Screenwriter Alex Garland, best known for his work on sci-fi favorites 28 Days Later and Sunshine, makes his directorial debut with this month’s Ex Machina. Working from his own screenplay, Garland paints a tension-filled portrait of deception and manipulation as a young programmer (Domhnall Gleeson) spend a week with his company’s CEO (Oscar Isaac) in order to test his latest invention: an artificial intelligence names Ava (Alicia Vikander).
Earlier this week during a conference call with journalists, we had the privilege to speak with Garland about his work on Ex Machina, and his thought on the true nature of a director’s role in the filmmaking process.
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You’ve written several films, but this is your first time behind the camera. Did you know, while you were writing it, that you would eventually direct it as well?
I didn’t think in those terms, and in a weird way, I don’t really care about those terms. I don’t really overstate the role of a director – I think directors are very important, but I also think DOPs [directors of photography] are important, and production designers are important, and so it goes.
I think at the point where I was writing it, I was just trying to figure out “does this work, is there a movie here?” The directing aspect was something that came later, and just felt like it made sense. There was no great sort of epiphany about it, it wasn’t a very big deal.
What were some of the challenges of working with the visual effects?
Actually, it was very, very easy on this film, for a couple of reasons. The guy running the VFX, Andrew Whitehurst, said “look, you can’t shoot this constantly fussing about the effects shots. Just shoot it as if you’re shooting humans, and we’ll figure out a process.” In other words, just shoot the drama.
And it was a brilliant kind of free gift he gave us. There was no green screen, there were no tracking markers, there was nothing. Basically what they did was they got themselves a full 3D, very detailed, very textured amount of data about the room in which this is all taking place. And then everything was all done in post-production. Andrew promised all of us it would work, and it did.
What is it about the science fiction genre that attracts you? And what do you feel you have to do in order to make a project like this work?
The way to make it work is all about the people you work with, it’s just as simple as that. It’s the team that are the filmmakers, and how they work with each other and the level of the ideas they come up with, and how they solve problems. It’s the DOP and it’s the production designer and it’s the actors – that’s how a film is executed.
The reason to work in sci-fi from my point of view, is that you’re allowed to deal with big themes and big ideas and not be embarrassed by it. If you try to put that stuff in an action movie, or even a sophisticated adult drama, people get almost self-conscious about really big questions, and feel like it might be too pretentious or whatever.
But sci-fi audiences are very relaxed about that kind of thing. They want big ideas, and from a writing point of view that’s really nice, because it means you can have a lot of fun with it. I’ve always liked watching sci-fi, and I’ve always liked working in it for that reason.
Do you think it was easier directing for the first time when it was something you wrote, and material that you were already comfortable with?
That’s sort of a tricky question to answer for me, just on a personal level, because the whole “first time director” thing… that isn’t how it felt. I was making this movie with a group of people, many of whom I’ve worked with many times before. It’s just a continuum, it wasn’t really a very big deal.
And more broadly, I think we overstate the role of the director. We sort of deify it, and it’s kind of bullshit. The director is an important person on a film, but so is the director of photography, and so are the actors, and so is the screenwriter. We’ve just decided that we’re going to pretend it’s all directors, but it’s not.
Alicia Vikander isn’t very well known yet, but it seems like she’s about to break through in a major way. Can you talk about the process of casting her?
I had seen her in a Danish movie called A Royal Affair, and she was acting opposite a very charismatic and incredibly talented actor, Mads Mikkelsen. And you could just see that this young lady was just totally holding her own, and had this amazing presence and amazing confidence. I saw her in that, and me and one of the producers were just saying “it’s gotta be here, she’s fantastic.”
And I think you’re right, I think she’s about to blow up, which looks like prescience on our part for casting her. But it isn’t really, because everybody knows good actors when they see them. Have you ever met anyone that’s ever told you Philip Seymour Hoffman is a bad actor? Does anyone think that? I’ve certainly never encountered somebody who felt that. When they’re good, they’re good. You just know it.
Oscar Isaac gives an incredible performance in this film. Did you have to work with him in order to bring that out, or did you just sort of let him go and figure out the character on his own?
You know, one of the most common lines of bullshit I read in reviews or film writing is talking about how a director coaxed a performance out of an actor. I promise you, I didn’t coax anything out of him. People like Oscar and Domhnall and Alicia, they’re really good actors, and you wouldn’t want to micromanage their performance, even if you could – and you can’t because if you try to do it, they’ll tell you to fuck off.
I write the lines, and then we can have a conversation about where the gear changes in a scene. Like “he’s putting him on the spot here” or “when he says this line, he’s not actually meaning it.” And then you can have discussions, but that’s about the narrative construction, not the performance. The performance is something that the actor creates, in the same way a composer creates a bit of music.
So do you see yourself as a writer, first and foremost?
I just see myself as one of a group of people working on a film. When you’re working on a film, you’re a filmmaker. But you’re not the filmmaker, you’re a filmmaker, within a group of other filmmakers.
I used to work in novels, years ago. I used to write books, and you do that on your own – that’s authorship. But film just doesn’t function in that way – or at least it doesn’t function in that way on films that I’ve worked on. I think on other people’s films, like maybe Woody Allen’s films, it does work that way – I don’t know, I’ve never worked on one.
Basically, what we’re talking about now, broadly speaking, is about this term “auteurship,” the French word that gets applied to cinema. I’m not into auteurism, I’m not an auteur, I’ve never worked on an auteur movie. The whole thing is kind of anathema to me.
Were there any ideas or scenes that you wrote, but ultimately cut from the finished film?
Not really entire scenes, but many of the scenes are shorter than they were written and shot. Over the years – particularly on Dredd and Never Let Me Go – I would tend to write longer, knowing that I would cut it in the edit. You know you’re going to cut something, but you don’t know what, so you try to have a bunch of things within the scene that may be useful in the edit. It’s a slightly dangerous thing to do, in some respects, but that has become my working method.
So the scenes are pretty much the scenes, but they’re not in the same order. I’ve never worked on a film where the scenes order remained the same as it was written, and it always interests me how fluid films are in the way you can move stuff about. But what’s on the cutting room floor is like 20 percent of a scene, rather than 100 percent of a scene.
Are you able to talk about what you’ll be working on next?
Well, in intention – that doesn’t necessarily mean it happens. It’s an adaptation of a novel by a man called Jeff Vandermere, and he wrote a really strange and beautiful book called Annihilation. I’ve written an adaptation of that, and it’s been submitted to the studio, so we’re just waiting to find out if we get the money to make it.
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Ex Machina is currently playing in New York and Los Angeles, and will open in wider release beginning April 17.