AH: How did this carry over into The Bone Temple?
GP: With the Jimmies and their leader Jack O’Connell, we really were able to have a lot more fun and kind of creative freedom with that. A lot of what you see on screen comes from Alex Garland’s script, like this wild idea of this marauding band of kind of bloodthirsty teenagers essentially dressed in a bricolage of tracksuits. We’ll try not to spoil it, but within the film, they take part in this quite brutal act that they refer to as “charity.” Danny really wanted them to put on some kind of mask, almost like an executioner’s mask. But because of this brief we were given about these tracksuits, we decided to create these masks made out of reappropriated trainers and T-shirts to establish a world beyond what we know.
AH: So much of what resonates with 28 Years Later, as with a lot of Garland’s and Boyle’s work, is that the most terrifying aspect isn’t necessarily the supernatural element, but it’s the mirror held up to humanity. How did you manage to communicate this sinister stunted youth through the Jimmies’ unique look?
Carson McColl: You hit the nail on the head. One of the key pieces of research that we did for the Jimmies in particular was looking at youth cultures, isolationist cults, and these worlds within a world where they have their own internal logic. We looked a lot at the photography of Derek Ridgers and looked at these quite aggrieved youth cultures that were building their own iconography and how you do that when you’re in isolation. Obviously there were visual cues that Alex had given us, but there were also things they hadn’t linked directly in the script that jumped out to us, like the Teletubbies or the Power Rangers.
AH: Speaking of the Teletubbies, which are shown on the TV in the opening scenes of 28 Years Later, how do you go about making them post-apocalyptic?
CM: The thing about these two movies is that 28 Years Later and then The Bone Temple is that 28 Years Later is a hero’s journey–it’s a classic story told in a visually radical way. And then with The Bone Temple, it’s a really radical script told in a much more classical way. The way that Nia DaCosta and Sean Bobbitt have filmed it is very beautiful, but the story is much, much darker than 28 Years Later. The first film, for us, was always about mortality and then the second film is very much an examination of morality. Nia gave us the latitude to create a look for the Jimmies in particular. It’s very heavy metal and she allowed us to push it to a more hyperreal place.
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