Danny: We used cameras that people at home are likely to own. The format is miniDV and the cameras cost £1,500 each. This digital is not the same kind that George Lucas uses, which is incredibly expensive. EDITOR'S NOTE: The camera was later confirmed as being a Canon XL-1.

Andrew: Digital is definitely the future. I think we could have shot this film on conventional celluloid, but there was no actual reason to do so. Digital allowed us to work quickly with numerous cameras. The entire film was shot in 9 weeks. The scenes involving post-apocolyptic London were shot in 15 minutes.

Danny: Another great thing about working with digital and working from a low-budget is that you are forced to work creatively. When you can't simply throw money at something, it is amazing how you suddenly find yourself digging deeper to come up with solutions that you otherwise would not have.

Danny: We recruited the services of Anthony Dod Mantle - the same cinematographer who worked on Festen (the first film shot with a palm-sized camcorder to be theatrically districuted), as he is highly regarded as the world expert in digital film. One thing that is important to note is that if we wanted this to look like film we would have shot on film, but this DV-to-film has a look of its own and is beautiful in its own way.

Alex: We don't really care about that. When you look at Danny's film 'Trainspotting' you'll see it made more money in the UK than in America - hell it made more money in Italy than in America. Out there we've found that actors tend to drive movies. When my book 'The Beach' was turned into a motion picture that Danny was ultimately asked to direct, it happened because Leonardo Di Caprio liked the story and he liked Trainspotting so he picked Danny and drove the movie forwards that way. We were very much flavour of the month and now we're not, so we're not really worrying about how the film is received in the states.

Alex: I don't think a death toll of 56 million is upbeat. We were toying with a number of different endings (some of which were shot and will be on the DVD) and they ranged from the very upbeat to the downright depressing. The one I get asked about a lot is the ending where the survivors are nuked. I saw a film recently called Arlington Road - a film about modern-day terrorism. I remember how cheated I felt at the end because the film has such a down-beat ending. You form bonds to characters and you invest your hope in them that they will triumph - so the ending where everyone is killed was not followed because I didn't want audiences feeling cheated.

Danny: I am not a big fan of storyboarding. There are times when it is absolutely necesary; you don't want a scene costing £20,000 where an oil truck is blown up without first giving the producer some kind of reassurance that you have planned the shot meticulously and are not going to waste all that money. So shots like that were storyboarded, but the rest of the film was tackled by following the script and then turning up to shoot each scene with a certain naivety. It really worked too. There was a scene shot in London where we wanted to see a statue sitting in isolation. We couldn't do this because some work-men had boarded one side of it up. But then we turned that to our advantage. I remembered how I'd scene the aftermath of an Earthquake on TV that had hit China. People were desperatly trying to find relatives, so they pinned photos and written descriptions to boards in and around the disaster area. When all reasonable communication breaks down, this is how people communicate - one only has to look at September 11th to see that. That gave me the idea of how to use the boards around the statue, so not sticking to a storyboard ultimately aided us. But I am not knocking storyboarding - it's just not something I feel is necessary for each scene.