One of the scariest films of the year, 28 Years Later, used iPhones to film key scenes. Mashable chats to director Danny Boyle and stars Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Jodie Comer, and Alfie Williams.

Los Angeles

The film '28 Years Later,' directed by Danny Boyle, incorporated iPhone 15s to shoot several key scenes, offering a new and experimental experience for the cast. Actors Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Jodie Comer, and Alfie Williams noted that the use of iPhones created a sense of vulnerability and presence, as the lightweight devices allowed for more intimate and immediate performances.

Boyle explained that the decision to use iPhones was influenced by technological advancements and a desire to maintain a sense of realism, reflecting the ordinary world depicted in the story. Alongside iPhones, the production utilized RED and Panasonic cameras, drones, and a widescreen format to unify the film's visual style, enabling innovative techniques such as a 'poor man's bullet time' effect for action sequences.

'28 Years Later' was shot on iPhone 15s, the actors loved it

The film was shot on iPhone, how was that for you as actors to use that technology? Yeah, it was very new, I mean it was such a different experience, I mean probably, you know, same for you, I guess, you don't know any different. This is normal for me, I don't know any different. But I guess, yeah, it was very experimental, you know, and I think that sort of set the ground for Danny and everyone, that it was just, yeah, everything was very bold choices and experimental, so we could explore. But when someone puts an iPhone, you know, very close, you feel, it's a bit intrusive, you know, you feel kind of vulnerable and you can't hide. There's this quality about it that just shows everything and it meant that we just had to kind of feel very present in the moment and it was just going to capture these moments. And so, it became, you got used to it very quickly and it became such a great environment to work around. You're just like, yeah. He's like, well I do that, I mean all the time, we make movies on iPhones all the time. With Danny Boyle. Don't, don't look at what's in front of you, boost, boost, boost, boost, moving up and down again. The world has moved on so much since we made the first film and we used for very specific, kind of almost story reasons. At one point we were going to have a scene in the first film where a character picked up a discarded domestic video camera that was left on the ground along with all the cash and everything that's been left behind and is now all useless. And it still worked, the battery was still live and you could see evidence of the horrors or something touching or something like that. So we thought, we'll make the film on those cameras for all sorts of reasons. It allowed us to do the opening sequence in a clever way so that we could. But technology has moved on and we thought we've got to move on and yet we want to respect that instinct which is to use the ordinary in some way. So it feels like it's something that's come from the place that the story is about. And of course we've all got the phones now. So we decided to use them, they're lightweight, they do, they now record at 4K. But they allowed us to visit places, remote places in the UK with a very light footprint. But we used a lot of cameras. We didn't just use the iPhones, we used some special, there's a RED sequence in it that's used this special Panasonic camera, the EU123 I think it's called. And we used drones which use 6K cameras. And we unified everything with a format, with a 276 which is a widescreen format which you can do now with all these cameras. And it's a beautiful format, it's not very much used, it's only been used in a handful of films weirdly over the years. But recently Sinners used it and The Creator used it, Oppenheimer used it, Hateful Eight is shot in it. And I love the way Tarantino uses widescreen, he's wonderful. The way he edits as well, he edits in a very different way than I edit. He lets you select as a watcher where you're watching because you have to select on a widescreen. And I like that unease it creates when you watch this. It allows nature to be portrayed but it's also the danger could be anywhere within that broad scope. So yeah it was exciting and it allowed us to... We wanted to depict some of the violence in a very particular way which is like a poor man's bullet time, the matrix technique. So we were able to get a lot of these cameras for free and stack them. And then use this technique which you see a couple of times in the film to surround an event and to be able to flip around the different sides of it. And sort of my dream is trying to... You're here watching it and my dream is always to get you to go to flip inside it and then back out again. We haven't got that technology yet but one day where you just like astral project into inside what you're enjoying. So anyways but it's a kind of little way of doing that, it's a little technical way of doing that.

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