The movie that inspired Nia DaCosta to become a director: “The sheer fucking audacity”
It would be a bit of a shame if 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple went down as a flop, because by all accounts it is something different, audiences and critics seem to love it, and in Nia DaCosta, it has a director of genuine talent.
Maybe it was released too soon after Danny Boyle’s third film in the franchise arrived last year, perhaps the incredibly confusing naming of the different movies made people think they’d already seen it. Either way, it hasn’t done the numbers at the box office that were hoped for.
There’s certainly nothing wrong with the recipe for the film, a screenplay by Alex Garland, two actors at the top of their game in Jack O’Connell and Ralph Fiennes, and DaCosta at the helm, one of the most in-demand directors at the moment thanks to her work on the Jordan Peele-produced Candyman and the 2025 drama Hedda which was nominated for a host of awards last year including a Golden Globe nomination for Tessa Thompson.
DaCosta has already shown she is capable of directing films in a number of different genres, including big-budget superhero fare with 2023’s The Marvels, and she names a wide variety of films that influenced her, including one from 1979 that went down in infamy as one of the most challenging movies to make in history.
In referencing Francis Ford Coppola’s sprawling Vietnam War epic Apocalypse Now from 1979, DaCosta told Ioncinema: “I found this in high school by way of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The sheer fucking audacity of this movie and the people who made it make it one of my all-time favourites and biggest inspiration for becoming a director.”
Coppola’s film is notorious for having gone wildly over budget and running time, with the star Martin Sheen having a heart attack, big names like Harvey Keitel quitting mid-production, typhoons wrecking the set, and Coppola sending a begging letter to George Lucas asking for money because Star Wars was such a hit.
Conditions during filming were almost unfathomable; at one point, instead of dummies to use as dead soldiers, a local brought in real human corpses, leading the crew to be questioned by police. He was then discovered to be a grave robber, and the deceased were taken away by the authorities.
Apocalypse Now was eventually released a full two years late, somehow managing to make five times its budget back at the box office and being nominated for eight Oscars, winning two, including ‘Best Cinematography’. Coppola would eventually go on to re-release the movie as a ‘redux’ in 2001, with a running time of 202 minutes.
DaCosta, meanwhile, who has written on almost every major project she has directed, is busy writing a new TV series called Southern Bastards about a war veteran heading to Alabama to find her father, only to discover a world of crime.
As for 28 Years Later, a final film in the trilogy is dependent on just how well the latest instalment does once all is taken into account. Alex Garland would again write the third film in the series, and it’s likely Danny Boyle would step back in to direct. Reportedly, Cillian Murphy would also return to star as Jim, a role he first played back in 2002’s 28 Days Later, alongside Brendan Gleeson.
