28 Years Later with Alex Garland

(upbeat music) Okay, 28 years later. That's both the name of the eagerly anticipated horror sequel that we're talking about today and the amount of time that it feels like has elapsed since the last episode of this show. Yes, my name's Al Hornor and this is Script Apart, a podcast about the first draft secrets of great movies and TV shows, back after a brief unplanned hiatus. Here's the thing guys, don't ever accuse me of not being dedicated to this podcast, right? Because in anticipation of this episode today, in conversation with the one and only Alex Garland about his and director Danny Boyle's folk horror follow-up to their 2002 zombie classic 28 days later, well, I actually went and became one of the infected as they would say in this franchise. Not with the rage virus of this series of movies, thankfully, I picked up dengue fever on a short trip to Mexico and basically had been wiped out for a couple of weeks. I spent most of May and June hallucinating and sweating, but I'm back and so too today on this show is a guest who made his first script apart appearance last year breaking down the politically close to the bone dystopian epic Civil War. You might know Alex as the writer/director behind films like X Machina, Annihilation, Men and Warfare. He also made a fantastic TV show that came out in the pandemic. So a lot of people missed it called devs. And the last time we spoke, he was telling me how tired he was of directing and he was talking about yearning to get back to a stage in his career where he was concentrating on writing and writing alone, you know, kind of like the old days. Well, it doesn't get much more like the old days than returning to the blood-soaked quarantine Britain that he first imagined two decades ago with a director who he shared an incredibly fruitful partnership with around the turn of the century. Danny Boyle and Alex's relationship began in 2000 when Danny adapted his novel The Beach into a backpacker thriller about going primal in paradise. They also worked together on Sunshine, a deeply underrated sci-fi, but 28 days later is undoubtedly their biggest impact in terms of work together. That film, in which a bite courier called Jim played by Keelian Murphy, awakes from a coma in a London hospital to find a country overrun and descending into animalistic chaos proved to be a monster hit. 28 years later, which hits cinemas on Friday, is no retread of 28 days. It's a meditative folk horror with the same level of terror don't get me wrong, but with a contemplativeness towards death that I was not prepared for. The film stars Alfie Williams as Spike, a boy living in a protected tidal island community off the coast of Northumberland, who leads his mother, played by Jodie Coma, on a dangerous quest onto the mainland in search of a doctor to cure a mysterious ailment. What follows is not at all what I expected in all the best ways. What you're about to hear is a spoiler-filled conversation breaking down those surprises. We go deep into the themes of this movie, including the influence of Brexit on the isolationism of this island withdrawn from the world. And of course, I had to ask what the hell is going on with the illusions to that disgraced figure from British pop culture history at the end of the movie. The evolution of the Alpha Zombies, the inspiration behind Kelsen, Alex's original draft of a 28 years later movie that involved Chinese special forces infiltrating Britain in search of the lab where the rage virus began. It's all in here, as well as honestly some very deep conversation about the entwined language of death, Memento Mori, and love, Memento Amar. I love this conversation. This week is actually the fifth anniversary of script-a-part, if you can believe such a thing. And this chat is exactly the type of conversation I dreamt this show could be a home for right at the beginning of this journey. So a big thank you to Alex. Thanks to Dan Gregory, who recorded this episode. Thank you to our Patreon community over at patreon.com/cript-a-part, who pay five bucks a month, and in return, get all sorts of exclusive perks. And of course, a big thank you to you guys for showing up and listening both today and over the last five years. A quick note for the screenwriters among you, script-a-part now offers script coverage, meaning feedback on your new screenplay and zoom consultations about what you're working on, head to scripta-part.com to find out more there. With that all out of the way, we can dig straight in. This is Alex Garland on the first draft secrets of 28 years later. My name's Al Horner. This episode was produced as ever by Camille de Mack. A big thank you everyone for tuning in. I really hope you enjoy the conversation. - Alex, thanks so much for joining us. - Well, thanks for having me, Mike. - Yeah. - It has brilliant to have you. I was so excited for this film when it was announced and I absolutely adored every second of it. And I think one of the things I loved most about it is how unexpected it was in that when the movie was announced, I thought that makes perfect sense. 28 days later is a film about rage and we live now in this rage saturated time. But this film doesn't, it didn't strike me when I saw it as a movie particularly focused on rage that is still the infection at play here. But it feels like there's something else that the movie wants to address. - Yeah, I think that's right. The key, the sort of key stone as it were to the arch is just how much time has passed. So it's partly how much time has passed for the people who made the original film and now coming back to make this. But it's also how much time has passed in that world and what that allows you to look at. And some of that is to do with communities and to do with families and some of it is to do with sort of logical steps you might make about the infected. Well, if they're still around and giving that these infected are not supernatural, they have to eat and they have to drink. And so sort of things flow from that. Like you can't catch a deer on your own but you can catch a deer with a bunch of other people, a large bunch of other people. And that's a bit like a pack of dogs or wolves and how far's emerged from that. But you can also get protein from earthworms and beetles and stuff like that. So there's things like that. But in the end, the thing that I was really interested in on a personal level was to do with a sort of regressive way of looking at the world rather than a progressive way of looking at the world. I grew up, I think, in a kind of progressive culture that was all about looking forwards and trying to think how to make the world more equitable and fairer and it sort of felt like a kind of inexorable process. And then that really changed in the last 10 to 15 years. And I got very interested in the way the past was being remembered. So it would be cherry-picked. And it would be not remembered when it was good to not remember something. And I guess that's similar to cherry picking. But more than cherry picking, there'd be absolute amnesia in some in convenient ways. And also most importantly, misremembering. And this film becomes, this film sort of visits that as an idea and then develops it more going forwards, I would say. - There's so much to dig into there. And I want to zero in on this idea of the passage of time. And first and foremost, I want to speak about that on a personal level, Alex, 'cause I'm fascinated. - 'Cause I'm in my mid 50s. I've had quite a lot of passage of time, yeah. - Well, no, it's more than like, when I think back to the original 28 days later, and I think back to a lot of those other early garland texts, like, there is, in a lot of them, there is something kind of primal and animalistic that is dormant that becomes unleashed in the beach in 28 days later, in sunshine to a degree. And this film just feels so much more tender. And I don't know if you agree with that categorization, but like for me, I didn't expect to go into a 28 days later film and cry. But that happened here. - Well, I mean, good. I think that is a good thing. What there is is, it's not exactly a game, but it's sort of a game being played where films have a kind of normal trajectory and the trajectory tends to be a punch up. So we spoke about Civil War a couple of years. Civil War ends up in a massive punch up, in a sense. You tend to get a bigger battle than the preceding battles you've seen earlier, and that could be boxes, or it could be a shootout, or it could be a shouting match, or whatever, but it's essentially a kind of punch up. And at the end of this film, in the last, what I think of the third part of the film, so the first part is a dad and the second part is a mum, and then there's this character played by Ray Feinds who writes in the third part, Kelsen, exactly. And what he is, is like an inverse of cuts. He sort of superficially looks a bit like Kurtz from "Hard of Darkness" or Apocalypse Now, sort of surrounded by bones, and apparently gone quite crazy, sort of deep in country, as it were. But actually he's very reasonable and very compassionate. And so it's like, if the promise of "Hard of Darkness" or films like this would be the horror of the horror, actually what you get from him in the last third of the film is not the horror, and that's the turning round of it. He's a guy who is building a memorial, and he is not differentiating in the way that, the little boy's father differentiates between people and infected and says, you can kill them, you should kill them, you should learn to kill them, they don't have souls, you're not really killing anything, sort of their sub-subhumans as it were. He sees them like a fair-minded GP as sick people, and his memorial is as concerned with infected people as non-infected people. And so you get something touching, or hopefully touching, it sounds like that's how it worked. For you, which is dovetailing with a little boy who's trying to find a way to make his mum better, from an illness, so it's about family, and it's about sickness, and it's about compassion and where you find it, and that kind of thing. When you stack the two films next to each other, and you contemplate the passage of time, and how you might have changed between these two scripts, what do you think the fact that this third act is so full of compassion tells you about how you've changed Alex? However it might look, I think I'm sort of an optimist about the world and about people. I'm not misanthropic at all. I think I might be misanthropic about the internet, but I'm not misanthropic about April. You're only bad. Actually, one of the things I like about this world or in has been the growth of podcasts, because I think in podcasts, people talk in a sort of gentler and more long form way than was able to exist for a long time. Anyway, I think though that I still have, to be honest, I still have a lot of anger. So those early films are very angry films, and Civil War is an extremely angry film, but it's also moderated, and maybe this one is slightly more moderated, and that is probably the difference is in writing terms, and I think also as a person, I was wilder in some respects back then, less controlled. You mentioned inversion a moment ago, and that inversion of apocalypse now, another inversion that I found, or it might be a complete coincidence, maybe it wasn't intentional, but the kind of set up of this story, the idea of a child leading a parent across this dangerous wilderness, rather than the other way around, which is something that we've seen in titles like The Last of Us. That was really interesting to me, and it got me thinking about the way, well, it got me thinking about this idea of iteration, and the idea that when you did 28 days later, you were iterating on Resident Evil. 28 days later comes out, then all these films and TV shows iterate on what you did. When you came back to this world, did you find yourself in conversation with any of those shows or video games in the case of Last of Us that were inspired by 28 days later? - I was very, very aware of and very impressed by and very impacted by The Last of Us video game on lots and lots of levels. Partly is a game, partly is a bit of writing, also performance and directing like the whole thing, just in really, really impressive. And I thought it was more sophisticated than the thing I had written back then. So you get affected by it in a sort of just raise your game or try to raise your game at any rate, type way. I think in terms of then the actual writing process, when that starts, you then forget. You then have a kind of amnesia and you are just locked into the space you're in and the world you're in. And it's a little bit like this. You are rewatching a film that you've seen many, many times and you really love. But as you start watching it, you don't really start anticipating all the scenes that are gonna come up. You just suddenly find yourself back in the story and back with the characters and in the flow of it. I had this, I've had this recently several times actually, watching things I'm very familiar with and being aware of how instantly I forget. And I'm in a version of the first time I ever saw it. So something related to that happens when you write. Now what that means is you can find later retrospectively, you took this from here, you took that from there and you weren't consciously thinking about it, it just happened. And sometimes other people police you and say, hey, that's like that scene in XYZ and then you got, yeah, you take it out. Other times nobody notices it until you're doing a press tour. And then somebody says it. And then you can't take it out because it's too late. But so that does happen, but I'd say it's all before the act of trying to make it. - Yeah, yeah. Before we dive into 28 years later in detail, I would like to just throw back to the creation of the first film briefly. Something I always forget with that film is that it was written as a pre-9/11 piece of media 'cause it's re-watching. - 9/11 happened while we were shooting it. - Yeah. And to me, it captures so much of the feeling that time in the aftermath of the event. Can you tell me like, was there something in the air that you managed to anticipate or was there something was, yeah, how do you think that film managed to bottle something that hadn't yet properly manifested? - I suspect it's a kind of coincidence, but the coincidence does make a kind of sense. So the thing that it has in common with post-9/11 is to do with fear and is to do with war in a way, complex and violent. And what had happened was a few months before the idea for 28 days later sort of arrived, I'd been in a very troubled country and I got back home after that trip and was very struck by the kind of dissonance state between where I'd just been and where I was now and people as it were fussing over the heat of their cappuccino or something like that and feeling quite jolted by it, I think. And some sort of angry, subversive part of me was like, okay, I'm just gonna bring all that violence and chaos here and apply it. And so in that respect, it was a film about the anxiety of violence and the actuality of violence and then of course that's what followed. But so it's a, it really is a coincidence, but not entirely, if you see what I mean. - Did anything about kind of releasing that film that was so close to the bone in that environment, post-9/11? Did you and Danny have any conversations about like, I don't know, maybe you even contemplated re-editing some things? I'm interested in, for example, in the fact that there were all these different endings for that film and ultimately you went with a more hopeful one. - No, because no, because I think that's part of the amnesia thing is while you're in the making of the thing, you start being preoccupied with a whole other set of concerns like, does this ending make sense or is this true to this character or is this correct to that arc or, but which could be a narrative owner which is the character art. So not exactly, I don't remember any conversations like that. I think I have had conversations like that that have occurred at times about whether things are appropriate or not and then you just try to make the best decision you can but not with that film, I don't think. I also think that it's in the nature of those times that when you are in that time the noise is too great for you to be able to make much sense of it. So again, this is like another of these obscure parallels like keep making. One of the reasons why we spent so it took so long to make this film was just, this is a personal thing is, I couldn't trust myself for my own motivations, I think earlier on because I wasn't able to see 28 days as what I think it is or what I think it is now. I wasn't able to have the right relationship with that film and five or 60 years later there'd been too many competing noises, one might just become us or the relationship that films has with sequels and the imperatives of sequels and stuff like that. So 9/11 would have, the same thing would have been true then and when something happens, what you need is repotage and analysis is probably best saved for some time later so that I guess that would apply your question. One of the strange quirks of this film is just as how the first film was kind of this text that preempted 9/11, this film kind of, you started. - I'm clearly. - Yeah, yeah. You began thinking about this film and I believe you wrote a script before COVID and of course now the film's coming out in a post COVID time. - Yeah, that's probably, that's the sort of the concept of that is probably a good example of what I'm talking about. So this was the idea of the original. Actually, I had an idea, I was working on something else if someone else had a crack at writing it and then later I had a crack at writing it and this was this, but this was the abandoned idea, okay? The idea was 28 days later something subversive about it, something kind of punk, something irreverent and sort of aggressive. So the idea I had was that the heroes of the film were gonna be Chinese special forces. Britain had been quarantined and Chinese special forces would break the quarantine, secretly land on the mainland and sort of fight their way through to Cambridge where the original outbreak happened and there they would discover that in fact, they were going there to try and find a cure but that entailed breaking quarantine and what they found was another group of people there who had done exactly the same thing but were not seeking to make a cure but were seeking to weaponize the virus, right? And the sort of subversive thing in a sense was to make the heroes Chinese special forces and almost all the film would be subtitled and it was, so it's got a kind of anti-auto commerce instinct in it but it also has a very, very generic idea an idea that wasn't generic when it first appeared saying something like aliens, which is less weaponized the alien, the Cameron alien, really brilliant film but has become incredibly generic since then and I hadn't not enough time had passed in effect. What I was doing was doing the thing that you do when you're writing a sequel, which is instinctively or consciously but I think it was more instinctive, be commercial and I'm sort of actually using the subtitles as almost like a defense against what is basically a very generic idea and it was not to be trusted and I wasn't good enough, I think, as an idea. So, does that, in any way, do you see what I'm trying to do? - In terms of the answer to the question, anyway, it was a learning process, once enough time had gone past and I'd taken the big wrong step I could then have a slightly clearest slate and try something else. - Yeah, it was interesting hearing you talk about that realization that this wasn't the right story and you've described how you gave this script to Danny and he was like, yeah, this could be, you could tell he wasn't necessarily quite on board with it and the phrase he used is, I realized I needed to get weirder with it. And I think this is, I say this in the most complimentary fashion, this is a weird film and I guess we should discuss some of that weirdness. First and foremost, there are sort of really unsettling folk horror elements to this and it feels watching it maybe unavoidably 'cause it's so British that perhaps Brexit was something on your mind. Was that a tool in influence on that? - Well, the thing about Brexit was that was self-imposed. We did that. I mean, we in a loose sense book, but this country did that. And this is not self-imposed. This has been imposed by the people. Look, does Brexit or does COVID play a part? - Yes, probably somewhere because, you know, you, me, everybody else, we live in the world. So if you're telling a story of that stuff, probably filters in somehow. But I was more interested in the way as you and I are talking, there are very extreme points of conflict now in several places around the globe, like really in the white heat state of conflict. And here we are in a hotel. You've got your laptop, I've got my coffee and there's a bottle of mineral water on the table. And it was that thing that I was thinking about that Europe, in Europe, people are getting Amazon deliveries and their girlfriends, you know, he meets a Swedish soldier and his girlfriend is clearly invested to money in collagen implants or whatever. So the rest of the world is carrying on just as normal. And this country is in a kind of forgotten, isolated space as a kind of inconvenient. Yeah, people know what's going on. Yeah, don't go to the UK. It's quarantined and it's full of zombies. You don't want to go there. Sort of something like that. It's not exactly Brexit, but I'm sure Brexit did. I'll tell you where Brexit came into it. Brexit did come into it. But it was to do with what lay behind Brexit. 28 years later, it's really, really genuinely interested in things that are misremembered or cherry picked or amnesia, as we've been talking about. And that's what Brexit was based on. Was a kind of notion, a regressive notion of the past. All the people who are saying make X great again. It's a regressive state. It's not progressive. It's not saying this is the way the world is now. How can we make it better? It's saying it used to be better before. And in the very end of this film, you encounter Jack O'Connell's the sort of micro family who are a kind of mash of misremembered things. And that becomes sort of the launch pad for near the cost of second film. Well, one thing, in fact, one person, in particular, seemingly, like, unless I'm mistaken, I mean, the character's called Jimmy. Not one person. It's not Jimmy Savile. Well, no, this is the key. Is that it's explicitly not one anything. It is a weird compression of many things that have been in a disturbing way compressed and compacted together in the mind of a little boy, who has, you know, who was very young when the outbreak happened and has these fragments of memories that he has made into a rational mythology and his rational mythology is the absolute opposite of rational. It turns out. Hey, everyone, this is Al. Just jumping in with a quick word about one of our great sponsors this week. Final drafts, big break, screenwriting contest. Your final chance to enter this year's big break is fast approaching. The contest closes on June 30th, but there is still time to enter. Big break has been launching screenwriting careers for over 20 years now and winners and finalists have signed with agents and managers. They've sold and option scripts. They've been staffed in TV writers rooms, so on and so forth. It's a great opportunity. Is this the year for your big break? There's only one way to find out. Visit finaldraft.com to enter now that address one more time is finaldraft.com. Okay, let's get back to the conversation. I could spend the entire podcast asking questions about that ending and maybe we'll get back there. But I do want to know about the evolution of the infected because you introduce kind of like, I suppose, logical ways in which these creatures, if we're going to call them that, I think the film challenges the idea of them as creatures. - Yeah, of course. - It kind of introduces ways that they may have survived. It also introduces us to the idea of the alpha. Can you tell me like at what point the alpha? - The alpha. - The alpha is one of those things that then somebody else said to me later way too late. Hey, there's another zombie film with alpha's in it. I was like, what the fuck? Which one's that? I can't remember the name, but it's set in Vegas and Zack Snyder. - Army of the dead. - Army of the dead. There you go. No disrespect. I just blanked on the name at that moment. But the idea was lots of the core ideas, including this thing about memory is all to do with 28 years having passed and what that allows you to explore. But it also creates in a way a problem, which is you've got a bunch of zombies, they're not traditional zombies 'cause traditional zombies are supernatural. So they're reanimated dead people. So they don't, they're not subject to the same sort of issues that you and I are subject to in terms of getting energy and sort of that kind of thing. Because they are people who are sick, they need to eat, they need to drink. And so how have they survived 28 years? If any of these ones have survived 28 years, some of them maybe just seven or eight years, well, it doesn't matter, it could be seven or eight weeks. You still need to eat or drink, right? So, and then it, that's when the logic comes in. If I was on my own and someone said, go and catch that deer and bring it back dead so we can eat it, on my own without a rifle or a bone arrow or something, I wouldn't be able to do that. 'Cause I wouldn't be able to get my hands on it. So, okay, so then they have to hunt as packs. Now that's not a problem because we've seen the infected in the first movie, work, a bit like a pack animal. What happens when animals are in packs? Well, you know, as BBC nature documentaries will demonstrate, you get, you get alphas within a group. So, okay, so now you've got alphas, you've got the pack and you've got alphas, but there are other means of getting proteins and that would be earthworms and beetles. And those infected would move slower and be less interested in roaming and attacking their interesting things lower down. And so, in other words, it has a logical element to it and it's got a kind of crude, very crude evolutionary element where if the kind of thing that lies behind evolution is that an environment suddenly changes for some reason, it gets covered in water or the water recedes or it gets hotter or colder and some creatures find they are better adapted and then those ones propagate better and so on and so forth. So, it's a bit like that in action and it has a sort of quasi-logical sort of thing you can overlay over it. Yeah, I suppose it also helps that it adds a point of differentiation to the first film. Like there's a new threat here as well, which just from a blank storytelling site. Yeah, but in a funny way, to me I almost felt like the infected were just part of the landscape and I was really interested in the idea that they were sick and there was a little boy whose mother was sick and making a strange parallel and then reconfiguring how you see them. So, it's more to do with the non-infected people and then to do with making the infected seem less infected and definitely that is that's kind of crystallised, I suppose, with the way this dad behaves to infected rather than this Kelton. Yeah, I think one of the scenes in which that idea comes alive best is on the train when we meet this infected woman giving birth, which then raises a question. So, I often get up braided for this. I'm so slightly bored of it where I don't explain things in films, but I like not explaining things. As a viewer, I don't want everything explained. I like projecting in and asking questions of films. I just enjoy that as a process. To me, there's a question there which is implicit. Was she pregnant and then got infected or are the infected having sex and impregnating each other? That's an interesting thing to throw out there. They're eating, they're drinking. There's all sorts of like prerogatives in life. Reproduction is pretty up there. So, yeah. And even earlier in the film, we see a child infected who has a stillness to them. And so, that scene, it doesn't seem out of the blue. I think early on in the movie where we're introducing that idea that these aren't mindless, soulless creatures as Jamie is discrediting in that. Who's that? So, I love the character of Iric who, you know, you touched upon him? We did. Yeah, yeah. And you touched upon him as a great way into this idea. There was in the first film that the rest of the world continues to turn. Doesn't give a fuck. Exactly, yeah. One thing that Danny's talked about is the ability of that character to unlock this idea of like, what Danny calls a culture block. So, Spike has grown up in this world that doesn't know what the internet is. Spike doesn't understand really even what a radio is. That's like a really interesting kind of like sub-theme in the film. Can you tell me what was interesting to you about that? Do you know, to be honest, look, partly I just wanted something that would illustrate that the rest of the world is just fine. You know, everything is just carrying on as it sort of, as it is now, as it were. So, not exactly just fine, but broadly just fine. And, but there's something else as well, which is that the film has a lot of tonal shifts, I think. Like, there isn't a lot earlier on that would lead you to think that the ending is going to be the ending. And, one of the tonal shifts, which horror, as a genre, is very good at accommodating is something which is sort of silly. I mean, not just funny, not just comedy. Obviously, horror's got a good long relationship with comedy and uses it as a release valve often at key moments or just after a key moment to sort of let the audience sort of get a breath and sort of be okay with what's just happened or something like that. But this was almost like Monty Python. It was just, this guy is ridiculous in some ways. And so, some of it was just that, was to not be too self-serious with the whole thing. Yeah, yeah. The line that you alluded to earlier about what's wrong with her face, the collagen implants. Like, I think like, if you take that out, if you take out that sort of palette cleanser out, then maybe the emotionality of the ending works differently without that reset in the middle of the film. Yeah, I just remembered something else, which is what actually happened with the alpha thing was that somebody told us in pre-production that there was this other film that had alphas in. And we took out alphas and we called them something else. I can't remember what it was now. And, and then we reinstated alpha as a word for only one reason, which was if you stopped it being alpha, there's a joke that he makes where he says like, you make them, you should call them berserkers because you'll make them sound like stockbrokers because, you know, alpha males, I always think of us like thrusting stockbrokers with Rolexes or something, I don't know. And it came back in just to protect that joke. Was there much else that changed? Were there kind of like the different story beats or kind of-- There's tons that changed from the script to the film. Oh, yeah. Yeah, so like there's scenes in the film that weren't in the script. And one that I quickly wrote them, these were created on set or written by Danny or-- so it was, I don't know what the relationship is between the script and the film in terms of actual content. Like lots of sequences were not quite the same. But also for me, I'd just come from a period of-- whereas writing scripts, but I was also directing the scripts. And I really wanted to stop doing that. I really wanted to write for other people, for, in this case, Danny. And so in a way, I sort of expected that. I was in a funny way looking forward to it. I was sort of thinking, I wonder what's going to happen now. And so yes, there was lots and lots of stuff, short answer. Would you be able to give me an example, maybe first, of something that was in the script and make it to the screen? And then maybe afterwards, a scene in the film that wasn't in the script. A scene, so an example of a scene in the film that isn't in the script is the little boy and his dad stop to take their shoes off before crossing the causeway to get back to the island. And so lots of bits of connective tissue, like that, I suppose. I think in the script, the emaciated infected that they meet in the field was actually in the-- well, I can't remember if it was Rivo or Panson's Abbott. I can just Rivo. The Reformation Ruined Abbey in Yorkshire. And so that was flipped. So the starving infected was in the Abby and the slow-low was in the fields. And then what was the other part of the question was, are there any cutscenes or-- Yeah, or anything that you explored in inspiration of the script that you ended up changing? Well, I didn't change it. Because as I said, I was really-- I really wanted to just be a screenwriter and not-- I didn't go on set. I didn't visit Danny Set or near the Costa Set. So those things are additions, I guess, the emaciated-- that's flipping something around. And then, yes, there's lots and lots of lines. That the lines are usually-- some people call them exposition. But I think that word gets used slightly too much and in slightly the wrong way. People do talk about stuff at times. That there was a scene where the doctor is musing about how the little baby is non-infected. And that got, I think, a chunk of that dialogue got reduced to a line. It's stuff like that. But honestly, that's normal. And it's exactly what I do with my own script. So I would expect a director like Danny or near to do exactly the same thing. So there's nothing in that. You mentioned the scene in the field. I think the kind of, like, decline of fact character, the mother, mental decline. She's a cognitive decline, yeah, yeah. She's imagining that she's there with her father. Of course, she's there with her son. And there's something so lyrical-- He's confused, yeah. Yeah. And it starts to kind of seed in this tonal shift that we get. We're going to eventually get to with Kelsen's kind of skull memorial and all the chat of Memento Mori. You kind of alluded to the softness of that ending. Can you tell me where that came from, Alex, like the tenderness of it and the perspective it has on death? The nuance it has around death, like it's quite sophisticated for a film that, like, many people might be going into this movie expecting, like, zombie rollercoaster, because that is what the genre promises. It has those thrills, but it's rare that it has this kind of meditation, I suppose. Well, that's-- thank you. I mean, that's very nice for you to say that. And I really do genuinely appreciate it. I think that-- I often work in genre, but then when I'm working in genre, I try to then apply the rules of reality to it in some way. I remember in annihilation, there's an alien, essentially. And so I really try to think about aliens and making them not like us, as it were, not with our agendas, or even our form, necessarily, or having relatable thought processes, not having anything you could really intuit about them, or anyway, so on, so forth. I think in this, I was very interested in this inverse Kurtz character. I was interested in the idea of sickness. And thinking, look, what is the reality of the world of 28, whether it's days or weeks or years or whatever? What is the reality of that? The reality of that is a lot of people have died. Like, really, a lot of people have died. And that needs to be addressed. I-- it's not like this is my thought. Lots of people have had this thought, I think. If you know the consequences, as we all do, of 9/11, in terms of you get a big building with people in it, and that building smashes to the ground, that means a lot of dead people. And then you apply that to a lot of movies, say, superhero movies, where big buildings are getting trashed the whole time. And you think about the implication of the number of dead people. I was actually thinking they're not very good superheroes. The sort of attrition around them is absolutely massive. They're not saving enough people really. And I was thinking what has happened on this island is just an enormous amount of death. And who's looking at that? Who's looking at it fairly? So there's this character who is concerned with that thing, a sort of compassionate thing. And then, and this is going to sound a bit odd and probably pretentious. That's exactly true of any place. It's true of London and Britain and Europe and the world. It is just a space of people having these little sparks of consciousness and existence and then that ending. So it's just looking at that memento-mori idea. How did you build Kelsen as a conduit of his ideas? By imagining him as the inverse Kurtz. So in a horror film, you think you're moving towards the horror of the horror of that. In the third act, that's what you all bump into is the sort of greatest iteration of this problem that the film has created for itself. And then doing the reverse of that, finding someone kind and compassionate who looks not just at the dead of this landscape infected or non-infected sick or healthy, but also someone who arrives to him as neither of those two things. And what is the fair way to talk to that woman and talk to this child, essentially? It's interesting. The last time we spoke, I asked you a question about-- and in fact, I think I referenced apocalypse now. And the idea of going up river as this narrative thrust that's often in your work where sunshine, they travel across the universe. Civil war-- we start in one location. We invent some where so much of your storytelling involves, like traversing. The interesting thing, as you say, is typically-- and this is included in your work-- when we get to this location, it is, as you say, the greatest iteration of that horror. But here, it's the gentlest. And it kind of makes me wonder the degree to which this work feels new for you. You started this journey a 28 days decades ago. And you must put them side-by-side and see things that you wouldn't have been able to write years ago. It's getting older, really. I think so. Yeah. I mean, without wanting to bust out of the fourth wall of the confidences of, as it were, podcast, pre-podcast, but you and I were talking before and about how health of people we care about impacts us. And one day, that will be our own health. And that is the nature of what we have to deal with. The older you get, the more you encounter that. The more reflective it makes you. Yeah. Have the ideas in the film, this idea of momentum, worry, and forget the Latin phrase, if momentum worry means, remember we must die. Because there's another phrase, remember we must love. And-- They're meant to have more. That's right, yeah. Do these ideas that are in the film have they brought you comfort in your own experience of these things? Uh, that's a very interesting question. I mean, in a sense, they are just true. And somewhere within truth, or what I perceive to be true, whether it's difficult or easy, there is nonetheless a kind of comfort. And the comfort is that you believe it to be true. Do you see what I mean? Yeah. I find that one of the most peaceful thoughts I can have is one of those you're trying to get to sleep thoughts is to do with the scale of the universe that we live in. How many styles, how many planets, how many galaxies, their ages, our size relative to them, an atom size relative to us, and the perspective that that gives. It's a very interesting thing, because if you do think in those terms, you would reach the conclusion that it is not just morally wrong to invade Ukraine. It's pointless. Like, it is a literally pointless exercise. There's-- it doesn't matter what the borders of your country are, really, it just doesn't matter. And so-- and that can apply to all sorts of things. It can apply to some difficult moment I'm having at work. There's enough to be geopolitics. But so, yes, in a way, I do find something peaceful in that. And it's funny. I know it would-- it can produce the opposite feeling in some people sort of immense anxiety. I always think that people that really fiercely believe in star signs, that's a product of their anxiety. They can't believe that these distant objects don't directly relate to them somehow. You know. Really going. I'm not going to go any-- I'm not going to respond to that because the amount of time I spend in L.A. and the amount of L.A. listeners that we have-- Oh, I've really put my foot down. I'm sorry. Tell me about the ending of this film, Alex. Was it a hard conclusion to find? Well, no, not exactly, because the thing that's in my head is not one thing. It's three things. And they develop and cross-relate. And so although this is a self-contained film in all sorts of ways, in other ways, it really isn't. Many of the people you encounter in the first film have an ongoing role and sort of narrative to track. So-- and I knew if someone is very ill in a certain kind of way, even with the benefit of medicine, you can still know ahead of time, and they can know ahead of time where this is leading. And in a world that doesn't really have any medicine, you can be really sure about that. And so I always knew where this story was going. And there is within films-- there's all sorts of odd contracts between the storytellers and the story recipients. And one of them is to do with jeopardy and whether people will survive against impossible odds or difficult odds or whatever it is. And I always knew this one wasn't going to be quite like that. So it was only ever going in one direction. Is there anything that you can say about the tone of the next film compared to this one? Is it a continuation of some of the philosophical aspects of the film, some of the meditative aspects of the film, or is it a different piece entirely? Well, no, it is. It definitely is. But as I said, when I handed the script over to Danny, I didn't know exactly what he would do. And when I was watching the rushes coming in, the way I direct is very old-fashioned and very basic in a lot of ways. Like, if I was shooting the two of us now, a lot of directors would kind of twitch what I was doing, because I really would get a master, a sort of two-shot, and I'd get an over-the-shoulder, and I'd get a clean single. And then I'd probably pick up another angle. And Danny doesn't do that. And because he's his own director, he does it in his own way. He's much more avant-garde than I am in all sorts of different ways, which I find very interesting. And then there's another whole set of things for Nia. So the two films, I think, would be very different, but co-related, but it's the difference. It will actually be one of the interesting things. So yes, there will be a continuation of some stuff, but there'll also be some real sort of objective differences because of the different directors. And of course, it's been confirmed that some of the characters, or one character, certainly, from the first film, is coming back. That is kind of one of the-- Oh, yeah. Well, yeah. I have to say, I think everyone's always a bit too tricky about this stuff fairly soon. I'd imagine there'll be a trailer, and then you'll see, well, it's not just one. It's several. It's several. I mean, that is one of the sort of like, not demands necessarily of sequels, but it's one of the wants from both fans and studios. Was that something that was kind of a difficult demand to satisfy in a way that felt-- No, because it didn't work that way round. Oh, really? So I think if you were to think back on-- so if you separate out in your mind the idea of trilogies that were intentional trilogies, like Lord of the Rings or something like that, with sequels, there tend to be different in terms of-- they're different in terms of the way they relate to stories and characters, because really, traditionally, what happens with the sequels, the studio makes a film. They hope it will do well, and if it does well, they will find some way of reconfiguring that first film, usually not to continue a story necessarily, but just to provoke the same set of responses in the audience, the same bunch of people, pretty much. And this isn't that. This is not a result of something having been successful. Near's film is not a result of Danny's film having been successful. Danny's film hasn't come out yet, so we don't yet know if it's successful. This is conceptualized in a different way. It's the reverse in as much as that either will or won't be a third film, dependent on the success of the first film. It's slightly weird. But it does in an industry, which is, of course, has this super close relationship with money. It does make me realize why there aren't very many trilogies, because they're sort of high-risk game, yes, both. But then, you know, well, might as well try. Sunshine was a trilogy. I didn't know that. Wow. So what was the new way we only got one of them made? This time, we put at least two. So we're improving on our sort of strike rate. I mean, you're returning to this collaboration with Danny Boyle years later. Is there a chance that Sunshine-- You could hear a chance on a zero. I think zero chance. It was Sunshine, Moon Shine, and Star Shine was the trilogy. The second one was to do with-- it was to do with-- So the concept of Sunshine was this, right? Sun's going to die. People set off to try and stop the sun from dying. And then they're interrupted by someone who is basically saying this was the idea of the film. Don't do that. Don't restart the thing, because all you're doing is delaying the horror of extinction. You're sort of reassuring yourself. And you're just handing on that horror of extinction to your great, great, great, great, great grandchildren. Why make them face it? You should be protecting them, as it were, and facing that thing yourself. Be brave enough to face it yourself. That was that idea. And then I think I probably got lost in a film somehow, but that was the idea. And then Moon Shine, his completely barmy idea, was going to be that some sort of vain gloriously-- and I don't know-- entrepreneur, narcissist, tech mogul, if the sort that do appear to exist these days-- decided to make the moon into a spaceship. And so they had to leave the solar system that meant turning the moon into a spaceship by sort of terraforming the moon. Not everybody from the Earth could get on the moon. So only some people would be selected. People who were good friends of the tech weirdo. And but by setting the moon off, you would have to have something to push against, which would be the Earth. So the Earth would be destroyed by the moon setting off merrily out into deep space, into star space, to find another planet, which it could then orbit around. And then Star Shine would be the arrival at the new solar system with this moon having had a very, very long journey, because the distances are so great. Such a long journey that there was enough time for evolution to have taken place on this moon. And that would have been the third one. Wow. But we never got to do it. That's such a shame, because a lot of those themes, they feel especially resonant to now and the idea of passing extinction on to the next generation and all that kind of thing. We are running out of time, Alec. So I'll end just with this final question. The last time we spoke, I don't want to put these words into your mouth, but you convey the sense of having hit a brick wall in terms of like you've been doing so much directing. And you wanted to pull back to writing. And I'm curious as to like, now that you've achieved that, what the emotion is, and whether you're happier and healthier in yourself, or if you've achieved whatever it was that you wanted to achieve by making that adjustment. I have, yeah. I mean, there's all sorts of ways you could configure that, but probably the easiest one is I wanted to be around my kids more. And in Civil War, I'd been away for six months. It felt like a long time. But you're also away for more than six months because in periods of pre-production and post-production, you're very occupied. And a screenwriter has a different relationship with the world. You're lucky if you get to shoot a film near where you live. And it wasn't just that, but I would say if I was-- that would have been the single most important. That would have been the single key part of it. And you know, it's rather a kind question there. I find it sort of oddly touching. I-- it did work in the way I've hoped it worked, yes. I'm really glad to hear it. Alex, thank you so much for your time today. It's been a fascinating conversation. And I love this film, if you haven't been over to tell. So thank you so much, and congratulations. Thank you, thank you. You've been listening to "Script Apart." Thank you so much for tuning in. A reminder that if you want to help the show continue to grow, you can join us on Patreon by visiting patreon.com/script Apart or clicking the link in today's show notes. Thanks again for joining us. We'll see you next time. [BLANK_AUDIO]