Anthony Dod Mantle on the set of 28 Years Later

When 28 Days Later arrived on screens in 2002, it marked a leap forward for both zombie movies and digital cinema. Eschewing the shambling undead of George Romero, the film’s infected sprinted after prospective human snacks. Technologically, 28 Days Later represented one of the first wide theatrical releases to shoot on digital cameras.
Director Danny Boyle and cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle belatedly returned with 28 Years Later. With the British Isles quarantined from the rest of the world, the story follows a 12-year-old boy (Alfie Williams) who leaves behind the relative safety of his island community to search the infected-strewn mainland for a doctor to treat his sick mother (Jodie Comer). Now that digital cameras are the dominant capture device of cinema, Boyle and Dod Mantle have again challenged the status quo by foregoing high end offerings in favor of the iPhone 15 Pro.
With the movie now available in all home viewing formats—and a Nia DaCosta-directed/Sean Bobbitt-lensed sequel The Bone Temple on its way January 16th—Dod Mantle spoke to Filmmaker about the arduous process of modding out the iPhone 15 and shooting tests on an old MiniDV tape left over from julien donkey-boy.
Filmmaker: When’s the last time you watched 28 Days Later? Did you revisit it at some point in prep for the sequel?
Dod Mantle: Well, unlike a lot of people, I still have a DVD of it, so I see it occasionally but definitely didn’t revisit it for prep. It’s so deep in my DNA, that film. It was like my christening into a kind of commercial but indie English cinema. I’d certainly made more “indie” films than 28 Days Later before in Scandinavia, mostly with Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg. It was also my theatrical release debut with Danny Boyle, though we’d done a couple of TV things together before. So, I remember it really well, and it was challenging and exciting to be back together with this extraordinary mixture of bank robbers and clever intellects in Danny, [producers] Andrew Macdonald and Peter Rice and [writer] Alex Garland. Working with Danny is never anything but challenging and exciting.
Filmmaker: How did the notion of shooting this largely on the iPhone present itself?
Dod Mantle: Danny was hunting for how to visualize 28 Years Later and poking away at what he loved about 28 Days Later. He loved the cohesion on that film between the narrative, the writing, the performances, the ideas, the architecture, the visualization and the technique of the camera. For him 28 Days Later was a reminder of how you can get it really right. However, you can also get it really wrong. All the best intentions can be involved, and you can try all the best things as a DOP or a director and sometimes you just build your way to hell. On 28 Days Later, something clicked for Danny. That is one of the films on his CV that he feels best amalgamated all those forces. So, that’s where the iPhone idea came from, that we should make a $75 million American studio film with theatrical release but make it with artistic control and in an independent filmmaker way.

Filmmaker: It was interesting rewatching 28 Days Later recently because I hadn’t seen it in quite a few years. When you look at the movie now alongside Blu-ray or 4K releases of films from the era, you really feel how different the aesthetic was of those early digitally shot features.
Dod Mantle: When we made that film, I’d just come from julien donkey-boy, Celebration and independent arthouse films with Lars von Trier. So, I was already in gear for that. Danny wasn’t in gear yet. He had just come from The Beach, Darius Khondji and studio complexity and really wanted to go somewhere else. I was just the catalyst to help him do that and we’ve stuck together as best we could since.
Filmmaker: A couple of years ago I read that you still had one of the Canon XL1s from 28 Days Later. Still the case?
Dod Mantle: I still have it. I actually pulled it off the shelf [before making 28 Years Later] just thinking, “Well, are we going to go back to that?” Danny and I never really intended to do that, but I did get it off the shelf and shot on it recently and it’s a nightmare. (laughs) It’s very erratic.
Filmmaker: Can you still find MiniDV tapes for it?
Dod Mantle: You can get anything if you want to look hard enough. I still had some old tapes that I could use, with shots of Ewen Bremner walking in the middle of the road with his false teeth in Queens in julien donkey-boy. I didn’t wipe anything, but there was a bit of space on that tape, so I put that in the camera and tried to make it work. And it did, but it was horrifyingly difficult and temperamental and there was no way I was going to take a risk on that.
Filmmaker: When you did your first tests with the iPhone 15 Pros, what were the issues that initially presented themselves?

Dod Mantle: The issues were many. (laughs) I tested a Samsung, a Google Pixel phone, an iPhone and a couple of others. We had [a PA] running around in bare feet in the sea in January in the dying light with Danny waving flames around to try and test the shutter. We screened those first tests at one of these big arthouse cinemas in London and Danny was three rows in front of me. What I saw was 50 minutes of absolute, unadulterated compost. There were a few moments, but more coincidental than contrived or prepared, where I could see indications of, “Okay, but how do we control it?” Uncontrolled can be good, but you don’t want a terrifying uncontrolled. During the tests Danny kept turning around and saying, “Oh yeah, I love that.” It’s my job to marry myself to that, develop it, protect him and maybe even enhance it. So, that’s where prep started, with me slightly reluctant or cautious but ready to embrace it.
Filmmaker: How much did you ultimately tweak the cameras from what someone else might get from the iPhone out of the box?
Dod Mantle: I had to get Apple and Blackmagic to collaborate with me to adjust quite a lot of the official setups in the Blackmagic Camera app. Basically a lot of those apps are just a load of words around the frame that make you feel like you’re more of a filmmaker. Yes, to a certain extent, it is the language we know as professionals, but you’re still without a lot of the tools I normally use in the way of controlling focus, where and how you place the framing and control the shutter. So, the next six weeks in prep were me building a bridge between this whimsical idea about doing something in a maverick radical way and slowly adjusting these phones with lenses and adapters. Danny wanted to shoot anamorphic and as we were testing I saw that there was a bit more real estate on the side of the frame than even a 2.39 aspect ratio. So, that became our 2.76 ratio for the film, which was an absurd and crazy, but suitably provocative, idea for us. It was not an easy process because every time I put an extra lens on or ordered new stuff off strange websites from somewhere around the world, the producers were sort of saying, “What’s that? Aren’t we just shooting this on iPhones?”
Filmmaker: As you mentioned, the Blackmagic app allows you to manually adjust things like ISO, color temp and shutter that you can’t control with any precision in the iPhone’s native recording mode. That said, it’s still a fixed aperture lens and as a result there are certain things that you’re stuck with.
Dod Mantle: Yes, you aren’t really changing the stop. We tried to embrace utilizing the phone as close to its naked capability as possible. For one of our builds, I had a prosumer anamorphic front lens adapter, a bit of diffusion and an app, which is pretty close to how Tangerine was made ten years ago. We worked out a way of getting out of Apple log and into Arri log, which is where we were going to work down the line in post. We changed some of the settings, we changed shutter speeds. We got Apple and Blackmagic to pull together in conference calls about that, because there was this whole idea about [replicating something similar] to the infected shutter from 28 Days Later, which had this kind of hectic, jagged feeling. We had to re-find that using a very different tool because it may say shutter speed and ASA [in the app], but it’s not the same mechanics.
The second generation of our iPhone set-up came into play during prep when I found this prosumer company called Beastgrip that, amongst other companies, is manufacturing things for iPhones. There’s a massive industry there and some bloody good filmmakers out there doing those things, clever people who are not spoiled or elitist or privileged to just take the biggest camera off the shelf. They work trying to get the best out of what they have, whether for economic or aesthetic reasons. The Beastgrip adapter was basically set up for EF mounts, then Arri came on board while I was doing my tests and helped [alter] that adapter so it became a PL [mount], and that opened up a lot of newer lenses for me. So, that was the second set-up, which then became a third set-up and a fourth set-up. That ultimately enabled me to put anamorphic lenses and spherical lenses and zooms onto the iPhone so I could control how I place the viewer’s eye in a more conventional way. We also used drones to a certain degree. I think I succeeded in getting the drone into the language of the film in the way I wanted to. There’s a percentage of it that’s still not quite right for me. I’m very particular about what the lens does and how anything moves and when it moves. That includes drones. I just don’t want these things suddenly flying away like it’s at Wimbledon or a baseball match. It does tend to slip into that very quickly on some films and I’m quite strict about that.
Filmmaker: Once you got that PL mount set up going, it sounds like you used a lot of different glass. What were some of the sets you leaned on most?

Dod Mantle: I did a lot of testing of lenses. It’s weird, the two films I’ve tested the most for in terms of lenses and formats are this one and Celebration, which was shot on a Sony PC3 and ended up winning Cannes and basically giving me a career in this business. That’s the most testing I’ve ever done, including the $100 million In the Heart of the Sea with Ron Howard. It doesn’t necessarily correlate that the smaller the budget, the less testing. So, after a lot of testing with both spherical and anamorphic lenses, I settled on two set-ups. One was this simple iPhone setup where I just used the consumer front anamorphic adapter [from Beastgrip], the 1.33x version. I thought the 1.55x was appalling and distorted. Just too self-conscious, too hipster. I didn’t really like that at all when it was projected. So, I stayed on the 1.33x and also used diffusion and put mess on the lenses to try to help get it a bit more organic.
I also fell in love with a second set-up [using the PL mount adapter] that used Atlas Mercury anamorphics, which were adequately lightweight that I could still operate with my hand-made hand grips. That’s very important to me because Danny’s all over me about the operating and why and how I operate. I came up as a DP who operated. Many of us who grew up in independent cinema didn’t really have a choice—you had to do both. We barely had a production designer. I come from that, so I still don’t mind it. I only had four or five of those Atlas lenses from something in the 30mm or 40mm [range] to the 90mm [range]. They’re anamorphic with a 1.55 squeeze. I also had lens babies and spherical lenses. I felt a juxtaposition of blood and gore and fear with beauty was very interesting, so I was inclined to lean slightly more towards something softer. I wanted this beautiful dying nature 28 years after [the first film], just overgrown trees and bushes and greens, greens and more greens. My least favorite color in my life and Danny knows that. [laughs]
I also pulled in a K35 zoom, which I adore. Danny suddenly started talking about zooms, so I had to find a way of zooming because you can’t zoom on iPhones successfully and control it. I had some other small primes standing by. I had a couple of rectilinear wide lenses that I sometimes used, but I basically shot the film mainly on five or six lenses. You have to be able to evade being caught with your pants down or letting Danny down. Nobody can envisage everything. Even Danny, who’s a superb director and very experienced on set, can’t envisage everything and if you feel you suddenly let him down, that would be terrible. So, I had to find tools that could cover me. They were like weapons. They’re in bags in wheelbarrows, wheeled up to set, and I had one that could do this, one that could do that, one that could do a third and a fourth thing. We also used a [Slokey 60090 24x-300x astronomical refractor] telescope lens, which is the most absurd thing I’ve ever seen or done on a film set. I was completely out of my—or anybody else’s—comfort zone with that one. It was hilarious. We’re shooting on a phone and there’s this beast of a lens on it that’s two foot long. It was impossible to operate. If you panned off [an actor], you couldn’t find them again. [laughs] You had to find them once and hold on and then say, “Good luck, Mr. Focus Puller.” Out of that came this extraordinary observational and predatorial imaging that I quite liked.
Filmmaker: LED lighting tools weren’t available back when you did the first 28 Days Later. How have changes in lighting units affected the way you work and your ability to keep this pace that Danny likes to work at?
Dod Mantle: When I first trained as a cinematographer, if I did eight shots a day I was doing well. Now it’s 28 shots a day with three or four cameras. There are still people that like to shoot everything with one camera and that’s fine. There’s no one way of doing anything anymore, but Danny likes to work fast. On the lighting front, I worked with the Sinfield Brothers [gaffer David and best boy Ian], who are experienced in working in enormous studios. They’re on Dune now and work a lot with big productions. I met them on In the Heart of the Sea, then they helped me on 28 Years Later and I’ve just used them again on this last film [The Runner] with Kevin Macdonald. They can go from ginormous studio films like Dune to standing next to me with a small LED or two. I embraced [LED lighting] very early, where you have it all connected to an iPad. The first cinematographer I remember reading about using it in a good way was probably Benoît Debie with Gaspar Noé. We really did try and keep the size and lights down, but there are points in the film where the lighting is pretty heavy, like the causeway scene at night, which we shot on stage. That was set at blue hour with the Northern Lights. I was not going to try to shoot that outdoors in an English summer with a kid’s working hours.
I’ve always traveled a lot with gaffers. I try to work with the same ACs and grips when I can—people I know and trust, who know me and understand the way I think and don’t think sometimes—but a gaffer has always been important to me because it’s the biggest area of learning for me and has been since I started. With lighting, I know what I want. I don’t always know how to get it, but I know what I want. In many of the films Danny and I have done together, I had a gaffer called Thomas Neivelt who followed me for many, many years. He’s now back home in Denmark and not doing so much, but we’re still close. I saw more of him than I did my wife and family for years of my life. He traveled with me everywhere and we did many films together.
LEDs are also just so much cooler [in terms of the amount of heat they put out]. Shooting high speed on Antichrist, I was setting people on fire basically with [the heat from] the units you had to use then shooting film at night. It was always a massive, massive saga. Now, I rarely shoot film. I do occasionally, but I’d probably shoot night on digital for obvious reasons and day I would still consider shooting film.

Filmmaker: Tell me about this iPhone camera array that you used, which featured a row of iPhones attached to some sort of moveable board. It’s essentially the same principle as the old “bullet time” from The Matrix.
Dod Mantle: That is what we called the “BarCam.” The biggest version was a 20-camera set-up. They each have a custom-made variable ND.
Filmmaker: That’s how you controlled the exposure, because as we said before it’s a fixed aperture lens?
Dod Mantle: That’s right. For much of the shoot, they still had not succeeded in developing a system for us where they could slave one camera to them all so you could get much quicker control. We literally had to go around and [adjust every camera individually]. So, you had to go, “tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, check, check, check, check, check, start, start, start, start, start, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop.” I think aesthetically some of the images in the film that are a result of the 20-bar camera are really exciting because Danny has a bigger radius through which he can explore frame by frame. I do like the idea, which I don’t think we’ve explored to the fullest yet, of using the eight-bar cam that I can handhold and move around with, which totally abuses the classical principle of the array à la The Matrix. It abuses that tradition of precision, but at the same time you open up something else. So, I saw endless enigmatically interesting possibilities in the bar cam. We explored some of them, but I think there’s still a ways to go. The bar cam is part of the DNA of violence in the film without a doubt.
Filmmaker: How did working with the iPhone compare to the early DV cameras you used on the original 28 Days Later?
Dod Mantle: On this we actually had a lot more latitude. You have between 12 and 14 stops of latitude between the whites and the blacks, which is kind of insane, and I think potentially stylistically very boring. I spend my life destroying that anyway on all my films. That said, [with that much latitude] even if your granny is next to you operating the camera and she’s never shot a camera before, there’s a chance she’ll get something in exposure, which is not degrading my colleagues and myself to being useless puppets who just press a button and walk away. It’s not like that. But let’s face it, you can do that, and something will come out. One of the best documentaries I’ve ever seen in my life was called Leviathan, about the fishing industry, shot on small GoPros and cameras like that. It’s an astonishingly immersive experience where you put the cameras in and let them go. It’s this incredibly visceral usage of small sensors just to show a process, which you associate with something like a surveillance camera. There are so many things you can do in cinema if the story is applicable. Leviathan is one of the most unforgettable films I’ve ever seen in my life and an example of how you can use small, less capable, less light sensitive cameras where you can almost feel them struggling. It’s like the struggle becomes an integral emotion in the way the film’s put together. I had that in Celebration. The sensor on the PC3 was struggling sometimes and basically collapsing in its focus capability and its light sensitivity was struggling to even survive. When we made 28 Days Later, I had to embrace the limitations of those cameras, but I didn’t mind the [highlights] clipping and the blacks going to black. Those were problems you have to accept, but what I did like about it was the physicality of it almost being like a film camera. There was still a tape moving across a head, a physical movement aspect, which there isn’t for this one. As soon as you get into sensors, whether you’re talking about the Alexa 65 or Venice or whatever camera, they’re all incredibly powerful, capable and sophisticated, but it’s dead technology. It’s not organic. It doesn’t breathe like film. The computers in these iPhones are powerful. The cameras are very clever. I’m interested to see what happens in the next generation of iPhone films, not that I’ll necessarily be doing them.