Nia Dacosta teased what to expect from her part in Danny Boyle 's 28 Days Later sequence, 28 Years Later .
Dacosta took over directing duties The Temple of Bones Filmed with Boyle's film, released earlier this year, starring Alfie Williams, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Jodie Era and Ralph Fiennes.
At an Edinburgh International Film Festival event on Monday, Dacosta said fans of the zombie apocalypse franchise will see more of Spike's story and Jack O'Connell's character in his film, slated for a January 2026 release.
“Making the 28-year-old sequel was one of the best filmmaking experiences I’ve ever had,” Dacosta, director of The Marvels (2023) and Candyman (2021), said. “One of the issues I had with Candyman and The Marvels was the lack of a really strong script, which is always going to be damaging throughout the process. But Alex Garland gives you a script, and you’re like, ‘This is amazing. ’ You don’t really have to change that, though I did—I basically asked for more Infected. [ Laughs. ] That was, like, my big contribution.”
“I inherited an incredible cast, so I was given the leeway to cast the rest of the film , ‘She Continued.’ There were some locations I inherited. I was given the leeway to develop all the other locations. Some of them overlap, like the character Samson: Danny and I collaborated a bit on the look, but at the end of the day, Danny casts so differently than the way I shoot.”
The MCU filmmaker is on the biggest box office film of all time directed by a Black woman in Edinburgh to discuss her varied career from Top -Boy to Tessa Thompson's upcoming Hedda , which is rewarding worldwide at the Toronto Film Fest next month.
He also went into detail about landing the role on one of cinema’s biggest horror franchises. “ 28 Days Later was one of my seminal films growing up… I had the DVD in my house. I watched it all the time. Obviously, Cillian Murphy fell in love with it. And Danny Boyle is a crazy filmmaker. No one else can make a Danny Boyle movie, and that was most of my pitch for the movie. I was like, ‘No one else can do this, and I have no intention of doing that. See how I watch the movie, what do you think? ’”
As it turns out, it was none other than The Zone of Interest helmer, who convinced her to take on The Temple of Bones . “The weather was so terrible because I was finishing Hedda and you do have a bit of an overlap, and I thought, ‘I can’t do that. ’ I was at dinner with Jonathan Glazer and I was like, ‘He’s going to tell me not to do that. ’ I was like, ‘Jonathan, this script came in and I don’t know, do you think I should do that? ’”
«That's all 28 years later And I [thought] The man who made Birthday And all his personal one-off movies isn't going to tell me to do a franchise movie. He goes, 'Do you like the script?' [I said] Damn, I love it. «
The New York-born creative spoke openly as she reflected on her colorful career so far, from studying at the Tisch School of the Arts in New York for her film Little Woods (2018). She spoke in Edinburgh on the day of a retrospective screening for Dacosta's selected film: Doug Liman's 1999 drama crime film Go .
Edinburgh International Film Festival 2025 takes place from August 14-20.
