouse,
part of the Limehouse Link.
We were very lucky to get that because this is impossible to do without a real location.
Again, Tildesley in the art department did brilliant job piling up these cars.
We had this idea of "Where are all the cars?"
We thought we'd put them all here as though there's been some huge pile-up.
Some massacre or terrible tragedy's happened that's blocked the tunnel.
Or people have created a barricade to try and keep things out.
When you have that idea, you think "We'll drive the taxi over it", which is impossible.
There'd have to be a special rig built to get it across.
It's cut very cleverly by Chris Gill to make it feel like it lasts a long time.
Like it's a real journey over it.
(Alex) It was a hell of a place to film.
I remember the exhaust fumes filling up the whole tunnel.
Everyone wearing masks, feeling their brain cells evaporating
every minute they stayed in there.
(Danny) This is such a cliché, isn't it?
Getting a flat tyre in a tunnel in a horror movie or a zombie movie or whatever it is.
Such a cliche, but you must never be frightened of cliches
because they're very enjoyable - that's why they are clichés.
(Alex) Given the kind of film this is,
there's a moment which is people walking into cellars, holding only a sputtering candle.
This is a bit like that, I suppose.
(Danny) The wide shots of the rats are done brilliantly by the digital-effects house, Clear.
They did us a fantastic job there. They're intercut with closer shots of rats.
We did get complaints from a magazine called Rodent and Marsupial Quarterly
about the stereotypical portrayal of rats,
and they're friendly creatures and why do we keep portraying them as horrible things?
Fairs enough. They are very nice.
- (Alex) They wouldn't run. - (Danny) They're too nice.
They wouldn't run for us and look scary.
They just manage to get away, of course. There you go.
That took two days, that whole sequence in the tunnel.
We only just managed to finish it. We had to do some pick-ups later.
(Alex) You can see the fumes chugging out the back of that cab.
This is Tottenham Court Road. We were very fortunate. Budgens were very keen...
Especially the manager of this branch, he was a big film fan.
And he agreed, if we signed some posters for him - he's a big fan of Trainspotting -
he would let us use the store!
We filmed through the night in it. We did this interesting thing - we didn't light it.
It's actually self-lit by overhead neons.
The only way we could do it in the time, to get the scene shot,
was to avoid the neon lights as much as possible
and then in shots like that, Clear, the digital house, would paint them out.
So they're actually self-lit by the lights in the supermarket store.
So we didn't have to do any lighting.
They took it all out in post and we tried to avoid it as much as possible.
(Alex) That was a little Homer Simpson homage there.
In a way, the whole scene is a respectful nod towards George Romero's Dawn of the Dead
set in a shopping mall, which is one of the great bits of post-apocalytic wish fulfillment,
that you hole yourself up in this consumerist fortress
and this is just a little tiny nod towards that.
One of two big Romero nods in the film. This is the first, really.
Other people would say the whole thing's a nod towards Romero. Maybe it is.
But, consciously, there were two very specific ones and this was the first.
There's an American band on the soundtrack, Grandaddy.
Fantastic band from America.
I love that ending to the scene, the plastic.
(Alex) Redundant plastic.
(Danny) More shopping trolleys.
This was the first shot we ever shot. Andrew and I did this on our own in Cambridgeshire.
We went up and shot some flowers.
We had this ideas of the flowers that had not been cut.
They'd just blossomed and almost waned and died on their own.
Then we turned it to look like a bit of a Van Gogh.
It's one of those mad moments. People say "You should cut that, it's ridiculous."
Other people go "I love that", and you can't really explain it.
I think you sometimes should go with things that aren't rational or explicable.
(Alex) We do that the whole time, I suppose.
(Danny) The film lives in its own world, which is a very healthy place for it to be sometimes.
(Alex) I sometimes think this sequence is one that we might have found harder to do
if we'd been making the film for more money,
and that it required a larger audience in a way,
because our protagonist kills a kid with a baseball bat.
I remember writing this, wondering whether we were going too far at this point.
But actually it works out fine, really.
It's easier to accept that this guy has done that than you'd think.
A hero killing a child goes against what one would expect one could get away with,
but actually it feels quite comfortable.
Like "Of course he's gonna kill the kid. What else is he gonna do?"
That finger, is that a nod or a reference?
(Danny) No, it was just there. I know it looks like Nightmare on Elm Street.
- (Alex) It is a finger? - (Danny) Yeah, it is.
- (Alex) As a coat hook? - (Danny) Yeah.
That's from when Saddam Hussein gassed those people...
- (Alex) The Kurds. - (Danny) That's a reference to that.
The kid here is played by a very good friend of my kids, Grace, Gabriel and Caitlin.
He's called Justine Hackney, and he's incredibly acrobatic.
He does a great job here of getting whacked with a baseball bat.
On the soundtrack, we put all these...
You probably heard him saying - you can hear it a bit too clearly there - "I hate you."
We put all this rolling, incessant vocabulary of the Infected,
kind of screaming at people, like rage.
We put that on them the whole time. Most of the time it's not decipherable,
apart from an attitude.
There were lots of gags we had in about her being a...
- (Alex) Ayrton Senna's kid. - (Danny) A racing-driver's daughter.
Chucking the two-and-a-half ton cab around.
(Alex) Danny wanted it to be Michael Schumacher's daughter.
He's a big Formula 1 fan who insists Schumacher's a better driver than Senna was.
(Danny) Well, I'm afraid so.
We sent Andrew Macdonald, the producer, to Cornwall to get that shot.
(Alex) I read somewhere that they said that's a CG...
- What is it? CG or CGI? - (Danny) You can call them either.
(Alex) A CG shot, the windmills were dropped in, but they weren't.
(Danny) No, they're real. The second one is dropped in, the close-up. That was created.
- (Alex) Maybe that's what they meant. - (Danny) The other one was from Cornwall.
It was a lovely idea - ironically, something kept going that there's no use for any more.
This is an abbey. We had to shoot this within the M25, or just beyond it,
because of financial reasons with the crew.
The location manager, Alex Gladstone, found this for us, which I'd never seen before.
When you get a good crew working, people add things to the script.
He brought this idea up of somewhere to stop for a picnic,
and I loved the idea of the past again.
That they were surrounded by something very, very old.
And the horses were very beautiful.
But one area that looked like it had been destroyed before in a previous generation,
a previous civilisation had collapsed.
It looks like that Max Ernst painting called After the Rain, Aprés la Déluge -
well, the next scene does when they're walking around.
That was done after the war, to suggest the ruin of Europe.
Anyway, that was the idea of it.
But that's what happens when people get involved in the script... I've run out of space.
(Alex) In this scene, it's really our first attempt, having laid a little bit of groundwork,
to try and create a relationship spark between the two of them.
I probably went over this scene more than any other,
because this was the scene that we were using in casting of the two of them.
So we heard this scene again and again and again with lots of different actors.
After all of that, for a while, we dropped it out of the film.
This was cut for a while, this scene.
It came back again because something needed to happen
where the two of them just got closer in the boy-meets-girl way of things.
In a way, it's more to do with Selena than it is to do with Jim.
It's part of her moving away from this machinelike take on the world.
And it's as much to do with her noticing Hannah and Frank messing around on the cab
that then comes back later.
(Danny) I love this look she gives here. Like that. Really great.
This is the Valium scene.
At one point, this was gonna be a much harder drug.
It was gonna be Class-A drugs at one point.
(Alex) Danny in his Trainspotting history, wanting them shooting up.
(Danny) Because I thought if it was 28 days later,
and she was a chemist, and you had access to all that,
you could use stuff like that, but it was too extreme.
And it moved the film into a different world.
But if you wanted pain relief or to be able to create...
(Alex) Valium works for pain relief, I find.
(Danny) ..absence in your brain, then this is how they do it in this.
(Alex) Actually, it's a "dad" moment.
It's Jim having decided now that Frank is his surrogate dad.
He talks to him like he's a kid.
He's the brother of his younger sister, Hannah, in a way.
Sort of treating the Valium like it's chocolate cake.
"Come on, let her have a bit."
(Danny) The idea of family in it is very important throughout it all.
(Alex) Soon he'll actually call him Dad, subtly. Blink and you miss it.
(Danny) But he does, yeah.
This is like their rest, really.
That's probably like the most relaxed they'll ever be.
Inside it, or course, is a slight poison, really.
- (Alex) Which is this. - (Danny) His paranoia.
Because the scar of being left alone at the beginning of the film has left its mark.
His worst nightmare is that he's been left alone again, that they've gone and left him.
- (Alex) That's more of Andrew's camerawork. - (Danny) Scaring some sheep.
And I can't guarantee that he didn't harm the sheep in that particular shot.
I think he just shouted at them, but I can't guarantee it.
They actually did it with some sheepdogs, then they took them out later.
Here's the bit that Alex was referring to, where he just...
wants a dad.
But he can't, really. The idea of it was that he's got to take..
Eventually he finds another father figure who's a much more patrician figure,
played by Chris Eccleston later.
He has to do that work himself, in the end. He can't keep relying on a father figure.
(Alex) One of the questions that I keep getting asked
is why it takes them two days to drive up to just north of Manchester.
Danny has the answer to that.
- (Danny) Do I? - (Alex) Yes. Don't you? I don't.
- (Danny) Why does it take them two days? - (Alex) It just does.
We thought they should spend the night somewhere, so they do.
You can get obsessed about...
As anyone can tell, we're quite cavalier about that kind of thing.
If we think "Let's make it two days", then that's what happens.
There's one of my favourite moments here,
which is Jim putting his hand out the window.
It's something I always used to do when I was a kid. I still do it, actually.
Treating your hand like an aerofoil on long journeys.
Going on holiday with the family.
Dad saying "Stick your hand back in or it'll get ripped off."
(Danny) This is the NH, which is the busiest motorway in Britain.
We were unbelievably fortunate -
we contacted these policemen and they were very keen to help us do it.
They created a "rolling block" in both directions,
where they drive in front of traffic coming in both directions, very slowly,
and create this diminishing corridor where there appears to be no traffic.
It's just being held back by them driving at 10 miles an hour.
So the stuff in front of them clears.
We had seven or eight minutes where we could shoot.
Again, we used lots of cameras.
I'm on a camera inside the cab, on that shot.
Anthony's following this cab in another cab.
Andrew's up on a crane, I think, getting a wide shot.
This is actually picked up later. We did this somewhere else.
It does affect the actors to see something for real, rather than paint it all out afterwards.
You do see it affect them. It helps them enter the world of it.
(Alex) This was very tricky.
How do you show a city burning from a huge distance,
and still make it look dramatic,
still justify the long... pan?
(laughter)
- (Danny) Tilt, actually. - (Alex) Oh, fuck it.
The long tilt.
The long tracking shot upwards.
That's Manchester burning. And that's my hometown.
What better town to burn than your hometown?
And Alex went to university there.
There's a common thread there.
(Alex) This was the most amazing set.
(Danny) Yeah, this is our roadblock, which we did on a test-drive track
where they test out car tyres and braking distances and stuff like that.
You often see those shows on television where they're testing different cars,
those Jeremy Clarkson-type shows, this is where they're all filmed.
Tildesley, our designer, did a brilliant job creating with very little
this sense of a blockade which has been abandoned.
(Alex) You could look at it from any angle.
It never felt like you'd walked behind it and were seeing the scaffold that's holding it up.
It was a completely contained 3-D world.
Walking around it, you'd suddenly feel as if you were walking into the film
as you walked past some burned-up corpse or upturned car.
(Danny) Again, the images that we tried to use was that things had been abandoned.
It's that Mary Celeste image which is so evocative,
that things have just been left, just abandoned,
rather than seeing corpses everywhere.
We have to have corpses at certain points like we do later in this sequence.
There's more the feeling of just desolation, really.
They always say "Hell is other people",
but the premise of this is that hell is no other people,
that when you're truly alone, it's a terrible thing.
This is one of my favourite moments in the whole film, where he just snaps at them.
- (Alex) And he is Dad. - (Danny) And he's such a total dad, Brendan.
His performance here of snapping at them, and then he walks away and regrets it.
He thinks "Why did I do that?"
And they also did really well.
It's a wonderful moment of them being three told-off children.
"Dad's in a bad, bad mood and he's got a big, heavy lead pipe in his hand."
But his regret then and what happens, ironically, to him is sad.
But he gets a chance to apologise to her, which I love,
the fact that he apologises for what he'd just done.
He knows he's gonna die but he gets a chance to actually say something,
something that his daughter can remember him by.
(Alex) This death came quite late in the day.
For a long time it was dogs, but dogs really screwed around with a few things.
They were very expensive to use,
but also if there were infected dogs, then all animals would be infected.
One of the many rules we ignored was that it was primates.
That's a fantastic shot.
That's our second emotional point in the film, really.
(Danny) Yeah. I loved how emotional this scene was,
in something that you could call a zombie film or a horror film.
That you did get a chance to really emotionally grieve for these people,
and get put on the spot about what is gonna happen now.
Not just in terms of violence or who's gonna get killed,
but emotionally in terms of how they're gonna say goodbye to each other.
People trying to work out what's going on, then having to do something about it.
(Alex) It might be a measure of me and Danny being a bit sad, I don't know.
But there was one rehearsal... Do you remember this?
They were rehearsing this scene, a couple of months before filming it,
and we got choked up.
It was pathetic in a way, but it happened.
I shouldn't say that. Cut that.
(Danny) That point, where the soldiers shoot him,
is an end point where a different version of the film -
which we hope to be able to show you on the extras, storyboarded - kicks in,
before the solders shoot him.
But I won't say any more about that now. Hopefully that'll appear on the DVD extras.
The soldiers' costumes are done by Rachael Fleming, our costume designer.
When she first showed me them, I thought
"These are way too extreme. We won't get away with this."
They're in total bio gear to protect themselves.
But, of course, she was right.
When you get the energy of the scene, and they come into the scene,
it's exactly that kind of alien thing that you want.
Their first sight of other survivors is almost like they come from a different planet
before they begin to get to know them, as they do here.
(Alex) This is our really big continuity error coming.
(Danny) You mean Marvin, on the right?
That's Marvin, who you'll see later appearing as the chained-up Mailer, already infected.
That's because we changed cast after we'd shot that film
and promoted Marvin into the part of Mailer.
We had to keep it in. We hoped no one would notice, cos you haven't met Mailer yet.
And your eye is really taken by the introduction of this character,
Chris Eccleston, who's one of my personal favourite actors.
I've worked with him a number of times.
Chris always brings something extraordinary to parts that he plays.
And this is the next father figure for Cillian to put his faith in.
This is a much more authoritarian figure,
obviously because he's got the might of the British army...
or a section of the British army with him to protect them.
He invites them into the British country house.
It wouldn't be a British film without a country house in it.
(Alex) We were trying to set up different characters there with the soldiers.
Jones standing there forlornly with his shopping bags.
This was moved around.
In one cut of the film...
Originally it was a lot further back and it was brought forward, this whole scene.
It used to appear much later in the film.
It was interesting for me, watching this editing process,
and seeing just exactly how much one can change the thread of the story
in the edit suite.
- And they weren't in the same room. - (Danny) They weren't.
We put them in the same room together.
You often do, you concertina things that you keep separate.
It's often better, especially once the film is moving on into its second or third stage.
You need to concertina things rather than lay them out too leisurely.
So you start to crush things together because the audience is up to speed
and can take those shorthand ways of crushing things together.
(Alex) This took 20 drafts before Danny could persuade me to have a kiss between them.
(Danny) Here's your British country house scene.
Ironically, it's all filled with barbed wire, floodlights and barricades,
but it's still the Jane Austen country house.
Originally we wanted it to be a very feminine Queen Anne type house.
This house was actually built for Lord Nelson,
although he never got to live in it because he got killed at Trafalgar.
I think his brother took it on instead but it was built for him, I think, by the country.
It was given to him. He's buried in the grounds, down the road.
We wanted it to feel slightly feminine
because of the gender stuff that starts to come up in the film from now on.
We wanted it to feel a slightly feminine place.
(Alex) That's Eccleston ruffling his hair, which he's just picking up.
That's just him doing that.
It reinforces the father thing.
More exposition.
It feels a bit more natural here.
This was another shot that Danny set up
so that we could change dialogue, put more in in ADR,
and add to what wasn't there in the script when we were shooting it.
These are fantastic actors, all these guys. Really impressed with them.
The problem is, in a film, it's very different to differentiate them.
You tend to caricature them slightly.
So we put Leo in a pinny, and stuff like that,
so that you've got a code the audience can cling to to separate them.
The guy you don't have any worries about here is Mailer, who you know straight away.
You'll always remember throughout the film.
This scene changed and changed and changed in what was said.
I have to admit, I always felt it should be more theoretical
about the intellectual pulse that lays behind the idea of the film,
and rage, and our responsibility for rage.
That kind of psychological sickness we have with each other.
But it always felt plonky. That's the danger of that.
We ended up with a much more matter-of-fact scene, I suppose,
which is about the progression of the narrative.
He's experimenting on this guy to see how long it will take him to starve to death.
(Alex) For what it's worth, this is the second very conscious nod towards Romero,
with the third in the trilogy.
The first nod was towards the second of his Dead trilogy.
This is in the third, with Bub, the chained-up Infected
in the underground compound of Day of the Dead.
Always a character, an idea, that seemed very strong.
I never know with that kind of thing if it's theft or what, but it's there, anyway.
(Danny) It's not if you acknowledge it, I don't think.
(Alex) Quick, I'm acknowledging it.
You hope that people who know those films will get that.
While we're on the subject of other films,
this, I was personally thinking a lot about the cut scene in Apocalypse Now,
this surreal dinner party on a plantation.
A French Indochina plantation.
Ever since watching Hearts of Darkness, the documentary of the making of,
I hadn't really seen the scene properly until Apocalypse Now Redux
but I just loved the idea of a surreal dinner party,
having a dinner party here with soldiers in dress uniform,
and trying to cling on to some notion of civilisation.
(Danny) And this Italian fresco behind them. And eating...
(Alex) It was a much longer scene.
This got messed around a lot.
Obviously there's something problematic about surreal dinner party scenes in films.
(Danny) I love the way Chris does the bad omelette acting.
These scenes are always a nightmare when you film them, dinner party scenes.
It's all about left to right, right to left. "Who's he looking at when he's looking that way?"
The truth is, no matter who you are,
you end up going round the table, shooting everybody.
You double up sometimes, to make sure the editor's got enough in editing,
where the editor can control the pace of the scene and shape it a bit.
But it's basically pretty bog standard.
You just have to cover it, as any director'll tell you about dinner party scenes.
It's an acting scene as well.
The danger, cos you have to repeat it so much,
is that the actors get bored or lose their freshness with it.
But Eccleston's fantastic at keeping control of the scene
and giving enough to other people so they've got enough to act with,
but keeping enough back for his own takes.
That's Stuart McQuarrie. He's the American tourist in Trainspotting
who was kicked and assaulted in the toilet in Trainspotting by Begbie.
He's a wonderful actor. It was great to get him for this, to have this other presence,
this different view, really, which you get to hear a bit more of later.
(Alex) I think he's got the hardest lines in the film to say,
clunkiest written, and I think he copes with them extraordinarily well.
(Danny) But I like that, cos it stops dead.
It's like a big lead weight's dropped on the table, of something different.
So I think that's good.
(Alex) But if you'd given it to another actor, it would have been a car wreck.
(Danny) I love this moment where Chris acknowledges that she's right there,
before madness takes over again.
There's the pinny again, just so you know. Little clues like that.
(Alex) They're all in uniform, and uniforms are designed to remove different characters.
(Danny) That's right.
You rarely remember character names anyway, beyond the hero and the heroine.
There's me running across the foreground, trying to make up the numbers.
We didn't quite have enough people to do it with.
Actually, the numbers were increased a bit by the digital house, Clear, again.
Doubling up people.
- (Alex) Cold night. - (Danny) Yeah.
- (Alex) This is the bounce. - (Danny) Oh, yes. The double whammy.
I don't know whether people get that.
I don't know whether they hear him say "He bounced."
Anyway, he does. That he'd never seen that before.
So they come in. They're obviously fired up by that slaughter, really.
The film from then on begins to take on a very different complexion in terms off...
Genders are revealed, really, if you like.
It's inevitable that they start to come out.
At first jokingly like this, but then on a serious level as well.
(Alex) There's a good example coming up of what you can do in ADR
with Chris Eccleston saying "Slow down" to his men,
which says that he's complicit and understanding in what's happening.
(Danny) But not the way they're going about it just now.
- It's a line he says to... - (Alex) Clifton.
(Danny) "Slow down", which is added in ADR cos he was in shadow, but it works brilliantly.
Again, there's the standoff between those two, the two alternative authority figures.
Or the two world views.
It was also meant to be linked to a special affection he had for that soldier.
This guy takes his hat off when he's in the dining room.
We eventually cut it. He had to kill that man himself.
You'll see it in the deleted scenes. The two of them play it beautifully together.
There was a special bond between them but, for reasons I'll explain later, we had to cut it.
(Alex) This is two actors playing beautifully together.
(Danny) This, I think, is a cracking scene.
(Alex) And it was in jeopardy at one point.
It goes to show that everything's up for grabs.
But it's pivotal in terms of plot.
It makes me surprised that we even discussed dropping it now.
(Danny) I think you just go into a kind of...
You challenge almost anything and sometimes that's not a good thing.
But I guess sometimes it is.
I loved it when Alex brought it in
and it obviously developed the idea of what had happened with him killing the kid.
(Alex) It actually came out of an argument with Chris Eccleston and Cillian Murphy.
They said that the scene that existed before wasn't good enough, and they were right.
I remember we wrote this the day before it was shot,
that night, in the hotel room up in Salisbury.
It was reverting to an earlier scene.
There was a scene that could have been shot here that would have been terrible,
but Chris Eccleston and Cillian mutinied - correctly.
(Danny) The way they play it, there's something almost homoerotic between them.
Can Cillian break that bond, really, which is being...
(Alex) Not least because he talks about sex in terms of procreation
rather than recreation.
(Danny) Cillian takes a good hit here. He does that very well.
This is Cillian's last chance to join.
This is for all the things to be said or left unsaid between them.
Then we move into the cellar where you hear the sergeant
talking about the fact that it's not a worldwide contagion,
that it has been contained and that so-called normal life is going on elsewhere.
This was something that developed as we did the film.
We came up with this idea of quarantine.
What was great about it is that we set out to say it was a worldwide contagion.
We were gonna shoot some scenes at one point
of infection getting on a plane to America.
So it was spreading worldwide across seas and oceans.
Then, as we worked on the film, we decided to make it that Britain would be quarantined.
It gave hope that there might be some way out of this.
Also, it's curiously appropriate because when we were making the film
foot and mouth had very recently paralysed Britain.
(Alex) There was this concept of Britain being diseased with BSE and foot-and-mouth.
Every time you turned around, it felt like there was something else.
Of course, that also affects people within Britain.
It's not just how other people perceive you, it's how you perceive yourself.
That was a hell of a bit of ADR because Stuart had to time it
so that when the camera came on to him, he was saying the right words.
That was a real bit of professionalism.
(Danny) That scene was shot by a different cameraman
cos Anthony wasn't available to do our pick-ups,
and we did that as a pick-up later.
A kind of reshoot, really.
It was shot by this cameraman, Alwin Kuchler, who was very generous.
He stepped in cos Anthony wasn't available
and shot that and a number of other sequences that you'll see,
especially towards the end of the film.
(Alex) I love the way this looks. This was another of our conscious references.
- There've been Rwanda and China. - (Danny) Bosnia.
This is a lot of the photographs that came out of Bosnia.
Especially the kind of grave area that they're taking them to.
It's not really a grave. It's just an open pit of bodies, really,
that have either died and been dumped there, or they've killed, they've shot.
The idea was to evoke some of those images that we got from photographs of Bosnia.
Everything that had happened in Central Europe in the last few years.
(Alex) This was also a "write yourself into a corner" scene
where your hero's just about to be shot
and there's no real clear way they could escape.
You've just got to sit down and try and think of something.
(Danny) How can he get away?
(Alex) A good way of propelling a story is just write yourself into a complete corner
and then just sit with it for a bit.
The old double bluff.
And then this sequence here came late in the day
because this followed the decision about quarantine.
We talked a lot about where this plane could be.
Do they see it out of a window in the house
or is it just the noise of a plane?
This just felt like the most natural.
In fact, now, it seems like the only place you could possibly put it.
- Your back garden again? - (Danny) Yeah.
I shot that in the back garden.
I just spent a few days looking for planes.
All the planes go overhead, my house.
I just shot them through the trees.
One of the great things about DV cameras is you can improvise lots of stuff and bring it in.
If you've done it well enough, you can use it in the film.
You don't have to have a whole film crew out doing stuff like that.
(Alex) This was one of the most problematic scenes we had.
This was the cause of many, many arguments.
Not necessarily between me and Danny,
but just general arguments about how far this scene goes.
There's another cut of it.
There's a way it can be cut where it's considerably more disturbing
and harder to watch than it is now.
- We pulled back. - (Danny) We did.
We had a screening, a very small screening, with a few people.
A couple of women walked out.
As soon as the scene began, they just got up and walked out, which is fairs enough.
And we toned it down slightly.
But the scene, once you get over that initial impact, is actually about...
- (Alex) Empowerment. - (Danny) Her empowerment, really.
And her controlling the scene, and winning the scene, really, in a way.
And protecting the girl and herself, ultimately.
(Alex) But only if you allow yourself to get to that point in the scene. That was the thing.
(Danny) That's Clifton, who did a great job. They were good, the guys.
(Alex) He's an unbelievably gifted actor, that guy, isn't he?
(Danny) Very, very good.
That's Sanjay just going through there.
This keeps the thread of the Valium going.
I don't know whether people pick up that she's off her head on Valium, the little girl,
by the time we get into the end sequence.
But, anyway, that picks up that thread. Keeps that going.
Jim lures them to the blockade, brings them to the blockade by creating this siren,
which will bring hundreds of Infected, unless it's quietened down.
The idea of the Infected is what alerts them or what gets them going.
We always had this idea that it was the human voice
that sets them off into the killing fury, if you like.
Which is why, when he kills that kid, he says "Hello".
He deliberately knows there's one of them in there, and he wants to confront it.
The use of the human voice is... but in this case it was the siren
or the idea that the siren might bring them all there.
Again, the effects guys did us a brilliant job here.
Unless you've got a lot of money, rain is very difficult to make look cinematic.
Because there are so many films, especially American films,
where the rain is phenomenal.
I was adamant that I wanted it to be really thick, thick rain.
Because the idea of the deluge, and there'd been no rain,
and the whole idea of the ark and all that kind of stuff, and the rains.
It was an absolute substantial...
You could feel it. It's a visceral contribution to the film.
That's an Alien moment there.
As soon as you look through the camera you think "Yep, that's Alien."
Harry Dean Stanton goes looking for the pussycat in Alien: Pouf!
We used this technique in the camera.
For anything to do with the Infected, we use this frame-ratio thing.
I don't know quite how to explain it.
We use these Canon XL1 cameras and it has this frame setting
which suggests that it shoots not just at 24 frames a second,
but it will also shoot at 48 and up to 300,
1,000 frames a second, 16,000 frames a second.
It isn't actually slowing the film down when you look back at it,
but it's capturing the images almost in a more obviously static way.
When you run it, they appear slightly kind of jerky
or not quite true in the way that you normally watch films in the cinema.
We used the technique whenever anybody was infected. We used it for these Infected.
But also for Jim, towards the end of the film,
when we wanted to give the sense that he was infected.
And indeed he is infected with rage, with a kind of vengeance.
We wanted to visually suggest that as well as show it...
say it.
So this begins the whole end sequence
of the chase around the house and Jim arriving back.
The girls set up in their red dresses
as a kind of image of fecundity,
in this beautiful house.
This scene is an example of how you work with a cameraman. I staged the scene.
I had them sat there and I said "I want them in front of that beautiful picture of the woman,
the elegant woman, the portrait."
I wanted the soldiers here like that, then Anthony said "We'll track."
He used this huge track, which you'll see used a couple of times.
Alex'll like this because he can use this word "track".
I'll say "There, that's where it's tracking!"
It gives a tremendous dynamic to the scene.
We've used it once already and you'll see it coming up again.
It binds together the different elements of the room.
Cameramen are wonderful at that.
Sometimes you think of them as directors, but not in the way the cameraman does.
It's cos they're always looking through the camera. That's their job.
They feel it. They suddenly have a feeling for a scene, that it needs to be like this.
You'll see when he crosses back now.
It keeps them all connected in the room. It's all round a pivot. I love that.
With a sequence like that, you've got to basically direct the shit out of it,
which is what I tried to do with this end sequence.
We spent a lot of time and money on it,
so that you'd have something to get excited about, really, I guess.
This is horrible for the guy underneath.
It's actually coming out of a pipe at the side of his mouth.
It's just being pumped through. It's very pleasant.
Red Ovaltine or something. It's something very pleasant, anyway.
Although the whole idea of this isn't very nice at all.
(Alex) This was a sort of gag, this shot coming up.
This left-to-right, like a tennis match.
It's risky because if people laugh, does that destroy the tension?
And if they don't laugh, have you failed to provide a gag?
This had some cuts in it on grounds of taste.
This death of... Bedford, wasn't it?
(Danny) Yeah. I love Marvin here.
He's full of such malevolence there. It's fantastic.
He gets jumped by the guy who got infected earlier on.
I don't know if people can take that in.
They put him on the table here and basically sodomise him.
Or it sort of looked like that at one point.
That was one of the ideas that somebody had for the Infected,
that they should be just raging sex machines,
with constant erections and naked, and stuff like that.
Alex is telling me to calm down, ease down a bit on this side of it.
OK, this is more Alice In Wonderland!
This is a very nice Alice In Wonderland moment. She disappears off into the house.
(Alex) At one point, there was another Alice In Wonderland with a white rabbit, earlier on.
(Danny) That's right. We never did that.
There's lots of bits - some of which are in the deleted scenes - which used to be in this.
It was a longer sequence, but we honed it down in the end
to the essential ingredients, which is basically Jim's return,
Jim's entry into the house.
Although you'll see this man, Jones, was killed a different way
in the deleted scenes at one point.
But I do love the way this has been edited.
This is the way it should have been shot and edited, really.
Visually there's some wonderful things to look at, but it isn't a pictorial thing,
it's a visceral thing that you feel.
You don't grab hold of things perfectly sometimes,
but you kind of get a feeling of running through it yourself.
Having said that, this is the only static moment in it,
which is a soldier saying goodbye to another soldier.
This is the picture of her family we saw earlier. She'd taken it from the house.
You never saw her take it but it felt like a natural thing
you would understand in retrospect that she would do.
This is a moment of confusion where he calls for her
and he could almost be the Infected coming towards her.
The idea of Jim being infected, although we know he's not in the way that these guys are.
I love the idea of the Infected kind of drawn to his own image,
his image of himself and staring at it.
Whether he's doing that or whether he's sensing her behind it, I don't know.
You've got that jerky camera,
that slight sense of it being not reliable, the way it captures the information.
That sequence is a very good example of it.
(Alex) This is a real bit of film license,
that this very light sofa holds these two Infected at bay,
just for the crucial seconds you need for your hero to escape out of the window.
Even poor old Bell.
(Danny) Yeah, Junior gets it there, I'm afraid.
Most of those deaths feel gruesome. A lot of it, nothing is really happening.
A lot of it is sound - actors just begging for their lives.
The sound of their voices makes it almost unbearable to watch really.
This is obviously leading towards a kind of final confrontation.
The lieutenant is the representative at this point of...
(Alex) He's the real evil sod, isn't he? He's the sadist.
(Danny) So, reserved for him is the best death, I suppose.
This was all shot in Salisbury, although there's a number of a pick-ups in it,
where we went back later to pick them up.
I love the way this is put together by Chris Gill.
His run across the floor here, and just the sense of him arriving there.
(Alex) The idea is that, for Selena, what's she's seeing is an infected guy.
In all his movements and actions, he's indistinguishable from their enemy.
(Danny) This looks horrible. That is Ricci on the floor,
doing a brilliant job of allowing his eyes to be pushed down into their sockets.
(Alex) That's method acting. You just go for it.
(Danny) If you watch it without sound, it's OK, really.
It's the sound that makes it so unbearable in a way.
(Alex) Yeah, and his thumbs being right in his sockets adds something.
So here's where you have a problem. You have a continuity issue.
His thumbs have just been in his eyes, so they'll be covered in blood.
So, when he kisses her like this, his thumbs have got to be covered in gore.
So they're doing this kiss and I'm going "Get your hands down, Cillian".
I thought "Nobody wants to watch you kissing her with gore on your thumbs."
They'll be thinking about the previous scene.
You wanna leave that behind and move on to the next thing.
But he couldn't keep his hands off her.
(Alex) There is one shot, not used obviously,
where his thumb is absolutely covered in bits of material.
It does draw your eye to it.
This is a very tricky shift of tone here.
To say the least.
(Danny) I like stuff like that. I think you should take those risks with the shift of tone.
After something horrific like that, then you just let people off the hook a bit,
by gagging, really, I suppose.
This is all very well manipulated by everybody cos Megan can't drive,
and legally she's not allowed to drive cos she was 15 when she did the film.
It's very cleverly put together by drivers and people pushing the car with her ahold of it.
All that kind of stuff, really.
(Alex) It's also the thing that led to a lot of these multiple endings
because Jim has been shot and that was the key point.
It was what happens from that moment, in a way.
(Danny) This was as far as we got with our first budget.
In fact, this next shot was our last... No, not this one.
The film ended like this for a long time, until we showed it to Fox.
They gave us more money and we were able to shoot this sequence,
which actually takes them out of the grounds, which gets them out of the place.
(Alex) This was all done months and months later.
In fact this was the very, very last thing shot in the whole film.
(Danny) Yeah, it was.
A lot of people thought the film should end there, for instance.
I loved bringing back the "28 days later". I think the use of that subtitle is great.
It's just a really neat way of doing it.
This sequence here is part of a much longer sequence
which we'll talk about later in the deleted scenes.
We kept a little bit of it in, and the upside down moment there.
And Jim wakes up again. So it's all binded together, obviously, by him.
All bound together. "Binded"? Bound together by him waking up.
Fox gave us the money to go to the Lake District and shoot this ending,
and another ending that you'll see on the deleted scenes.
But, to be fair, this scene - although in a slightly different way -
was always in the original script, the idea of going to the Lake District.
(Alex) It was in the shooting script, but the film changed so much during filming -
quarantine, and we had all sorts, really.
And this is film now. It's not DV.
(Danny) Now we've moved to 35mm. We wanted it to feel like the film had opened up.
Nature, freedom and some kind of hopefulness.
So that there was a different textural quality.
Actually, on the days we shot, it wasn't great weather. It was very cloudy.
So you don't feel it as much as you'd do if it was a sunny day.
For instance, when we recced this cottage, which belonged to these wonderful people
and has been there since the 15th century,
it was a sunny day and it looked magnificent.
It doesn't quite look so wonderful in the cloud,
but nevertheless it was lovely to be there with them.
I can't think of a bigger contrast to the rest of the film
than the solitude and peacefulness of this place, really.
Personally speaking, it would drive me insane to live there.
But you could see for an afternoon, it was absolutely magnificent.
So you're asked to believe that this lettering has been made up
from just sheets around the house...
where there's the equivalent of 4,000 parachutes laid out on this field.
(Alex) This was another good day to be on set
because of this plane that wasn't dropped in by special effects afterwards.
It was really there, flying around, and it was a hell of a sight.
(Danny) The sound of it was incredible.
The only one we could get was an RAF jet.
- It's meant to be the Danish Air Force. - (Alex) Finnish.
(Danny) Finnish Air Force, cos we got our friend, Jukka,
to do the voiceover, at the end, of the Finnish pilot.
Sadly, we couldn't change the markings on the plane.
So that's the moment of hope at the end of the film.
We'll talk about the deleted scenes when we come onto those.
We did have a very different ending, which was a much bleaker ending.
I know a lot of people think you change things
because of the influence of Hollywood or America on movies generally -
hopeful endings, happy endings, that kind of stuff.
Actually, the truth of it was that we all felt,
when we watched the film with an audience with our bleak ending,
that the film was such a gruelling experience to get through,
especially on a journey film which this particularly is,
you felt like you had a responsibility to end with at least a note
that the journey might continue, that these people could go on in some way.