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Training
The Script Factory Masterclass with ALEX GARLAND, ANDREW MACDONALD & DANNY BOYLE
Contemporary 'Zombie' movie, 28 DAYS LATER
Followed by a preview of
28 DAYS LATER
The Other Cinema, London, Thursday 14 November 2002
These transcripts are intended for educational purposes on our site only. To reprint them in any form, you must get permission from The Script Factory.
An extract from Danny Boyle, Alex Garland and Andrew MacDonald's conversation with Radio 1 film critic, James King
On working within a horror genre and collaborating to develop the script:
Alex Garland (Writer, 28 Days Later)
...there are plenty of people here who can see where this film comes from, which is George Romero movies. When I was a teenager I really loved these films, they really affected me and they really got under my skin, so I realised, I think when I was working with Andrew on The Beach, that there was a possibility if I wrote a screenplay I had someone to take it to and I had someone to talk to about how to get it made. In a way the thing that came to me was ‘oh, I’d like to make a Zombie movie’ and so I did...I was writing it I was working incredibly closely with Andrew and Danny, they co-wrote it. Andrew has a very hands on approach when working with scripts - it’s not invasive, it’s a good thing, and so has Danny, so I was talking with them the whole time but I was also talking with my brother or friends of mine saying ‘what do you think? Do you think this would be a good scene or…’ There was one scene where the dad dies, I remember thinking ‘we need this scene’. I remember discussing it with a friend and saying ‘it has to happen you’ve got to have a core group, one of whom has to…’ and I put it in. I’m not trying to over-simplify the script writing process, there are a lot of things that go into it, but that’s certainly one of them and if I was thinking of someone, if I was thinking who would enjoy this film? It was me when I was eighteen...There is this, sort of, division of responsibility and I don’t know if I can accurately say about any one idea in this film that I had that idea, I just think it’s impossible to say ‘I had that idea on my own’, and by extension of that, you can also take that away from Danny and Andrew that it has to be shared, as an author you sink or swim based on the book yourself, but on a film your constantly buoyed up and knocked about by other people...
On making 28 DAYS LATER in the UK and working with a modest budget:
Andrew MacDonald (Producer, 28 Days Later)
I think it’s all about imagination and it’s just about trying to do it, and Danny [Boyle] particularly, is very good at pushing the envelope in ways we never knew existed, we never exactly finished with any money in the bank, you just have to have a lot of conviction and work with the right people in order to achieve it really. A lot of it is fortune, like the M1 stuff, we had to find two policemen who thought this was a fun idea to do on a Sunday morning and as they say in Glasgow they were a bit gallus, they were just game for it, in Britain you can still find people like that, and we shot it on these digital cameras like home cameras, domestic cameras, most of the film was shot like a film, on one camera with ten fifteen set-ups a day because of explosions, rain, costumes, whatever. There was lot’s of other stuff… Danny shot in his garden, the scene with the roses, that sort of weird crazy scene, that was the first scene we shot, Danny and I did that ourselves one weekend, you know, just did it. You can use it to your advantage and I think that’s often the way, the effects and so on, you can work around it, things are becoming more and more possible the whole time, it’s only lack of imagination that holds you back...It’s different, it has to be different. It’s crucial because everything is different here, the weather, the lines on the street. It’s impossible to compete on one level and it’s also… there’s room for a lot more and you just get what there is, I had the choice to stay here or work in L.A. but in L.A. you have to work a lot harder. Jerry Bruckheimer is the producer you’er up against, you know, forget it. I just think that you have to make something different.
Danny Boyle (Director, 28 Days Later)
I think one of the pressures on British cinema in a competitive market is (obviously not if you are going to make art house films but if you want to crossover) you have to somehow make mythic…. America is sort of automatically mythical because of it’s scale some of it’s landscape and probably it’s relationship to cinema which is self-perpetuating and I think if your going to compete with it you are going to have to somehow try and find images and… you have to make the landscape look great, you have to make it look mythical somehow and I remember how we got round that in the first film we did together, Shallow Grave, by trying to make the interior of this place kind of mythical, I know it sounds very pretentious but that was the idea of that London sequence was to have big calling card, something that people were very familiar with and just change it really to make it more mythical. I think that’s one of the problems you’ve got because when people are out at you multiplexes people are just making a choice on a Friday night, you know, they are not big cinema aficionados, they just want to make a decision on a Friday or Saturday night where to take their girl... (LAUGHTER)
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