Okay, Jim.
I've got some bad news.
- Halloween is tomorrow, so
we're squeezing in one more movie that really delivers on the gore.
It's one of Danny Boyle's best works and
we kind of can't believe we've never covered it before.
Actually, are we sure we never covered this before?
We've done over 100 episodes now and I legitimately have no idea.
Probably should have checked on this before we started this episode but well.
Here are seven things you didn't know about 28 Days Later, probably.
(Sound) Remember the sequence in the lab with the chimps
that essentially kicks off all of the events of the film?
That chimp there is named Johnny, by the way, boom,
bonus thing right out of the gate.
Anyway, you probably didn't know just how hard it is out there for a chimp.
First off, you can only work with chimps until they're about seven or
eight years old,
because they become considerably harder to work with after that, like Lindsay Lohan.
But unlike Lindsey Lohan, chimps can live to to 40 or 50 years old.
So, they also had to create legislation to disallow putting chimps down just
because of their age.
Boom, bonus bonus thing.
That means there's a limited availability of chimp actors overall,
since most of them have aged out and
are taking it easy in whatever the chimp equivalent is of Boca Raton.
Ultimately, all working age show biz chimps are supplied by facilities in
either Los Angeles, California or Stuttgart, Germany.
Twenty eight days later went with the Stuttgart option since production
was based out of London and they shot this entire lab sequence there over the course
of three or four days not 28 though that would have been way too many days for
a sequence of length.
Next thing.
(Sound) When Jim wakes up in hospital, as the Brits say,
one of the most eerie things is how deserted it is.
Director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland had to make a big decision about
whether the hospital should, in fact have corpses lying around,
and they did shoot some dead bodies in various locations around the hospital.
But they decided not to use any of that footage and kept the hospital empty.
Playing it up as a big symbol of what had gone wrong in the past 28 days.
The film makers concede that it would have been more realistic and
would have made more sense story wise to have had bodies all over the place.
But it was more cinematic and much better story telling the way they did it.
Tally Ho as the Brits say.
(Sound) They many have kept the hospital and streets empty, but
Jim does eventually find the bodies in this church.
Using a church as a makeshift cemetery just seemed like something that would
really happen in the team's opinion.
Anyway, the production budget was so low,
nearly all of the extras playing dead people, who turned up for
the shoot, were people who were paid nothing more than a cup of tea.
They simply couldn't afford an hourly or day rate for them.
But hey, I guess bragging rights that you played a dead guy in 28 Days Later
is priceless, especially when you go in for that free cup of tea.
(Sound) Production may have had to cheap out on paying their extras,
but it was mainly because they needed to save every quid, I guess,
for important stuff, like explosions.
Danny Boyle felt that just because the film was low-budget, or British, they
couldn't hope that the American audiences would lower their expectations and
be cool with lame explosions.
In his mind they had to compete with the Michael Bays of the world and
had to have action and explosions as good as whatever else was playing in theaters.
Boyle also had the edge against Michael Bay in that his movies
actually have scripts, rather than crude drawings of car chases, fire balls, and
tasty hoots on a series of damp napkins.
So way to rise to the occasion Danny Boyle.
Moving on.
(Sound) If you know a bit about movies you probably know they're almost never shot in
sequence.
It rarely makes sense from a scheduling and budgetary standpoint so
it tends to be extremely rare.
28 Day Later, on the other hand,
is one of those rarities as it was shot almost entirely in sequence.
The structure of the film itself affording them this luxury and
it really helped the actor's performances, because they always felt like they
knew where they were, literally and emotionally.
Of course, production did have to go back and grab a few things here and there,
which is a perfect segue into our next thing.
(Sound) If you're watching this show,
it's safe to assume you've already seen 28 Days Later.
So spoilers are far from off limits.
But because the Internet has never been a hub of logical thinking,
nor reasonable people, consider this your warning to skip ahead to our next thing,
in case you don't know how the movie ends.
Even though you don't really deserve a warning because you accept
the spoiler life each time you watch our show.
Okay, we mentioned in our last thing that 28 Days Later was shot in sequence, for
the most part.
They did have to grab a few pickups, but they also had to grab a whole new ending
for the film, because this is where the film ended for a long time.
(Noise) - Bummer ending, right.
Production ran out of money and that was that.
But when Danny Boyle showed the film to Fox they gave him more money to go back
and shoot more.
And for the love of all things Tuchi it's a good thing they did.
The entire sequence at the lakeside is thanks to the cash infusion from Fox,
not to mention the fact that is was shot on 35 millimeter vs the fittingly
gritty DV we see throughout the rest of the film.
It was just a choice that Boyle made to make it feel like the world had opened up
for the characters and
to help convey a strong sense of nature that we never really get prior.
It also conveys a strong sense of another bonus thing you didn't know.
Last thing.
(Sound) Let's wrap things up with that one time
that Danny Boyle got pissy on set.
For this scene where we see all the buckets lined up on the roof to collect
rainwater, it was a bit of a scramble to pull off the shot.
The problem was the design team started off with 100 buckets.
Sure, 100 buckets sounds like a lot of buckets but
once you put them on a rooftop in wide shot, it looks more like ten buckets.
So I'm going to say the word buckets a few more times.
Buckets.
Once Boyle saw how it looked on screen, he demanded that they get
him 1,000 buckets by the afternoon and the production team did it.
Sure some of those buckets look pretty dodgy,
might even be a couple of laundry baskets thrown in there.
But they got the shot, didn't they?
And that makes Danny Boyle's hissy fit well worth it.
Buckets.
That's it for this episode,
but 28 Days Later had its 15th anniversary this year, so we'd be
more than happy to do a part two sometime soon if you guys liked this episode.
By that, I literally mean like the episode.
There's a thumbs up button down there, please and thanks.
Also boom, bonus anniversary thing in the outro.
Thanks for watching and subscribe to Cinefix for
more true-ish things about movies.
And sometimes tasty hoots on a damp napkin,
right here on Things You Didn't Know.
- Do you want us to find a cure and save the world, or just fall in love and f*ck?
Plans are pointless.
Staying alive's as good as it gets.