FILM 2311: 28 DAYS LATER (2002)

TRIVIA: One of the first mainstream films to be shot entirely digitally as opposed to with film.

Ewan McGregor was the original choice to play Jim, but he and director Danny Boyle had a falling-out at the time over The Beach (2000), in which McGregor was supposed to play the lead until he was replaced by Leonardo DiCaprio (they have since reconciled). After that didn't work out, the role was offered to Ryan Gosling, who had a scheduling conflict.

For the London scenes, police would close the roads at 4am, and filming would begin immediately. After 1 hour, the police would reopen the roads. The producers correctly predicted that asking drivers (including clubbers headed home) to either wait for up to an hour or find another route might make some of them angry. They got several extremely attractive young women (including Danny Boyle's daughter) to make the necessary requests, and the drivers responded quite amicably to them.

For the scenes on the motorway, the production got permission to shoot on the M1 on a Sunday morning between 7.00am and 9.00am. The police gradually slowed traffic in both directions. Using 10 cameras, the filmmakers managed to capture a total of one minute of usable footage.

The decision to film on DV (using Canon XL1 cameras) was both an aesthetic and a logistic choice. Aesthetically, Danny Boyle felt that the harshness of the DV imagery suited the post-apocalyptic urban landscape and the grittiness of the film in general. In the production notes, Boyle says "the general idea was to try and shoot as though we were survivors too." Logistically, producer Andrew Macdonald claims that shooting with standard cameras, especially some exterior scenes, would've been impossible. As MacDonald points out in the production notes, "The police and the local authorities were quite happy to assist us because we could set up scenes so quickly. We could literally be ready to shoot with a six-camera set-up within minutes - something we would not realistically have been able to do if shooting under the restrictions of 35mm which takes a good deal more time to set up a single shot."

The scene where Jim and Selena celebrate with Frank and Hannah was shot on September 11, 2001. Danny Boyle said it felt extremely strange to shoot a celebratory scene on that particular day.

Alex Garland and Danny Boyle felt that the notion of the living dead wanting to eat peoples' brains was outdated. One of the original factors behind zombie movies was a fear of nuclear power and its possible effects on people. Garland and Boyle concluded that one of the biggest fears in modern society is fear of disease, especially a viral apocalypse, such as Ebola or Marburg. Garland and Boyle were specifically inspired by such incidents as anthrax and bio-terrorism scares in London and the spread of mad cow disease and foot-and-mouth disease in the UK.

The film includes heavy product placement for Britain's National Lottery, which funds the British Film Council.

Included among the "1,001 Movies You Must See Before You Die" edited by Steven Schneider.

I’m making my way through the book "1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die", edited by Steven Schneider. See my blog post about my copy of the book here…

You can buy an updated version (which I will get after I’ve made my way through this edition) here…

I really hope you can come on this journey with me – if you do I’d love to know which films you’ve enjoyed the most!