Alex Garland first came to prominence in 1998 with the publication of The Beach. The book was embraced by outsider culture and became a staple of the backpacking crowd. After the critical and commercial failure of the movie adaptation Garland retreated with his Beach cohorts, director Danny Boyle and producer Andrew Macdonald, to develop the screenplay for 28 Days Later. They emerged with one of the scariest zombie movies I've seen. The title confused me until the first 10 minutes of the film when the main character of Jim wakes up in a hospital 28 days after a virus hits England. Much of London is dead but the survivors are crazed zombie like creatures. It's a film that everyone on SG must go see and talk about.
Check out the website for 28 Days Later.
Daniel Robert Epstein: How did you want to make this film different from other zombie films?
Alex Garland: Well not just films but books as well. This movie owes a lot to the novel, Day of the Triffids and JG Ballard as well. But also there are lots of films like Omega Man and George Romero movies. There are all those rip-offs, steals and homages in this movie. In a way I wasn't thinking about how to make it different on my part. What you are really doing is taking the post apocalyptic genre and using it. You are partly trying to subvert the genre. But really you are doing what all science fiction does. Using a story as a vehicle for some kind of social commentary. I wasn't thinking George Romero did this so I have to make sure we don't do that. Clearly I didn't do that. I was thinking this is the structure that these post apocalyptic stories provide; now how do you create an undercurrent. Right from the beginning half my conversations with [director] Danny [Boyle] were how do we get the story moving; to make a scene move quicker onto the next one and the other half were about what we're trying to do underneath the genre.
DRE: This is the first zombie film in a long time that takes itself seriously and is actually scary.
AG: The thing about it was that we were playing it really straight. You can widen it out from zombie films to science fiction and particularly horror. Scream is the best example. It's a great film but its one long series of nudges and winks at the audience. When you're watching Scream you know there's a reference being made without necessarily knowing what the reference is. What we wanted to do with 28 Days Later is play it dead straight. One thing that means is to make the dialogue the way people actually talk within reason because it will never be gritty urban realistic drama. But you can make it unironic. But it is dangerous when you lift an entire sequence from Day of the Triffids, the polite thing to do is to wink at the audience and say we are all complicit in this. I think all that irony can be a defense mechanism against criticism.
In the opening three minutes of the film you've got this silly science fiction premise begin. But you also get this newsreel footage of tragedies happening all over the world. Then you get this conflict between these Animal Liberation Front activists and a scientist and the catastrophe that begins with them. At the back end of the film you have this army major who's saying that he doesn't see the big deal with this virus. To him it's the same as the 28 days before and the 28 days before that. But the violence happens to be in England instead of war torn country. The major has one way of dealing with it which is procreation. A very ruthless pragmatism that isn't necessarily illogical.
DRE: The soldiers may have been rough about the idea of procreation in the movie but was there ever the idea to do it from their angle.
AG: Well you just leave that in the hands of the audience. If the major's ideas make sense to an audience member, it does make sense but its wrong, then so be it. You don't want to preach to your audience. Your context for whatever ideas you want to get across is in a zombie film. It's not Schindler's List. Its entertainment and there is a tension that creates which stops you from getting too pretentious.
DRE: I just rewatched The Beach to prepare for this interview and I found similarities between The Beach and 28 Days Later. The isolated community and things like that. That's a sensibility you must have.
AG: Yes I'm a middle class public school boy from England. There's a kind of work and thinking ethic that kind of background will guide you towards. I think maybe because of that, that I have a great distrust of what groups of people decide upon. 28 Days Later is a paranoid anti-mob film and in some ways The Beach is the same way. The more people who agree with a point the harder it is to disagree with it. Sometimes I find myself agreeing with a point then I hear a lot of people agreeing the same way and I become distrustful of it and start to change my mind. Also The Beach, in its film incarnation, was softened and wasn't as visceral.
DRE: Did you have any fear of this film coming out after anthrax and SARS scares?
AG: It came out of that. This is a paranoid time. One thing you get out of those scares is a sense that the government is failing to deal with them. You got this idea that the society you're living is actually more fragile than you thought. Because the people who we've elected to protect us can't do it from something unexpected like that. A lot of the films and books that establish this genre came out of the nuclear age. These days we've got a paranoia which I think comes from viruses like SARS and ebola. Even they haven't made much of an impact in the west at all.
Terrorism predates Sept 11 of course. Danny [Boyle] talked to me about that when he was a kid you didn't have armed guards at hospital because nobody would attack anyone. You'd come in to get your arm stitched up then leave. Now they're everywhere because people want service now and if they don't get it they flip out.
DRE: You mentioned JG Ballard earlier.
AG: Yes I'm a big Ballard fan. That's why the lead character is called Jim.
DRE: Ballard usually has sex in his work. One definite difference I see between The Beach and this is the lack of sex.
AG: Yeah Danny always wanted more sex. I would say that's another reaction to The Beach. I always liked the idea that if you set up a guy and a girl at the front of a narrative there is the assumption they are going to get together. The idea of The Beach is that it was an easy surprise for it to happen. But I very rarely buy the sex scene in any work of fiction. It pulls me out of the narrative.
DRE: If you took the sex out of a Ballard novel you would lose the story.
AG: Yeah it would. That's why he's a better writer than me. That could be the trick.
DRE: It seemed like the kiss between Jim and Selena wasn't your scene.
AG: Kind of. It took Danny ten drafts to convince me to do that. It was partly because I couldn't figure out how to get to the point where they kiss. The only way I could square it in my mind was to have Jim covered in blood. That made a weird kind of sense. Danny was right because you have to have an emotional core.
DRE: What were your challenges of writing this screenplay?
AG: The key difference between writing a novel and writing a screenplay is when writing a novel you're in a room. You never talk to anyone about it and in the film the three of us, Danny, Andrew and I worked very closely from the first draft on. For me it felt very sociable. I had to get used to all sorts of it. We'd have huge arguments about it.
DRE: Was doing a smaller film like this a response to having done a couple of Hollywood movies?
AG: I think so. It's very satisfying to do a film at home as well. Particularly for Danny and Alex they know everything about England. All the ins and outs. Also making a film without the huge financial pressures that The Beach had is very liberating. A director like Danny wants to be able to control every aspect.
DRE: Outsider culture has embraced your work. Especially a book like The Beach. If you go into any foreign country bookstore your books will be displayed prominently. That's a different audience than many authors.
AG: There are always alienated stories. I'm just quite pleased in general. It's good for me because it allows me to keep working. The Beach was a sort of mainstream success but the other stuff hasn't been. So you get tagged but all I know is that people keep giving me money to write something else.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
Check out the website for 28 Days Later.
Daniel Robert Epstein: How did you want to make this film different from other zombie films?
Alex Garland: Well not just films but books as well. This movie owes a lot to the novel, Day of the Triffids and JG Ballard as well. But also there are lots of films like Omega Man and George Romero movies. There are all those rip-offs, steals and homages in this movie. In a way I wasn't thinking about how to make it different on my part. What you are really doing is taking the post apocalyptic genre and using it. You are partly trying to subvert the genre. But really you are doing what all science fiction does. Using a story as a vehicle for some kind of social commentary. I wasn't thinking George Romero did this so I have to make sure we don't do that. Clearly I didn't do that. I was thinking this is the structure that these post apocalyptic stories provide; now how do you create an undercurrent. Right from the beginning half my conversations with [director] Danny [Boyle] were how do we get the story moving; to make a scene move quicker onto the next one and the other half were about what we're trying to do underneath the genre.
DRE: This is the first zombie film in a long time that takes itself seriously and is actually scary.
AG: The thing about it was that we were playing it really straight. You can widen it out from zombie films to science fiction and particularly horror. Scream is the best example. It's a great film but its one long series of nudges and winks at the audience. When you're watching Scream you know there's a reference being made without necessarily knowing what the reference is. What we wanted to do with 28 Days Later is play it dead straight. One thing that means is to make the dialogue the way people actually talk within reason because it will never be gritty urban realistic drama. But you can make it unironic. But it is dangerous when you lift an entire sequence from Day of the Triffids, the polite thing to do is to wink at the audience and say we are all complicit in this. I think all that irony can be a defense mechanism against criticism.
In the opening three minutes of the film you've got this silly science fiction premise begin. But you also get this newsreel footage of tragedies happening all over the world. Then you get this conflict between these Animal Liberation Front activists and a scientist and the catastrophe that begins with them. At the back end of the film you have this army major who's saying that he doesn't see the big deal with this virus. To him it's the same as the 28 days before and the 28 days before that. But the violence happens to be in England instead of war torn country. The major has one way of dealing with it which is procreation. A very ruthless pragmatism that isn't necessarily illogical.
DRE: The soldiers may have been rough about the idea of procreation in the movie but was there ever the idea to do it from their angle.
AG: Well you just leave that in the hands of the audience. If the major's ideas make sense to an audience member, it does make sense but its wrong, then so be it. You don't want to preach to your audience. Your context for whatever ideas you want to get across is in a zombie film. It's not Schindler's List. Its entertainment and there is a tension that creates which stops you from getting too pretentious.
DRE: I just rewatched The Beach to prepare for this interview and I found similarities between The Beach and 28 Days Later. The isolated community and things like that. That's a sensibility you must have.
AG: Yes I'm a middle class public school boy from England. There's a kind of work and thinking ethic that kind of background will guide you towards. I think maybe because of that, that I have a great distrust of what groups of people decide upon. 28 Days Later is a paranoid anti-mob film and in some ways The Beach is the same way. The more people who agree with a point the harder it is to disagree with it. Sometimes I find myself agreeing with a point then I hear a lot of people agreeing the same way and I become distrustful of it and start to change my mind. Also The Beach, in its film incarnation, was softened and wasn't as visceral.
DRE: Did you have any fear of this film coming out after anthrax and SARS scares?
AG: It came out of that. This is a paranoid time. One thing you get out of those scares is a sense that the government is failing to deal with them. You got this idea that the society you're living is actually more fragile than you thought. Because the people who we've elected to protect us can't do it from something unexpected like that. A lot of the films and books that establish this genre came out of the nuclear age. These days we've got a paranoia which I think comes from viruses like SARS and ebola. Even they haven't made much of an impact in the west at all.
Terrorism predates Sept 11 of course. Danny [Boyle] talked to me about that when he was a kid you didn't have armed guards at hospital because nobody would attack anyone. You'd come in to get your arm stitched up then leave. Now they're everywhere because people want service now and if they don't get it they flip out.
DRE: You mentioned JG Ballard earlier.
AG: Yes I'm a big Ballard fan. That's why the lead character is called Jim.
DRE: Ballard usually has sex in his work. One definite difference I see between The Beach and this is the lack of sex.
AG: Yeah Danny always wanted more sex. I would say that's another reaction to The Beach. I always liked the idea that if you set up a guy and a girl at the front of a narrative there is the assumption they are going to get together. The idea of The Beach is that it was an easy surprise for it to happen. But I very rarely buy the sex scene in any work of fiction. It pulls me out of the narrative.
DRE: If you took the sex out of a Ballard novel you would lose the story.
AG: Yeah it would. That's why he's a better writer than me. That could be the trick.
DRE: It seemed like the kiss between Jim and Selena wasn't your scene.
AG: Kind of. It took Danny ten drafts to convince me to do that. It was partly because I couldn't figure out how to get to the point where they kiss. The only way I could square it in my mind was to have Jim covered in blood. That made a weird kind of sense. Danny was right because you have to have an emotional core.
DRE: What were your challenges of writing this screenplay?
AG: The key difference between writing a novel and writing a screenplay is when writing a novel you're in a room. You never talk to anyone about it and in the film the three of us, Danny, Andrew and I worked very closely from the first draft on. For me it felt very sociable. I had to get used to all sorts of it. We'd have huge arguments about it.
DRE: Was doing a smaller film like this a response to having done a couple of Hollywood movies?
AG: I think so. It's very satisfying to do a film at home as well. Particularly for Danny and Alex they know everything about England. All the ins and outs. Also making a film without the huge financial pressures that The Beach had is very liberating. A director like Danny wants to be able to control every aspect.
DRE: Outsider culture has embraced your work. Especially a book like The Beach. If you go into any foreign country bookstore your books will be displayed prominently. That's a different audience than many authors.
AG: There are always alienated stories. I'm just quite pleased in general. It's good for me because it allows me to keep working. The Beach was a sort of mainstream success but the other stuff hasn't been. So you get tagged but all I know is that people keep giving me money to write something else.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
VIEW 4 of 4 COMMENTS
The Beach is one of my favorite films, (minus that obligatory subplot of Lenny DiCaprio being in love with the French girl) and I'm still meaning to read the book. I've lived in ludditey commune situations, and in forest camps, and I laugh with recognition when the beach dwellers make out their shopping lists of batteries, hair bleach, and tampons.
I adore Danny Boyle films because they seem to follow a path that has been true in my own life, whereas the good times never last forever, but if you're smart, you'll get away with a laugh or a lesson. Seeing as 28 Days Later is already on foreign DVD, and there is no movie theatre in my smallish town, I've been shopping for region-free players.
Cheers to SG for the Alex Garland article!
The only thing I would add is in reference to the idea that George Romero films having no politics. Zombie flicks "Dawn" & "Day" kinda beat you over the head with their simple social analysis, but the commentary was there. (The former being about consumerism, the latter about education versus the miltary.)
Thanks Alex, for a movie with a good script. Quite a rare thing in a todays major release films.