{"id":185531,"date":"2025-06-15T05:03:15","date_gmt":"2025-06-15T05:03:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/185531\/"},"modified":"2025-06-15T05:03:15","modified_gmt":"2025-06-15T05:03:15","slug":"danny-boyle-blends-zombies-with-brexit-were-a-small-shitty-island-not-an-empire-culture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/185531\/","title":{"rendered":"Danny Boyle blends zombies with Brexit: \u2018We\u2019re a small, shitty island, not an empire\u2019 | Culture"},"content":{"rendered":"

Danny Boyle (Radcliffe, England, 68) sits down opposite the journalist and bursts out laughing. The English filmmaker is good at promotion, and the conversation begins by going back to 1994, at the San Sebasti\u00e1n Film Festival presentation of his debut cinematic release, Shallow Grave, a dark comedy. \u201cIt was before everything, what a time,\u201d the director chuckles. And by \u201ceverything\u201d he means Trainspotting, 28 Days Later, an Oscar for Slumdog Millionaire, two further nominations for 127 Hours, the commercial success of The Beach or Sunshine, to much less heralded projects, to his departure from the 007 universe when he was preparing a James Bond<\/a> film, to his anger with David Bowie when he didn\u2019t give him the rights to his songs for a musical, or to his brilliant miniseries Pistols, about the legendary punk band.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s curious that a filmmaker with the soul of an auteur like Boyle, who has never rested from his output, is one of those who only joins projects when they appear with funding. Like 28 Years Later, which opens worldwide on June 20. The first installment, 28 Days Later, was released in 2002, and the second, 28 Weeks Later, directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, five years later. The rights to the sequels were divided among several companies, and after their reunion, Boyle and Alex Garland teamed up again to write. So there will be two films in one go, because the fourth installment, directed by Nia DaCosta, was shot at the same time as the third. Hence the abrupt end to 28 Years Later and the absence of Cillian Murphy<\/a>, the star of the first movie. \u201cWhen we released the trailer, my girlfriend told me a zombie looked like Cillian. I laughed and said, \u2018People aren\u2019t that stupid, they won\u2019t be mistaken.\u2019 I\u2019ve eaten my words.\u201d<\/p>\n

So no, that rabies-infected person isn\u2019t Murphy, who appears in the credits here as executive producer. We\u2019ll have to wait for the fourth. And the fifth? \u201cFor me, it\u2019s the third, because we feel like it\u2019s a reboot. Alex and I, who will direct, are clear about where we want to go and how, and that Cillian will be very important. But there\u2019s no script or investors yet.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

In horror cinema, the zombie subgenre has always carried a political charge. When George A. Romero<\/a> had to replace his lead actor just days before shooting Night of the Living Dead with African-American Duane Jones, he unwittingly added an extra layer of racism in the U.S. to the main plot and opened up a cinematic path. In 28 Years Later, continental Europe is free of infected people, with warships patrolling the British coast, while the island lives in perpetual quarantine. Can you call that Brexit? \u201cOf course! We haven\u2019t made a political film, but we\u2019ve used the current world as a reference, how we behave in it, what cultural legacy we\u2019re going to leave behind. Brexit has constrained us, locked us in, and that\u2019s what 28 Years Later is about. They pretended it was about growth in trade, but in reality it\u2019s navel-gazing, it\u2019s this nonsense of believing ourselves superior to the rest of Europe. That great England [he takes on a pompous tone], those historic victories… That\u2019s why there are images in the film of, for example, Henry V with Laurence Olivier and his archers. And we\u2019re a small, shitty island, not an empire [laughter]. This regressive thinking has fueled Brexit.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the plot, Boyle insists, there is a moral undertone. \u201cWhat do you do when you no longer communicate with anyone? How do you behave? The father [Aaron Taylor-Johnson<\/a>] opts for a brutal upbringing, military training. You kill or you\u2019re killed. The mother, on the other hand, still ill, has other aspirations. And the young protagonist seeks his own path. As all teenagers must. I have a lot of faith in the younger generations; they\u2019re better than us… Well, these are the ramblings of an old man.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"AaronAaron Taylor-Johnson and Alfie Williams in ’28 Years Later.’<\/p>\n

With the television success of series like The Walking Dead and The Last of Us<\/a>, didn\u2019t you feel like after 28 Days Later, you\u2019d lost out? \u201cOf course, we should have gotten a percentage [laughter]. Seriously, we always felt like the appetite for zombie stories wasn\u2019t waning. And that they set parameters for us, things we didn\u2019t have to repeat, fresh perspectives to explore. And even though it was a sequel, we had to bring in new ideas, like different classes of infected, or zombie alpha males, or the fact that they hunt, or the newborn, which suggests they have sex with each other: they won\u2019t have brains, but a body is a body, and every species fights to survive.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

I wrote [the James Bond] script with John Hodge and they thought it was too radical, which to me meant interesting”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Boyle left the 25th James Bond film with the project still very much underway. Ironically, in 28 Years Later, he directed Bond\u2019s boss, M, (Ralph Fiennes) and the actor bookmakers are tipping Aaron Taylor-Johnson as the favorite to be the new 007. \u201cMore than that, think about how Ralph would have made a great secret agent 25 years ago. Anyway, I wrote that script with John Hodge [his regular co-writer on films like Trainspotting] and they thought it was too radical, which to me meant interesting. They lost faith in that script [he searches for the right words to avoid putting a foot in it], and I realized I was going to be embarking on a disaster. So we left.\u201d But he\u2019s not giving away any details about Taylor-Johnson.<\/p>\n

\"ShootingShooting a scene with iPhones in ’28 Years Later.’<\/p>\n

The conversation turns to his relationship with Alex Garland<\/a>, whom he met when he was just a writer for The Beach; today he\u2019s a prestigious director. \u201cHis progression was already foreseeable, very natural. His scripts are very refined, because he likes to research and then develop his ideas with the director, allowing you to unfold before him. And he also has great ideas for the editing. Anyway, when we sit down together I feel like everything remains, for the better, the same.\u201d<\/p>\n

Boyle concludes with the technological innovations that affect the form of his latest work. \u201cIn 28 Days Later, we initially embraced digital cameras. Here, we embraced iPhones because they allow for a ton of possibilities. We shot with cameras set up in a row, and that lets you use stitched images or select a point of view, and with 4K quality. And it portrays violence in a believable way; it\u2019s important to show how it affects bodies… That\u2019s part of the responsibility of making a film like this, for adults.\u201d<\/p>\n

But doesn\u2019t he think that market, that of adult films, is dwindling every day? \u201cAdult films are a very useful tool. We go to theaters to see… extremes, themes that push you to the limit and help us think. There, we tolerate those extremes. At home, it\u2019s a different story, right? The atmosphere is different.\u201d In theaters, however, we applaud that experience. \u201cOf course, although we\u2019re losing it… Marvel monopolizing everything? Marvel will end up swallowing itself and self-destructing. What will remain after that? I don\u2019t know, although there are still films that guarantee me that different journey, like Sinners<\/a>. It\u2019s original and it challenges you.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sign up for our weekly newsletter<\/a> to get more English-language news coverage from EL PA\u00cdS USA Edition<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Danny Boyle (Radcliffe, England, 68) sits down opposite the journalist and bursts out laughing. The English filmmaker is…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":185532,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5226],"tags":[54589,802,748,66296,48891,4157,2000,299,5187,1699,4884,627,76023,76024,14264,4576,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-185531","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-brexit","8":"tag-aaron-taylor-johnson","9":"tag-brexit","10":"tag-britain","11":"tag-cillian-murphy","12":"tag-danny-boyle","13":"tag-david-bowie","14":"tag-eu","15":"tag-europe","16":"tag-european","17":"tag-european-union","18":"tag-great-britain","19":"tag-james-bond","20":"tag-juan-carlos-fresnadillo","21":"tag-laurence-olivier","22":"tag-ralph-fiennes","23":"tag-sex-pistols","24":"tag-uk","25":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114685634379569518","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185531","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=185531"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185531\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/185532"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=185531"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=185531"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=185531"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}