Unleashing his ‘rage’

IN Madrid on a Friday night in the summer of 2003, a Spanish film director went to an English horror film out of the basic human need to see some zombies. Yet as Juan Carlos Fresnadillo took in Danny Boyle’s “28 Days Later,” he felt blown away to an extent zombies alone seldom muster.

He and film editor Nacho Ruiz Capillas emerged from the cinema onto quiet streets and began imagining how Madrid might look if some raging virus left it depopulated, like London in the movie. They went for drinks. They talked “28 Days Later” for a healthy while. “I loved in the movie the sense of reality,” Fresnadillo said, noting its then-novel use of digital video. “You had the feeling it was kind of a home movie that somebody had sent you.”

Rapt from the moment Cillian Murphy’s character woke alone in a hospital and began navigating a desolate metropolis, Fresnadillo thought he’d seen “a new step in horror movies, a new benchmark.”

He just never reckoned he’d direct the sequel.

That’s funny, because in London’s Islington neighborhood probably on a Sunday night, probably in fall 2002, Scottish producer Andrew Macdonald had seen a Spanish film at the recommendation of Boyle.

Macdonald recalls “Intacto” as joining a refreshing wave of Latin films at the time -- “Nine Queens,” “Y tu Mama Tambien” -- that seemed neither “inaccessible” like some European cinema nor “dumb” like some mainstream movies. A thriller starring Max von Sydow, “Intacto” marked the first feature from a director whose short, “Esposados,” had fetched him a 1997 Oscar nomination at age 27.

That would be Fresnadillo, who in “Intacto” mined the concept of luck -- which enthralls him utterly -- envisioning luck almost as a human organ, enlarged in such people as plane crash survivors. Like many “Intacto” viewers, Macdonald found most indelible the scene in which lucky men sprint through a pine forest blindfolded to learn who’ll stand last.

Come August 2004, with Boyle ruling himself out to direct the zombie film’s sequel, “28 Weeks Later,” Fresnadillo’s name came up. The only concern being Fresnadillo’s relative lightness of resume.

“His Spanish compatriots tease him that he’s from Tenerife” -- Canary Islands -- “and that he likes the flow” of the island Europeans visit to flee stress, Macdonald said by phone from his London home.

Fielding an e-mail from Boyle, Fresnadillo felt mild puzzlement. “My first reaction was, ‘Why me?’ ” Fresnadillo said. A Canary Islands native who moved to Madrid at 18 and has lived there ever since, directing a film so thoroughly London?

Absolutely, they told him. They craved fresh eyes. Fresnadillo asked to rewrite the script. They complied.

He mulled the story of a virus called “rage” that transforms citizens into swift, homicidal zombies. “Aristotle, he said something really brilliant,” Fresnadillo said in excellent, accented English. “What is rage? Rage is the feeling, rage is the desire of giving back a suffering. It makes sense? I think it completely makes sense.”

Then he homed in on the intricacies of surviving such a thing. “Maybe this infection is a kind of destruction which impels a new race, a new history,” he said. “That’s why I love apocalyptic movies, because always an apocalypse implies destruction but at the same time implies a new beginning, a new creation.”

He massaged the script until its apocalypse zoomed in on one family. “Survivors, they need to run, they need to fight, and they can’t feel any kind of human feeling because if they feel that, they are lost,” he said. “So it’s the internal battle: What is the best way to explain these ideas? The best environment to convey this is a family.”

Chockablock with frenetic nightmares and searing music, Fresnadillo’s version repeatedly visits the heart-wrenching choice between protecting oneself and protecting a family member, even a possibly infected one. A husband faces the choice with his wife; their daughter and son face the choice with their father; sister faces it with brother.

Macdonald, for one, found that approach “really powerful,” and Fresnadillo still seemed charged up about it even in the fatigue of early April, when he effused through a lunch in Soho with “28 Weeks Later” freshly finished and set to open May 11. A youngish 39, he’s the type of mesmerizing conversationalist who, at goodbye, you might think it’s 3:15 p.m., only to find it’s 4:20.

“28 Weeks Later” clearly had stoked his fraternal-twin fascinations with luck and death. He had studied lottery winners and the uniformity of their unhappiness for “Intacto.” Meanwhile, “Esposados” follows a couple whose lottery win leads to one trying to have the other killed. He thinks he probes his fear of his own death -- and the maddening luck involved -- through filmmaking.

Some of this stems from a single Sunday in March 1977 when Fresnadillo was 9. Per Sunday ritual, his mother, Araceli, drove the family in their yellow compact to a restaurant on the island’s north edge, where a pianist would play as his father, Manuel, would croon two boleros, including “Ansidad” (Anxiety), while the son would wish himself elsewhere.

On the way that March 27, Juan Carlos spotted the first jumbo jet in his voracious memory, a blue KLM shimmering in the sun at Tenerife’s regional airport, diverted to that island because of a bomb scare at the bigger Las Palmas airport.

On return, the Fresnadillo car stalled and went kaput in a mammoth traffic jam. Up ahead, in settling fog, the KLM had collided on the runway with a Pan Am, killing 582 while 61 survived, still the deadliest plane accident in history.

While Fresnadillo recalls “a lot of ambulances” and “a lot of smoke” and “the smell,” he recalls most the blue eyes and three-cornered hat of a policeman who had witnessed the carnage. “Suddenly, he came to my mother, came to our car, and the face of that man was so strange and wild, like somebody who had seen the worst thing in the world, like somebody who had gone through hell.”

With Fresnadillo’s penchant for detailed storytelling and the impact of “Intacto,” he would receive in his late 30s, from Macdonald and Duncan Kenworthy’s DNA Films, a chance at widened exposure -- and his second go at shooting London.

At 16, Fresnadillo received permission from his father to travel to London and, yes, he could tote along the Super 8 camera that Manuel Fresnadillo babied.

“My father was the man who would record all the family events,” said the son. “He used to say, ‘Stop! Don’t move! Now, come to the camera!’ He would always do the same: ‘Go to the end of the street and walk to the camera!’ ” Manuel seldom spoke, but “When he was shooting, another attitude is taking over him,” Fresnadillo said. “I love that memory, my father, shooting.”

So when the greenhorn returned from London with footage, his father prepared a fete, a big screen, the projector, and ... “You know something really funny? ... I shot the zoom the whole time.” Upshot: “It’s London with a tight lens moving this way, that way, absolutely crazy.”

“I can’t believe this!” his father bellowed that night. “I gave you my camera and you shot this way? You’re a disaster!”

“It’s a big joke, a big joke for the destiny,” Fresnadillo said.

Now he has shot London again and used the zoom sparingly, but still, every once in a while in his office in Madrid, he’ll reach for his late father’s Super 8. He loves the sound of the metal scraping against the red-velvet interior as he removes the camera, and loves the clicking sound of the box after he puts it back. “It’s like life for me,” he said.