Making Fun Of Dramas On The Set

Filming the sequel to 28 Days Later was not all fun and games, writes Stephanie Bunbury.

FUN is our business." So says the carnival script, all fancy curlicues and serifs, on the side of the truck that brought the Carter familys Victorian merry-go-round and swing boats to the set of 28 Weeks Later, which happens to be a field attached to a stately home handily close to London - Knebworth House. Fun, however, doesnt exactly cover it. Knebworth House is also handy to Luton airport; a plane takes off, says the sound man darkly, every couple of minutes. If curses work, not one of those happy holiday-makers is going to come back with a tan.

Of course, thats not the only thing working against them. A tiny wisp of cloud is right on course to cover the sun during the next take; a massive storm is due to follow and the crews tramping backwards and forwards is playing merry hell with the long grass that is supposed to feature in the coming zombie attack.

"Show, please, respect for the grass!" yells the Ecuadorian director of photography, Enrique Chediak. Luckily, the props people have some growing in pots, the set-dressing equivalent of hair extensions.

There also seems to be some confusion about the plot. 28 Weeks Later is the sequel to Danny Boyles 28 Days Later, a sci-fi horror about a virus derived from the rage of chimpanzees that turns most of Britain into a rampaging maelstrom of flesh-eating madmen. They are not supposed to be zombies, exactly - they are not dead - but 28 Days Later, written by regular Boyle collaborator Alex Garland, was a hit with the zombie fan base in 2003.

Danny Boyle isnt here. He has done a bit of second-unit direction, we are told, but he was too busy with Sunshine to do 28 Weeks Later as well; Spanish director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, who made the acclaimed horror Intacto, has taken up the reins and is one of four people credited with writing the script.

Garland is not one of them, but he is here every day - supposedly line-coaching but actually rewriting as they go. His favoured escritoire seems to be the toddlers elephant seat on the merry-go-round, where he sits and writes furiously whenever it isnt in shot. His face is grim and set and he doesnt want to talk. Not much fun being had there, then.

28 Days Later was particularly successful in the US, which may explain why the sequel has two American soldiers at centre stage. One of them is actually Australian: Rose Byrne, wearing fatigues and waiting for special-effects whiz Cliff Wallace to touch up a gunshot wound in her leg. He squirts her with a syringe of fake blood. The old ways are often the best, apparently, when it comes to quasi-zombies.

Digital effects, Wallace says later, have forced effects artists to lift their technical game. "We use more skin-like materials that look better to the eye, but to the camera it doesnt make a lot of difference, frankly."

In the new film, the rage virus has supposedly exhausted itself and its human carriers all starved to death. Accordingly, the US military is overseeing the resettlement of London by survivors and people who were lucky enough to be out of the country when the disease struck.

Outside the protected settlement zone, the sorts of downbeat streets familiar from The Bill are eerily empty, Tower Bridge is traffic-free and Trafalgar Square given over to the pigeons. But inside the zone, its getting back to business as usual.

Except, of course, that cant happen. By the time we get to the merry-go-round, the infection once again has London in the grip of a heaving wave of bleeding monsters. The Americans have a solution: kill everyone. Renegade Rose, however - as Scarlett the medical major - has taken it upon herself to save two children she believes may have an inherited immunity to the disease; their mother was found mutilated by an infected human but apparently unaffected.

"That makes their lives more valuable than mine," she says to Jeremy Renner, playing a marine called Doyle who is running with her. "Or yours."

"I got it," he replies, succinctly and often, as the scene is shot from closer and closer angles.

Renner thinks a line about killing his buddy makes no sense; Garland agrees, quite fervently, and cuts it.

He also doesnt like the line he has to deliver about Scarletts mothering instincts. At this stage, he says, he hasnt even seen her with the kids. "I have seen nothing to indicate that they are special to her!" he snaps. "Not one inkling of that!"

Earlier, a set-dresser asks Renner what time of day its supposed to be. Is it still night? "I dont know," he says morosely. "F-ed if I know."

If you want upbeat, you have to talk to Fresnadillo. "I think in this movie the thing I love is emotion!" he enthuses. "It is a family concept: the family is trying to start over after the devastation but it brings again the infection; it is really about a family curse.

"At the same time it is good to tell the story of something that could happen in these days. We are surrounded by rage and by war, so in this way the horror concept is connected with things that are happening now. Always I say this is not a zombie film. Zombies relate to death. Rage relates to life; it is something more terrible."

The children are Tammy, played by an impossibly posh, thin 17-year-old next-big-thing called Imogen Poots, and Andy, played by Macintosh Muggleton, 12, who was chosen at one of dozens of in-school auditions. "He had a filmic look," says acting coach Ben Till. "In any year you get one or two of them. Then, of course, you dont know if they can act."

Mac, as they call him, is very strong on screen, but is finding todays heart-to-heart with Tammy, about whether their mother is alive, uphill work. "Mac, youre sounding bored," Till says. "Try to avoid boredom. Youre more hypnotised."

He tries again. "Do you think Mums still alive?" "Mac!" Till says. "With less energy!"

It isnt until the rain starts pouring in the afternoon and props people start sloshing around cheerfully that any sort of fun begins. Umbrellas go up; a plastic sheet whips over the camera; more reflectors are brought in to bump up the light. Doyle and Scarlett do their scene, now stripped of half its lines, muffled by rain. Everyone is poised for a take when yet another plane scrapes overhead.

"Ooohhh, aeroplane!" shouts the sound man in a voice stolen from Frankie Howerd. "Came out of nowhere, guvnor!" "Dont worry!" shouts someone else as Renner takes aim with his hollow machine-gun. "Doyles got it!"

Finally, as the light fades, it seems everyone is in the fun business.

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