ovelist and screenwriter Alex Garland reteams with his colleagues from The Beach (2000), producer Andrew Macdonald and director Danny Boyle, for 28 Days Later, an SF movie that Garland describes as a return to straight, unadorned and unironic horror.
In 28 Days Later, cycle courier Jim (Cillian Murphy) awakes from a coma in a deserted London hospital. Wandering the empty streets of the capital city, he encounters ravening hordes of zombielike people—the "infected." Rescued by Selena (Naomie Harris) and Mark (Noah Huntley), Jim learns that the country has been decimated by a blood-borne viral plague that causes uncontrollable homicidal rage. Later, Selena and Jim connect with Frank (Brendan Gleeson) and his daughter, Hannah (Megan Burns), and they set off to find other survivors.
The post-apocalyptic thriller film, an independent production shot on digital video, was a modest hit in its native United Kingdom, grossing about $9.7 million. Fox Searchlight released the movie in the United States on June 27. Garland took a moment recently to discuss 28 Days Later with Science Fiction Weekly from his home in London.
Where did you get the idea from?
Garland: Well, it's two things, really. ... I got the idea from other people, like [British SF author John] Wyndham, who wrote this book, The Day of the Triffids, and J.G. Ballard. I'm a big fan of J.G. Ballard. British science fiction, Long Distance Man. And also post-apocalyptic films, and, actually, there's loads of post-apocalyptic literature as well. And in films, I suppose I'm really thinking of things like Dawn of the Dead and Night of the Living Dead and Omega Man, stuff like that. ...
There's always been something about post-apocalyptic stories that I got a big kick out of. And the other thing was that, Britain at the time was ... very paranoid. It was this paranoid island, and it's more paranoid now. But two and a half years ago, when I started working, it was still paranoid back then. And the thing about the books and films I was just talking about was that I think they were responsive to paranoid times as well. Either sort of nuclear paranoia, sort of Cuban-missile-crisis fear-type stuff, or, ... in some ways, to do with consumerism or capitalism: ... a fear of what's happening to your own society. Or like Dawn of the Dead can be read in that way, I do believe.
So basically, what I'm saying is that I had a real love of the way in which those stories could be used as vehicles for a bit of social commentary. That you could get your agenda across in them, and then it felt like there was something to get across, which is this paranoia. And the whole film is about that, really. It's all about a threat that seems like it's something on the outside, but in fact it's something on the inside.
Rage seems to be a new element. Why rage?
Garland: The film opens with newsreel footage. ... It's newsreel footage about mobs of people in the real world, doing the kind of stuff that later on in the film you see the infected or zombies doing. And there was something about the state of mind that a mob gets into that allows them to chase the guy down the street and kill him. That somehow, they get into a state where whatever that guy said, if he turned around and said, "Hang on a sec, just don't do this," [and] tried to reason with them, they're beyond reason. They're locked into something, and it has to do with that, really.
Is there something peculiar about our times that gives rise to this rage?
Garland: I think that it's a point that Danny, the director, makes a lot, actually. It's a real preoccupation of his, which ... I think, actually is why ... he sort of went for the script, really. ... He feels it's getting a lot worse, and the example he always gives is when his dad was younger, he never got security guards in emergency rooms in hospitals, because nobody there would think about attacking anyone. It was just like the last thing on anyone's mind. Went to the emergency room to get your arm fixed up when you're in a car crash or something. And these days, all emergency rooms have got security guards, and the reason they've got them is because they need them. Because nurses get attacked. And it's not just that. ...
The point Danny makes about this—I really am sort of quoting him in a sense here—is he takes it as a kind of consumerist thing. What he says is, we get told these things on adverts [commercials]. You're very important, and you can have this thing now. You can get where you want to go immediately, and the thing that you want to possess, you can have it immediately. And of course, in the real world, you can't. Because you can't afford it, or because when you drive to the place you want to go, you get stuck in a traffic jam, and the car that you shelled out all this money for doesn't buy you freedom. You're still stuck in a f--king traffic jam, and you can't get anywhere. ...
According to an argument of Danny's, I think you could say it's getting worse, and here is a kind of growing feature of modern life. I suppose that I was thinking, as well as just about our sort of generalized intolerance, that there is ... a kind of misperception of how other people are that makes people afraid of other people eventually. And I think that's something that exists in our country, or in Western countries. But I actually think it's something that exists generally. It's not just our problem. ... And that's what I like about science fiction: that you can try and sort of get across or discuss something like that, and, in a funny kind of way, the science fiction stops you from getting too pretentious about it. Because if you were going to try and sort of tell that straight, it could easily sound very trite and very clumsy. ... The science-fiction element of it ... keeps the brakes on it. It stops it from getting too earnest.
Working with the metaphor is easier than working with the actual thing.
Garland: Yes. That's exactly what I was trying to say in a roundabout, rambling way. That's probably the point I was trying to make.
Tell me about working in this particular genre, zombie movies. There's always the risk of it devolving into camp.
Garland: There is, yeah.
How do you avoid that?
Garland: Well, we made a decision, really, which was, we tried to play it straight. Just to play it really, really straight. Very direct. ... Genre films ... keep defending themselves with these little ironic nudges and winks at the audience. You're constantly sort of locked into this irony game. And sometimes that works brilliantly, ... [as in] one of my favorite films, Starship Troopers, ... [which] works incredibly well on a social commentary level and incredibly well on just a straight sort of ... sheer, massive entertainment level. And I think it's sort of beautiful the way it works, really.
But that's when [irony is] done really, really well. And I think most times, it's not done anything like as well as that. And what you get instead is people who, let's say, [are] trying to make a scary scene or an emotional scene and are afraid that they're not really pulling it off. So what they do is, they defend themselves from a criticism by the audience, which is, "Your scene is lame," by putting a joke in. By sort of saying, "Come on, this is all genre. We're enjoying it together." And it's a bit daft. ... You can have too much of it. It can get very irritating and sort of boring, really.
So you have to deal with it as if it's a real thing.
Garland: Yeah. That was the approach we chose to take. So in a way, what Andrew, the producer, used to say was, "Try and get a bit of [British social realist director] Ken Loach in there." ... Sort of a bit of grit. Some dialogue ... or some exchanges between characters that just feel like they're real exchanges. That they're real people.
Being an independent film, you don't have the huge budget [reportedly around $15 million]. How do you deal with that when you're dealing with worldwide apocalypse?
Garland: Well, yeah, you've got to be strong, really. What we did was we threw our money at certain scenes. ... The truth is that what you do is, you deal with the fact that you've got a low budget. So there's certain things you can't have. You can't have famous stars. You can't have huge set pieces of a certain kind. Or you can't have an endless succession of huge set pieces in any way. So what you do is you turn these things into an asset as much as you can. That said, we actually never wanted to have, say, a famous actor in there, which made it a lot easier to do on a low budget. Because we wanted it so that our lead character didn't have any baggage with him when you first saw him. He was just a guy. ...
There's a sort of cliche about [how] low-budget stuff ... forces you to be imaginative. Well, I think it does, really. But, basically, what we did was, we picked and chose a few things. Like we had a petrol station we wanted to blow up. We knew that we wanted to do that. We knew that it wasn't going to be cheap, and there's no way around it. We just did it anyway. And then we had to cut sort of corners in other places. But you just kind of muddle through, really.
There's a couple scenes in the film that show an abandoned London. That must have been challenging.
Garland: Yeah. You watch it, and you think, "That must have been challenging." Actually, it was really simple. I mean, you just stop the traffic. And the beautiful thing about working with [digital video], which is the decision that Danny made really early, ... [is] that [you can] put cameras everywhere. So you stop the traffic for 90 seconds. You have a guy walk down the street. You've got loads of different angles of it, [and] you can cut it together so it looks like a sort of slower sequence than it actually is. So it feels more languid and sort of mysterious. And you do that for six days in a row, and suddenly you've got a 15-minute opening sequence.
What other things does shooting on digital video give the film?
Garland: Partly it gave [us] that [kind of] flexibility. ... The cameras can be set up and taken down a lot more quickly. There's several shots in the film that Danny just shot on his own in his backyard. And he just went out in the street and shot them, no crew, nothing. Just him. You couldn't really do that on 35mm. ... Also, it worked according to the aesthetic of the film. The first images the film shows you are news footage, which has to do with the sort of themes of the film. And those images set the film up, and they say what the film's about. ... But they also create an aesthetic, because news footage has its own aesthetic, which is actually [digital video]. So you just carry that through the whole film.
So it enhances the reality you were talking about earlier?
Garland: You hope so.
Do you think you'll be doing more science fiction?
Garland: I'm a big fan. At the moment, the thing I'm working on, ... it's not exactly science fiction, but it's not exactly reality, either. But I just think it's an incredibly sort of rich area. ... From a straight storytelling point of view, it's incredibly useful, and it just allows you to do stuff you otherwise wouldn't be able to do. So I'd like to. But I always sort of think it's sort of pointless saying that you'd like to, because who knows what's happening next?
I might never work again [laughs].
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