Danny Boyle tells us why he chose Young Fathers to score ‘28 Years Later’: ‘They’re like a hardcore Beach Boys’

Danny Boyle has opened up on his love of Young Fathers after he secured the Mercury Prize-winning group to score his new film, 28 Years Later.

The latest film in the 28… franchise focuses on a group of survivors living on a remote island nearly thirty years after the Rage virus first ripped through Britain. Jodie Comer and Aaron Taylor-Johnson star as husband and wife duo Isla and Jamie, while newcomer Alfie Williams portrays Spike – their 12-year-old son who prepares to head out to the infected mainland for the first time.

Throughout the film, it’s the score of the Edinburgh group which underpins the unrelenting palpable dread and tension.

“I don’t know whether they’d like this description but they’re sort of like the Beach Boys, but so hardcore,” said Boyle of Young Fathers in an interview with Rolling Stone UK. “I guess that’s kind of their use of harmonies and melodies in their music.”

Explaining how he get them onboard, Boyle recalled: “It was a huge risk because they’d never done a movie before and it’s that thing with any pop group, are you gonna trust the whole movie to them? But you go yeah! Yeah! Sony didn’t know the first thing about them, but they were wonderful. We had a wonderful back and forth and I went up to Edinburgh to their studio, which is a shed.

“It literally isn’t even a garage – it’s a shed, and they produce extraordinary stuff there. It was very beautiful. There’s some of the stuff you’d expect from them in there, which gives a very different flavour to the film.”

Speaking about his decision to return to the universe that began with 2002’s 28 Days Later, Boyle explained how the world’s reaction to the Coronavirus pandemic provided ripe inspiration.

“After Covid, you can’t deny that it has got to have some impact. There was such connection with the deserted cities and you can’t help think about that. But our behaviour was so interesting in Covid too. After that initial alarm and utter alert you relax a little bit and start to risk a little bit more. Humans are like that. So [after] 28 years of that, people’s behaviour would have moved on in an interesting way and Alex Garland set up this community on Holy Island.

“I think a lot of people love seeing that world-building,” he added. “How you would live in those reduced circumstances? The virus itself, like [with] Covid, different strains emerge. The infected look like the original infected but they’ve learned to eat and drink – they can hunt as a pack and a dominant has emerged too. So why go back to it? Because there’s stuff to explore and it’s not just a false copy of the first one.”

But, Boyle added, we can expect the return of Cillian Murphy as Jim in 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, the anticipated follow-up which arrives next year.

“There is an element of the first one that will come back, but not yet,” he said. “He [Murphy] is an executive producer in the first movie and he will emerge out of the horror!”