BOYLE: We storyboarded odd bits occasionally for technical reasons, but I am not a great storyboard fan. I know everyone is different but for me, personally, I much prefer making things up on the day. You can't do that because there are so many people relying on you for decision-making. But you can sort of pretend to know what you are doing and everyone feels confident. But I love leaving things as late as possible. It's very exciting. But the bigger the budget the less you can do -- that's part of the pact with Satan.
RES: What were other benefits of using digital cinematography for this film?
BOYLE: The biggest benefit, to be absolutely honest, was the London sequences, because we would not have been able to afford to do those on celluloid and not only that, they would have been, in their very nature, completely different. If we were working with a celluloid camera, with the number of people you need to operate that, it would have been either much less ambitious or staggeringly expensive, in which case the film would have been very different, in part because we would have had to have a star in it to pay for it.
RES: What about disadvantages?
Boyle: Picture quality, especially on wide shots. We were fortunate; on the whole we got away with it. When you dwell on a wide shot, the human eye is so extraordinary that it goes to where it is interested on that big screen and it zooms in, just like that zoom in on the video game. Halo! If the eye is interested in that picture and if the detail isn't there, it looks a bit ****ty. Whereas on film, you can go in that close and there's enough detail there so it is still acceptable. That's the only major disadvantage. I am not sure if DV would work for period films as there is something completely modern about its feel and about it as a recording or capturing process. If you did a Jane Austin novel or great period piece, I don't know what it would look like; it might feel very odd.
RES: How did you shoot the film's scenes of London emptied of people?
BOYLE: We literally turned up and spent a couple of minutes filming in each place, but with 10 cameras. And we'd choose the angles, set them up very carefully so we knew that when we cut them together it would make you feel like it was rolling on and that you were walking around the city with him and there was no one there. You immediately begin to pull the audience into this strange, new universe really, so when the attacks come, you feel vulnerable as well because you've been lured in.