Special effects supervisor Sam Conway, director of photography Anthony Dod Mantle and production and costume designers Gareth Pugh and Carson McColl take The Hollywood Reporter inside the making of '28 Years Later,' from how they built the film's impressive bone temple to what it was like shooting the feature almost entirely on iPhones. '28 Years Later,' directed by Danny Boyle, is now playing in theaters.
00:00Some films are easier than others. I don't think this is in the easy category. I think it was a fight for many people for many very legitimate reasons.
00:0811, 5, 9 and 20 miles today. 4, 11, 17, 32 the day before. Boots, boots, boots, boots. Moving up and down again. There's no discharge in the war.
00:23The difficulty we had was obviously for a lot of the blood effects on the infected was that they were mostly naked.
00:31So it's very difficult to hide anything. So we needed BFX to help paint out certain rigs and firing devices and stuff like that.
00:40For a lot of the arrow hits we actually used a micro-scrib and we squeezed enough blood into little balloons and when the balloon was popped the latex of the balloon would help fling the blood around.
00:52We were trying to limit the amount of equipment or the amount of stuff that involved to make these hits. We did a lot of R&D trying to get that right.
01:01Get back to the trees.
01:03Get back to school.
01:05John!
01:08Obviously there was these two very distinct spaces that we were trying to create and one was the island which was supposed to be this kind of impoverished, grey, sort of depressing place actually even though it was a safe haven.
01:20And then as Spike passes over the causeway it's sort of like he steps into like a portal and it's obviously a right to passage moment to him moving from childhood to adulthood but he's also discovering the mainland for the first time in this super abundance.
01:36So as soon as you step onto the mainland it's lush, it's green and it's kind of overwhelming for him.
01:42We ended up basically shooting in some of those most beautiful places in the UK but the most important one to find was going to be the location for the Bone Temple.
01:50So basically Kelson's Bone Temple, it went through a lot of iterations.
01:54It's obviously a very important set and obviously the second film in the trilogy is called the Bone Temple.
02:00So we knew it was an element that was going to have a lot of importance and that we had to get it right.
02:05We eventually kind of arrived on essentially this hinge, this sort of kind of circular, almost kind of prehistoric Stonehenge type talismanic structure.
02:19We kind of took the Bone Temple design through a huge amount of R&D and I think Danny responded really positively to it because he basically said it's something he'd never seen before.
02:33And I think that's what really got him excited about it and it's the idea that we could physically go to a location.
02:40Everything was done outside in the open air for better or for worse.
02:44And yeah, it was quite a feat, but we were impressed by the belief in the idea behind the set in order for it to be built physically because it was a big undertaking.
02:56Do you know the words, memento mori?
03:00No.
03:01It means, remember death.
03:06Remember, you must die.
03:08Basically, in our thinking or our approach to the costumes, obviously, in our heads, the clock stopped in 2002 when the first film was released.
03:22So basically, it was a big kind of sourcing job.
03:25We did a lot of charity shops, a lot of thrift stores in the Northeast, got a lot of budget from this film.
03:31And basically, we brought all of these incredible, very kind of like wildly different samples back to the atelier that we had set up in Newcastle.
03:41And we had a whole team of incredible kind of embroiderers and kind of breakdown artists to essentially batter them.
03:49Is your dad silly?
03:53Dad?
03:54Yeah.
03:55Silly with you? Jokey?
03:57No.
03:58Your granddad was so silly.
04:00Pretty early on in prep, Danny was pretty keen on the idea of using phones.
04:05So the iPhone idea came in pretty quickly and he stayed pretty hardcore with it.
04:09And I played around with the ideas of doing things differently.
04:12And that was definitely not going to work.
04:15I used certain specific cameras on the night scenes of the kind of, they're basically infrared and thermal.
04:20Some of the nightmare scenes in the film.
04:23But otherwise, it's iPhones, but it's a developed idea of how to use an iPhone.
04:26You're not completely like the filmmaker you thought you were when you worked with an iPhone.
04:30It's a different way of thinking.
04:32It's a different world.
04:32But that was his idea.
04:33And out of that idea becomes a set of rules.
04:36Out of those rules comes pleasure, horror, expectations get smashed.
04:40Other things occur that you don't expect.
04:42And I think that's really what he was looking for.
04:45And I had to develop these iPhones with certain systems to achieve the whimsical ideas that Danny can come with on the day when you're standing in front of joining people.
04:54It made it difficult because there were so many iPhones.
04:57You know, 14 iPhones all scattered around or whatever.
05:00So it's very difficult to know exactly, you know, what you prioritize on as far as effects go.
05:06And also, let's face it, finding a place to hide, you know, when you're on a set.
05:10That was always tricky.
05:11But the rigs made it harder as well because they saw pretty much 360.
05:15So it made it even harder for us to hide absolutely anything.
05:19Even though we had VFX help, there were times where we hoped that we could get away with a little bit, put some rigs somewhere.
05:24But it made it incredibly difficult.
05:26Obviously, this being our first movie, it was so exciting for it to have this sort of, this new way of doing it.
05:33And it was everybody's first time.
05:35So I think that sense of dynamism that brought to the project, the idea of you never really know what's coming next.
05:41I remember we were working on decks and sharing with Danny and there was like night vision in the decks.
05:46And then it was like night vision was in there.
05:48There's all these multimedia formats.
05:50And as visual people, as visual artists, to think that what you're going to come out with at the end is not just a movie,
05:58but it's this sort of assault of all these different layered uses of tech to create these everlasting images.
