Nia DaCosta Talks Candidly About Directing '28 Years Later: The Bone Temple'
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During the Edinburgh International Film Festival, Nia DaCosta talked about directing the follow-up to 28 Years Later, subtitled The Bone Temple. Filmed back-to-back with Danny Boyle’s third entry in the zombie apocalypse franchise, DaCosta said that working on the film was “one of the best filmmaking experiences I’ve had.”
It was obviously a dream come true, as DaCosta was a fan of the original film. “28 Days Later was one of my seminal films growing up… I had the DVD in my house. I watched it all the time.” She loved Cillian Murphy, star of that first film, and she loved its director Danny Boyle, who she praised by calling him a bonkers filmmaker and that, “No one else can make a Danny Boyle film.”
Previously, the director of The Marvels and Candyman, DaCosta, compared her experiences in regards to the script and working from it. “One of the issues I had with Candyman and Marvels was the lack of a really solid script, which is always gonna just wreak havoc on the whole process. But Alex Garland hands you a script, and you’re like, ‘This is amazing.’ You don’t really have to change it, although I did, I basically asked for more infected. That was, like, my big contribution.”
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Filming back-to-back was a good way for collaboration with Boyle, DaCosta revealed, allowing some of her ideas to feed into 28 Years Later, ready for the story of The Bone Temple. “I inherited an amazing cast, then I was given the leeway to cast the rest of the film. There were a couple of locations I inherited. I was given the leeway to develop all the other locations. Some of it overlapped, like the character Samson – Danny and I would collaborate a bit on the look, but at the end of the day, Danny shoots so different from the way I shoot.”
Originally, she wasn’t going to take it on, but dinner with 2024 Oscar Nominee Jonathan Glazer (The Zone of Interest) soon convinced DaCosta. Production for The Bone Temple would overlap slightly with a project she was finishing. In asking Glazer what he thought, DaCosta revealed, “It’s 28 Years Later and I [thought], the man who made Birth and all his unique, personal films is not going to tell me to do a franchise film. He goes, ‘Do you like the script?’ [I said], ‘Damn it, I love it.’”
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