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With 28 Years Later, Alex Garland is essentially circling back to the beginning of his filmmaking career. When 28 Days Later came out in 2002, Garland was better known as a novelist; that hit sci-fi horror, directed by Danny Boyle, was his first screenplay. He hadn’t yet made Ex Machina (2014), a prescient sci-fi thriller that broached some of the questions about AI we’re now struggling to answer in 2025. He hadn’t yet made Annihilation (2018), or Men (2022), or Civil War (2024) – all films that explored weighty themes through an imaginative genre lens.

After a lengthy spell, Boyle and Garland are teaming again to make a new trilogy of films which continue 28 Days Later’s story. Rather than continue from the 2002 film’s immediate sequel, 28 Weeks Later (2007), however, the filmmakers account for the generational gulf. It’s years since the Rage virus has swept across the UK. Survivors are now hived off in walled enclaves. Modern technology barely exists; in many ways, communities have fallen back into a pre-industrial way of life. Infected hordes still stalk the countryside, and so venturing out into the wider world – as the tough hunter Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and his son Spike (Alfie Williams) do – has become a dangerous rite of passage.

Having recently co-directed Warfare with Iraq veteran Ray Mendoza, 28 Years Later also sees Garland step back from movie sets and into the more hands-off role of screenwriter. “In some ways, it was a relief,” Garland says of writing his scripts for Boyle and director Nia DaCosta, who’s currently making next year’s sequel, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple. (The third film in the trilogy, if it happens, will be directed by Boyle.) 

But while 28 Years Later isn’t directed by Garland, its ideas and themes are of a piece with the smart, often quite dark movies he’s made over the past eleven years. And as you can tell from the transcript below – lightly edited for length and clarity – he has a lot to say about everything from Brexit, science and technology, and literary inspirations…

I think I was in my late 20s, certainly, when I wrote the first draft, yeah. I mean, look, I’m in my mid 50s, so it’s a lot of time past and I’m older as a person, I suppose. But also, I have a completely different perspective on filmmaking and the film industry. Because the thing about film is, if you love film, and you watch a lot of films, I think you develop the idea that you know the basic processes of films. You understand there’s an editor and there’s a cinematographer and there’s a director and so on and so forth. And I think I knew that stuff in some ways before I started working with Danny, but this is a long time ago. 

I quickly learned that almost everything I [thought was] a misconception. The process is not what I imagined it to be. A lot of the job descriptions are almost terms of convenience in a funny kind of way. You don’t really know how any film is made unless you have worked on that particular film. And it’s amazingly difficult to cross transfer. So the processes of working with Danny will be completely different when you’re working with a different crew and a different director. And so I think partly, I just had a lot more information about filmmaking. And also, by the time I wrote these scripts for Danny, I directed a few movies and a television show, and so I also had that extra piece of information. 

What it made me do was, I think, to be much more stepped back, oddly. That all the extra information made me more removed… So in this instance, I wrote the script, I handed it over, and that was it. I did not visit either Danny’s film or Nia DaCosta’s film [28 Years Later: The Bone Temple] while they were shooting. I didn’t go into the edit [bay] while they were being edited. In 28 Days Later and Sunshine, I would have been on set and in the edit and in pre-production the whole time. But now I really kept a distance from it. I said, ‘there’s the script, I hope it works for you,’ and that was pretty much it.

I do, yeah. But not for very explicit reasons. I’ve said it before, so I’m doing that thing people do in interviews, which is, they repeat themselves and then try and make it sound like they’re saying it for the first time. But now I’m trying not to be disingenuous. But there’s basically two kinds of filmmakers: there’s a filmmaker that makes films about the films they loved when they were growing up. And in effect, they’re making films about films. So they loved Paul Verhoeven, or they loved Spielberg or whatever it was, and they’re in a cycle of discussing the films they loved in some respects. And then there’s other ones which are reactive to the world around them. 

I think both Danny and me are essentially reactive. So in that respect, [28 Years Later] would be about Brexit, whether it was intended to be about Brexit or not, because that was the thing that was happening. I’d say neither Brexit nor COVID were particularly in my mind while I was writing, I’m just not discounting the fact that they would have played into it. 

The thing that interested me more, though, was not so much about Britain choosing to isolate itself from Europe. It was more to do with the rest of the world isolating itself from Britain. So it’s the sort of inverse of Brexit, the fact that you are not as important as you think you are, as a nation or as an individual, and also the way that there can be – in fact, there are, while we’re talking right now – absolutely horrific things happening in other countries, and those things don’t stop Amazon deliveries. 

They don’t stop people standing in the line of a coffee shop thinking, will I get a latte or a cappuccino. A basically inconsequential thought they’re having whilst children are being blown to pieces elsewhere. So that sense of a country which has been isolated, and everyone’s aware that this terrible thing has happened in Britain, but also they’re not going to stop struggling to get the new Nintendo Switch or whatever it is. So I think that was in my mind more, maybe, than COVID and Brexit.

I mean, yes, it is, but I’m not sure I’d call it anti-intellectualism. That’s not where I would place it. I’d place it… I’ll probably now say something which is sort of quasi-intellectual.

I was born in 1970, and I feel, looking back, that for a very big chunk of my life – probably up to about 15 years ago – very, very broadly, the world I lived in was a progressive world. It was looking forwards, and it was anticipating an increasing sense of equality, and things would be more equitable and fairer. That felt like the trend, post-Second World War. So there could be bumps on the road, but these great lessons had been learned from the Second World War that were so huge that they were unlearnable.

There would be aberrations, and they could be terrible aberrations, like, say, the Vietnam War and the genocide in Cambodia. But still, if you looked at the stock market graph, you’d be moving in a progressive direction. That’s what it felt like. And Obama felt representative of that in some ways. And then the world, but specifically the West, became incredibly fixated with regressive ideas. ‘Make America Great Again’, or Brexit and Farage, are emphatically about looking backwards. They’re really not about looking forwards. They’re about, ‘there used to be something good, and we need to remake the thing that used to be good.’ 

So you could bolt on progressive or regressive into a modern, political context in terms of what progressive politics or regressive politics looks like. I think I mean it just in its most explicit terms. One was looking forward, one was looking back. And the thing about looking back was that to me as someone who’s middle-aged, I remember aspects of the past, also, because I’m the product of my parents. My parents are Edwardian in some ways, so I pick all that up. It’s part of me too, in a sense, is that they’re cherry picking the past. They’re misremembering the past, and they’re also having amnesia about some aspects of the past. And I think that what the film is doing is showing a kind of messy memory of the past in some respects. 

So when you look at the community on Holy Island, there’s a 1950s vibe about them: 1950s and back. So just in small things – it’s really a detail – but like a dad  hitting his kid when the kid has stepped out of line. That’s not modern parenting, that’s old-fashioned parenting. And there’s all sorts of instances of that throughout the film. I’m talking in broad terms. 

Of course, there’s still parents that hit their kids, but in terms of social trends, or what is generally considered acceptable, if you saw an adult hit a child on the bus, people would probably intervene or or if they didn’t, it would be because they were scared, and they’d feel they should intervene. Whereas 50 years ago, they’d think, ‘I guess that kid just stepped out of line’ or something like that. 

Anyway, the films are super preoccupied with that. In the second film, that becomes very explicit, I would say. I’m sorry, man, I’m probably just talking too much.

I definitely started to get self conscious during that answer. It’s because these things come in a cascade, and they’re not single ideas. They’re all sorts of thoughts just amalgamated in it. So it doesn’t really have a thesis. It’s just a set of thoughts. That’s what all my stuff is.

Just because it’s a bit of a mystery, isn’t it? People are generally, whatever their online personas are, really friendly and helpful and good-natured. Not everybody. I’m just talking in general terms. I would say typically reasonable. So actually, when I was talking about Civil War to journalists, I remember getting really attacked at one point for saying that I had right wing friends. And I do have right wing friends. I’m not right wing, I’m left wing, but I have some really, really good friends who are right wing, and I really like them, and I respect them, and I enjoy their company. And there are points of total divergence, and sometimes we kind of knock heads, but then also we, we then hug and make up, in effect. And that seems to me to be really typical of how people usually are with each other when they’re in the same room.

Then there’s this amazing contrast, which is shown very neatly in online debate and in-the-room debate, and that conflict of behaviour, because it’s the same people doing both things, exists in the same way, with people being very constructive in their lives. So they would be concerned about being a good parent or being a good friend, or have a work ethic and be concerned about their job, and it just sits alongside these incredibly destructive urges. And I don’t want to sound cute because of the 28 Days thing, but there’s a kind of anger, a rage. There’s a lot of anger in people that sits alongside it, and the anger is very destructive, and it’s really interesting how easily people can flip between the two. It’s like the diversion of a stream.

It’s amazingly easy to divert people’s behaviour, and so reasonable people and neighbours and family members can suddenly turn that on its head, and so the same person who’s very concerned about being a good partner and a good parent might then become amazingly destructive to their own family. So I just find that interesting. I’m not exactly judgmental about it, because in a way, it’s too common to be judgmental about it. If you decided to be judgmental, you’d spend your whole life judging everything. But you see it played out on a small scale, a domestic scale. And right now we’re definitely seeing it played out on a geopolitical scale. Constantly. All these things are super loud at the moment. They’re much louder than they were in like, I don’t know, 1988 or something like that.

I think that was definitely, definitely happening. And so you get all sorts of things that are accelerants, as it were. So, for example, that sort of centrist government problem that starts to emerge where the left and the right keep swapping, but actually people’s lives stay exactly the same, which pushes people then towards more extremist positions, almost inevitably, you would say. But to me, looking back – and by the way, this doesn’t mean I think I’m right – it wasn’t actually to do with the rich poor gap and the unfairness within society. 

I have an intense dislike of tech companies and their leaders and the way they conduct themselves. I think that has been an accelerant, but I don’t think it’s that [rich and poor divide].  To me, it’s actually about amnesia. It’s about forgetting. So you have a very concrete lesson that is taught. ‘If you do this, if there is this kind of scenario, if there is this kind of sequence of events, it can lead people into catastrophic spaces where things like genocides can occur, or wars can occur.’  

And I really think that after two world wars, there was a deep understanding of some of the elements of that. And when I look at various administrations of government, but also the people voting for those governments and the things they are letting those politicians say and choosing to agree with in terms of what those politicians say, I just think what that means is they have forgotten the consequences and the things, that lead to people like that. And their complicity, their involvement in it. Now, all of that could be complete bullshit, right? Quite easily. It’s not about whether it’s true or not. It’s the forgetting and the misremembering that is disturbing me the most at the moment.

Sure. The thing about Heart Of Darkness is you’re influenced by it, even if you haven’t read the book, because so many people have watched Apocalypse Now, or other stories. Sorry, I interrupted.

Yeah, The Beach, definitely. And in this film, because I’m consciously playing with Kurtz and then, like doing a kind of inverse Kurtz. Look, [Heart Of Darkness] is just a very neat, compact, elegant story. And with good stories, a set of themes just inevitably come with a good story. I mean, I’m sure the themes came first and then this was the right way to explore them, or, or actually, maybe it was just Conrad’s own experiences, and he was in this almost documentary way, giving an account that then speaks to something real. And so the themes come along with that. I guess it’s some combination of all of those things. 

What I would say is that what I really am is, despite all this progressive, regressive stuff, I’m very old fashioned in a lot of ways. And the older I get, the more old fashioned I realise I am. And I do really admire old novels, old films, very, very old plays. George Orwell sort of fell out of fashion recently, in some respects. I’m personally a big fan, and I also don’t like auditing these people in terms of their belief structures placed into a contemporary [context], or their behaviours. People are too varied anyway, in their behaviours, to be audited in that way. I’m not interested in that. So am I influenced? Yes, definitely. I’m a product of the British school system in that way, where we get taught a bunch of stuff. And, you know, whatever it is, 40 years later, I still find myself thinking about Hamlet. I know how that sounds. I’m caricaturing myself, probably, but it is true.

No, I haven’t that one, but I have seen Omega Man. So in fact, I’ve seen the Will Smith one as well. But what popped into my head was Omega Man. So I know the story. I mean, part of the question is both Heart Of Darkness and any post-apocalyptic story, which, in a way, Heart Of Darkness is, it’s not post apocalypse. It’s, Within Apocalypse… I do think that somewhere within those stories, they’ve got a funny wish-fulfilment element of what would this be like? 

So here’s an oblique way of putting the point I’m making. I thought about this the other day. If I watch a rom-com like Notting Hill, I don’t actually project into the rom com. I don’t imagine myself as Hugh Grant, as it were, or Julia Roberts. I am observing this couple. ‘Oh, I hope they get together,’ or whatever one is supposed to think. Or When Harry Met Sally, or whatever. I really don’t project into it. It’s more like some friends saying, ‘Yeah, this is how we met.’ And then they tell the story of how they met. And you think, ‘Oh, that’s sweet,’ or that’s funny or silly, or whatever. 

With post apocalypse stories, or maybe Apocalypse Now stories, I absolutely project into them, so I find myself thinking in a conscious way, ‘If I was in The Omega Man, what would I do? What sort of house would I go into? What sort of weapons would I try and accumulate? Which would be the best canned goods? What supermarket would I raid? And I don’t do that with rom coms. 

I don’t think I would take Julia Roberts to the pub at the end of the street because it would charm her. It’s just stuff happening. Do you know what I mean? There’s something about those stories that must be connected to their appeal, that they’re making you think about something you fear will happen. Maybe it’s a really old fear.

Perhaps. Maybe, yeah. 

That’s interesting. That’s interesting. That’s a good bit of trivia.

I always feel a little bit uncomfortable about this. So the thing I say, which is true, was that I was playing a videogame, Resident Evil on the PlayStation. The zombies moved very slowly, and I absolutely discovered that the dogs in that game were more [scary] when they jumped through the window in that hallway. 

So that that was an ‘A leads to B’ process as a conscious thought. I have a feeling, though, that there were running zombie movies before. I’ll be getting this wrong, but there’ll be something within this that may be right. I think Dan O’Bannon did one which I probably saw on a VHS.

You know, in my teenage years, there was a kid on my street whose parents bought a VHS machine, and the Post Office started renting VHS [tapes] at the bottom of the street, and so we would go down and just get every single – it’s a common story from that era – every single film we could. And a lot of the films were B-movie, horror movies. And Dawn Of The Dead was a big one. I saw Dawn of the Dead a long time before I saw Night Of The Living Dead. And we used to watch that again and again and again. But there’s a whole bunch of others. 

There was another one, and just in my memory, it’s Dan O’Bannon, and it has running zombies. But anyway, because of the way we’ve been talking up until now, I mean, it’s sort of a slightly different mode than I usually am in interviews. I suppose I have a feeling there is this other movie, and so every time someone says, yeah, 28 Days Later, sort of invented running zombies, I don’t think we did. There’s another one, and there’s probably 10. 

Oh, thank you. That’s very kind. 

[A final warning here for Devs.]

So yes, because I’d heard those conversations. It’s slightly fuzzier and more nuanced than that, but in effect, yes. Also, a lot of the dialogue in Devs relates to this. There’s a line about people making such big decisions about the future, who know so little about the past. And I was getting very concerned about this thing about forgotten lessons of the past around that time – that’s when it really kind of went into overdrive in my head. 

I had also seen a very particular… It was to do with people having religious type interpretations of the universe. So one of them would be, ‘we live in a simulation’ as an example. They were religious-type theories, and coincidentally, except, of course, not coincidentally, they would directly relate those to tech. And these people had made massive amounts of money from tech, and the money they made was like proof of how clever they were. Because how else could you make all this money if you weren’t sort of a genius or or special in some way? 

So, of course, the religious type thinking that they end up having is a self-supporting one that puts them in the Jesus role, right? How fucking predictable. And how deeply pathetic and how deeply narcissistic. In a way, you can’t have that thought process unless you’re so self-involved, and you know so little about the past and how religious type thinking evolves or develops. And I was so dismayed by the stupidity of it and the arrogance of it. That’s what Devs came out of.

It also came out of, simultaneously, a really deep love and admiration, not of tech, but of science. I mean, tech is a product of science. I mean, often tech is really just entrepreneurialism, with some great engineers floating around somewhere, so there was a lot of real interest and admiration and surprise in some of the ideas… If anybody ever goes and listens to, say, David Deutsch, who’s one of the fathers of quantum computing, it’s just a pleasure to hear him talk, whether you agree with him or not. Just to sort of experience that mind is so rewarding and gratifying

So, on the one hand, there’s a great love of something, and on the other hand, there’s real dismay and anger at something. But often with this stuff, it’s not rocket science. It was pretty obvious how barmy a lot of these guys were. They didn’t exactly hide it. What I found was that, with a lot of these tech leaders, people reacted to them in a similar way that they react around movie stars. Whatever suspicions they had just got completely suppressed. I suspect it was also mixed in with greed: like, ‘If I become friends with this person, maybe I will become as spectacularly wealthy as them…’ I couldn’t stand it. I still can’t.

Yeah, I am, actually. I’m absolutely an optimist. Because I think people are largely, actually, pretty good. I think under certain circumstances, they can be really bad. I just worked on a film called Warfare, and in a lot of my reading about Warfare, I was reading some reports from the 1970s when a guy started doing an investigation into war crimes, the psychology of war crimes as the result of a massacre that happened, a really appalling massacre in Vietnam called My Lai, where enormous numbers of innocent people were slaughtered in a in a really horrific way. When he started doing the testing of this and interviews, and writing a paper, what he found was that there was an amazing absence of serious investigations into war crimes as a psychological product. 

This is what he discovered: the people who commit war crimes, you cannot look into their past and find something that will predict whether they will commit a war crime or not. So in other words, it’s not that someone showed psychopathic tendencies aged 12 and liked killing pets in the neighborhood or something like that. They are exactly the opposite. They are totally impossible to predict. They can be from any background, any part of the country, any demographic. It’s all of that. Forget it. It will give you no indicator. 

However, there is an indicator, which is, if you take a group of people and you put them in the context of a war, and there are some particular features. And one of the features is that people around them will arbitrarily be killed, so it might be by a sniper or by a landmine or by an accident, things that feel random. He said, under those circumstances, you won’t just find there’s a high chance of a war crime being committed. You can almost guarantee that a war crime will result from these kinds of circumstances. 

Now, bizarrely, that’s what gives me the optimism, because what it says is, we’re products of our environment, and if you create a reasonable environment, you will get reasonable people. And so what is required is being reasonable. And one of the things to be reasonable about is to remember the lessons of the past, right? 

So, that’s a circuitous way of saying, yes, I’m optimistic, but not without reason.

Alex Garland, thanks so much.

28 Years Later is in UK cinemas now.

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