Nia DaCosta Reveals Her One Amendment to Alex Garland's '28 Years Later: The Bone Temple' Script — 'More Infected'

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Nia DaCosta has teased what to expect from her instalment of Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later sequel, 28 Years Later.
DaCosta took on directing duties for The Bone Temple, filmed back to back with Boyle's movie released earlier this year that featured Alfie Williams, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Jodie Comer and Ralph Fiennes.
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At an Edinburgh International Film Festival event on Monday, DaCosta said fans of the zombie apocalypse franchise will be seeing more of Spike's story and Jack O'Connell's character in her movie, set for a January 2026 release.
'Making the 28 Years Later sequel was one of the best filmmaking experiences I've had,' DaCosta, director of The Marvels (2023) and Candyman (2021), said. 'One of the issues I had with Candyman and Marvels was the lack of a really solid script, which is always gonna just wreak havoc on the whole process. But Alex Garland hands you a script, and you're like, 'This is amazing.' You don't really have to change it, although I did, I basically asked for more infected. [Laughs.] That was, like, my big contribution.'
'I inherited an amazing cast, then I was given the leeway to cast the rest of the film,' she continued. 'There were a couple of locations I inherited. I was given the leeway to develop all the other locations. Some of it overlapped, like the character Samson — Danny and I would collaborate a bit on the look, but at the end of the day, Danny shoots so different from the way I shoot.'
The filmmaker — whose MCU instalment is the highest-grossing film of all-time directed by a Black woman — was in Edinburgh to discuss her varied career from Top Boy to the upcoming Tessa Thompson-starring Hedda, which is world premiering at the Toronto Film Fest next month.
She also went into a little detail about landing the job 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, fell in love with Cillian Murphy. And Danny Boyle is a bonkers fucking filmmaker. No one else can make a Danny Boyle film, and that was actually the biggest part of my pitch for the movie. I was like, 'No one else can do that and I don't have any intention of doing that. Here's how I see the film, what do you think?''
It turns out it was none other than The Zone of Interest helmer Jonathan Glazer who convinced her to take on The Bone Temple. 'The time was so terrible because I was finishing Hedda and it overlapped slightly, and I was like, 'I can't do it.' I was at a dinner with Jonathan Glazer and I was like, 'He'll tell me not do it.' I was like, 'Jonathan, this script's come around and I don't know, do you think I should do it?''
'It's 28 Years Later and I [thought], the man who made Birth and all his unique, personal films is not going to tell me to do a franchise film. He goes, 'Do you like the script?' [I said], 'Damn it, I love it.''
The New York-born creative spoke candidly while reflecting on her colorful career so far, from studying at Tisch School of the Arts in New York to her breakout movie Little Woods (2018). She spoke in Edinburgh the day of a retrospective screening for DaCosta's selected film: Doug Liman's 1999 comedy crime drama Go.
Edinburgh International Film Festival 2025 runs Aug. 14-20.
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