It's one of Danny Boyle's best works and we kind of can't believe we've never covered it before.
Here are a few things you didn't know about 28 Days Later.
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 40 or 50 years old.
So, they also had to create legislation to disallow putting chimps down just because of their age.
Boom, 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.
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 filmmakers 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 a much better storytelling the way they did it.
Tally Ho as the Brits say.
They may 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.
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, fireballs, and tasty hoots on a series of damp napkins.
So the way to rise to the occasion Danny Boyle.
Moving on.
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.
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 time.