28 days later’s silent city

Though we’d already seen Tom Cruise do it in NY (in Vanilla Sky), when Danny Boyle’s virus movie 28 Days Later showed us the eerie aftermath of complete breakdown in London, the effect was arresting. As coma patient Jim (Cillian Murphy) awakens in St. Thomas’ Hospital and discovers it abandoned, he dons surgical scrubs and sets off across Westminster Bridge, trying to unscramble what has happened.

Wandering, dazed, towards Big Ben, Jim cuts a lonely figure – dwarfed by

silent, empty London landmarks as Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s thrumming electro score reaches a crescendo of impending doom. WTF has happened? What dangers await Jim? How did Boyle do it?

He wanted to see Britain as “a mythic landscape” and realised that audiences might be overly familiar with postcard views of the capital, so this moment of flipping normalcy and erasing the bustle of humanity was key to making viewers feel unnerved and uncomfortable. “We felt it was important to try to make it unfamiliar,” explains the director, “so audiences could look at it in a slightly different way, a bigger way, than they do in their normal lives.”

He was unable to afford CGI, so this key sequence was filmed for real in July 2001 over seven consecutive dawns, between 4.30am and 6.30am. Without official police marshalling, Boyle charged his daughter, Grace (then 17), and her school friends to hold up what little traffic there was to get the shots on day one. He admits a “terrible sexist cliché” was at work in that these unofficial marshals were all attractive

girls, so the following days he hired female models and students to pull the same stunt. The crew also used multiple digital cameras to capture that seemingly long, lonely bridge walk. “Cillian would walk across Westminster Bridge, but we’d put five or six cameras in different places,” recalls Boyle. “So we only had to walk once. And you only had to stop the traffic once. And then Chris Gill, the editor, would cut in such a way that made you think it was taking forever for him to get across.”

The guerrilla-style feat took on greater social significance after it had been lensed as history added darker context to the images of a ruined city. Having bagged the London shots, production went into prep before starting the rest of filming in September that year. And then 9/11 happened. “It was weird, we thought we were making this film about social rage. Our loss of patience with each other,” says Boyle. “But, in fact, the film was refocused by the events of 9/11. It became about the vulnerability of cities. How these things we take for granted and seem to be around us the whole time can just be vulnerable.” JC