We could hardly believe our eyes. With the producer Andrew Macdonald swabbing his serious brow and the writer John Hodge passing forceps and scalpels, he was heralded as a miracle worker. He even played midwife to the birth of Ewan McGregor. And then, just as swiftly, he was struck off for making studio films in America, one of them with the Californian heart-throb Leonardo DiCaprio, and our film industry was rushed back to the operating table.

Danny Boyle sighs, allowing himself breathing space before he faces up to the “British issue” for about the zillionth time in his career: “The real issue is: can you use the British landscape in a cinematic way? — and very few people can.”

There is a good reason why Boyle is back in the firing line, for he has returned to the fold. 28 Days Later, a strange and vivid movie that hovers somewhere between a zombie horror and an apocalyptic disease drama, is his first film on British soil since the glory days of body dismemberment and heroin abuse. Sitting here, in the ordered splendour of a posh hotel room, it is as if a star striker has shaken off a season-long injury and returned to the pitch. The question is: will the crowd roar again?

“America has established cinema as a kind of mythical landscape,” he continues, getting into the flow.

“People at the end of a tough week want to see something mythical. They want something that takes them outside their everyday experience.”

That is the least that you can say for 28 Days Later, which follows the progress of a clutch of survivors after a lethal virus dubbed “Rage” ravages the country, filling its victims with unstoppable fury and the spasmodic twitch of the recent undead. In four weeks society has collapsed and bodies have piled up like rubbish sacks leaving the streets terrifyingly empty. It is written by the hip author Alex Garland (who wrote The Beach), produced by Andrew Macdonald and does not star Ewan McGregor. Oh, and it is not a horror movie.

“I am mad about not selling it as a zombie movie,” Boyle cries. “People will try and pigeonhole it as a zombie movie, but that will affect the way people react to it. I wanted it to be more about contemporary life.”

What attracted Boyle to the script was the concept of rage itself. He wanted to reflect the tide of intolerance that has engulfed modern society: “This social intolerance of each other is like an absolute brand new minted phenomenon. We laugh and joke about supermarket trolley rage and whatever, but actually there is a terrible side to it.”

The visually minded Boyle was especially turned on by the opportunity to shoot his entire film in digital video, giving it an edgy, raw and unkempt quality. Apart from the freedom that it allowed him (the cameras are faster and lighter) and its cost-effectiveness, there was an organic reason. He took on the role of a “guerrilla film-maker”.

“We could behave as if we survived and were recording the story,” he explains. “It sounds a bit naff I know, but I like the camera to behave in a certain way. For Trainspotting we were always on the ground because that is where they all ended up.

Bang! It also references the idea of permanent surveillance; there are cameras everywhere which would go on recording.”

It was an ideal format for the movie’s coup de cinéma, its staggering shots of a lonely soul drifting through the deserted highways of London. True to his promise, Boyle has mythologised a British heartland into a dreamscape.

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