Alex Garland has established himself as one of the most exciting filmmakers of his generation, approaching the science fiction genre in a deeply thoughtful way. I was recently granted the opportunity to join a roundtable of Toronto critics, thanks to the good people at Elevation Pictures, to interview Garland about his latest film. Below is a transcript of our conversation:
I wanted to ask about the film’s tone. One of the things that I think has been so interesting about this film is the way that the sides are politically neutral. All these factions, the ideas of how we divide them up, are all mixed up in this film. I was wondering why you decided to build the film off of that neutrality.
To be honest, I’m not sure… One thing is, not being clear about it within the movie doesn’t mean they’re neutral. It just means they’re unspecified. I think there are clues within the film. But it’s to do with the film language. Cinema has for a long time been very obsessed with ultra clarity. Ultra clear stating of a question, and ultra clear answering of a question. Interestingly, it’s just studios who get twitchy about that. It can also be audiences and journalists who get twitchy about that. Because clarity is in a way reassurance. You know exactly where the filmmaker stands and you know where you stand in relation to the film. Lots of films can do that, but they don’t all have to do that. This one is more uncomfortable in some respects. However, I’d say there are there are reasonably clear clues as to what side the film stands on. The president, for example, is a fascist. What are they demonstrating their fascism through? One of them is by dismantling a legal system that could threaten them. One is by being threatening two journalists. They say don’t go to DC; journalists are shot on sight in DC. That tells you something about the relationship between politicians and the press and the way they perceive them. The president has been running the country for three terms and undermining the constitution. To me those things are actually quite clear. They’re not really coded; they’re just not telegraphed in the way a film normally telegraphs them. I wouldn’t say that’s neutral. What it is, is the film is ultimately, in some ways, a film in favour of an old fashioned kind of journalism, where bias was removed from reporting. In order that it was trusted. So, the film tries to function like reporters.
I remember in the past you mentioned how you were inspired by Attack on Titan, which is a very political series. Was that an influence in Civil War?
I couldn’t say explicitly from Attack on Titan, but I did enjoy Attack on Titan because it was having not just a political but a kind of broad ethical conversation underneath the story the whole time. I thought it was smart and interesting and I enjoyed it a lot. Civil War‘s cues come more from non-fiction than from fiction. Obviously, it’s a fiction story, but its point of reference are things like news footage, documentaries and lived experiences. In fact, we went out of our way, like the group of people working on the film, to avoid some kinds of film grammar at times. I mean I could give an example, but it’s kind of a brutal example, but say film has over decades created a grammar about what happens when someone gets shot. So, you’ve seen many films that have big fountains of blood and people flying back as if they’re snapped on a cable and there’s something essentially cinematic happening there in the grammar. if you were ever unfortunate enough to see someone get shot or you watched it on some news footage, quite often what you see is just falling down as if the lights have been switched off and they just fold and collapse. So more than anything else, we were using people’s experience of the world in one way or another to inform the look of the film, I would say.
You’ve made four films with magnificent leading ladies over the course of your career. Alicia Vikander with Ex Machina, Natalie Portman with Annihilation, Jesse Buckley with Men, and now Kirsten Dunst and Cailee Spaeny with Civil War. When you were in the process of finding your leads, what is it that about both Kirsten and Cailee that stuck out for you?
It was different in both cases. Cailee, I had worked with before. We worked on a TV show called Devs, which Stephen McKinley Henderson was also in. I knew Cailee and I knew Stephen well and in a funny way, I was kind of writing for them because I know what they’re like together on camera, off camera, that kind of thing. With Kirsten, I didn’t know her, but I sort of knew her in the same way that you sort of know her. She’s been around since she was a child actor. She’s one of those few child actors who then made the transition into being an older actor. In a literal way I’ve watched her grow up, you’ve watched her grow up, we all have. What that does is, is it means number one, you’re very familiar with her as an actor, what her abilities are, that she’s got range, that she operates in something like in Melancholia, something really soulful and sad. It’s not all Spider-Man as it were. There’s lots of shades, lots of dimensions in her. But there’s also a lot of lived experience. And in the case of a war photographer, you need that, you need to believe that. And not all actors have it. Not all actors have access to that kind of sadness or soulfulness. That’s probably partly to do with them just as people.
So, I feel like the common thread that runs through all the movies where there’s one you’ve written or directed as well is this sense of existential dread through the characters that we’re reckoning with. So, can you talk about why that’s such a powerful theme for you as a filmmaker and how the Civil War is feminine?
I’ll give you three guesses. You know existentialism as a theory, it sort of came from the idea that it’s sort of universally shared in a way. That there’s a sense of angst that is common and then they gave a name to it and looked for the reasons for it. I think I like the world very much and I’m not misanthropic, I like people as well. But the world is also strange and disturbing. And I think in some ways writing is an act of processing. And so, I am processing things that are concerning me. And sometimes that might be I’m thinking why are we treating tech leaders as if they’re geniuses when really what they are is entrepreneurs. Like what’s that about? And that’s the concern. Or what does certain kinds of AI imply not just about machines but also about us or something. In this particular case I was really alarmed, you could call it existential and frustrated, actually angry with two things. One was the contempt that was being shown to journalists which I thought was incredibly short-sighted incredibly stupid actually and also dangerous because journalists have a societal role which is to protect you against, I kept wondering, I still wonder if Watergate happened now, would it have succeeded? Two journalists for the Washington Post brought down Nixon who was a crook. Would that happen now? Probably, almost maybe manifestly not it wouldn’t happen now. There’s something really strange there. That creates an existential feeling in me and also a feeling of anger. Also, divided countries, divided states, what causes it, what’s the engine, populism, where does populism lead, extremism? Is extremism dangerous, particularly if it’s not being mitigated by journalism? Yeah, it’s really dangerous. It’s not like a cozy, fun, playful, acerbic podcast that can play fast and lose without consequence. Actually, it’s really, really dangerous. People can get hurt, people can get killed, people’s lives can be made miserable. We have these systems of governments and the Fourth Estate, the press, actually to guard against something. If we dismantle the guard, then we’re unguarded.
You said that you wrote this script about four years ago, I don’t know. Was it marinating for a while inside? Was it always from the point of view of the journalist? Can you talk about how it evolved?
It was always from the point of view of the journalist and in a way, it was marinating for a while. It was a growing sense of frustration. I would say I feel almost embarrassed sometimes that I write the story that then gets called prescient. And it’s not true. One thing is the situation now was pretty much identical four years ago, it just might be slightly worse, but it was essentially identical in most meaningful terms. Something like Ex Machina. A lot of people were talking about AI and a lot of people were making films about AI at the same time. There was a whole bunch of films about AI at the same time. I often thought, I’m not sure I’m saying anything that wasn’t also said in 2001, which was decades before. But yeah, it was marinating for a while. Why did I choose to do it in this case with this particular film? Honestly, it was generated by anger. Thinking I need to control the anger, I need to modulate it, I need to make it thoughtful, I need to make it precise. I need to not be alienating. One of the things that happens when people get angry in a way is they shout. And whoever they’re shouting at stops listening, right? Just turns into a punch up or a shouting match or some online bickering or whatever it is. And I wanted to avoid that.
You touched on a little bit earlier how the film what you believe and what you’re saying is coded into the film. Where it’s not neutral but it’s unspecified. So, in making the story with that kind of politically semi-opaque lens, how did you want that to resonate with an audience that is, like you say, increasingly divided?
That’s up to them. I think that is one of the realities about language or communication of the sort we’re doing now. There’s no real guarantee that you and I will agree, not just on what we’re saying to each other, but agree on what is actually being said. Language is complicated. I’ll give you an example: Governments make laws. They write the laws trying to be clear. And then judges and lawyers, their entire profession is about interpreting different meanings of the sentences written to be clear. Two people read the same book. One person says, this happened for this reason. Another one says this happened for that reason. It’s in the nature of stories. It’s in the nature of communication. I don’t worry about it too much; I try to tell the story as truthfully as I can to my own criteria. I also try deliberately to leave space for the audience because I’m not trying to cut them out of the process. I could attempt to ask every question clearly and answer it all clearly and you will still get different interpretations. I choose to lean into that because I find it interesting.
Something that I really liked about this movie is how it shows that the country is very much divided. It’s kind of also spilled out into the reactions of the movie, which are divisive. It’s a very big theme with this movie. I think there’s really no scene that exemplifies that better than Jesse Plemons’ scene, where you see clearly someone on one side and someone on the other. It’s a terrifying scene. It’s the best scene in the movie. It’s the most talked about thing. So, I’m curious, what was it like shooting that scene? How did you evoke that terrifying feeling from Jesse and from all the other actors in it? Because it is really a fantastic scene.
We shot it in a particular kind of way. I think if you walked onto a film set, maybe you have walked onto film sets, what you often see is an actor or two actors or three actors, and then this massive semi-circle of people who are really crowding them, like the lens might be here. Sometimes the lens is actually, if it’s a clean shot, in front of the actor, and they are kind of hovering behind the lens to give an eye line to the other actor. Of course, actors, that’s their job, and they’re very good at blocking that kind of stuff out. But it does always interfere, or it often interferes, some way, somehow. So, with this particular scene, we pulled everything back as far as we could. So, it’s shot largely on long lenses, so that is to say, not wide angle, but encompassing everything. Lenses designed to see something further away and make it feel closer, I suppose. So, we took all of the structures as far back as we could and shot on the longest lenses, we could in order to get the cameras and the sound equipment and everything away from the cast and put them in a kind of bubble of intensity. And actually, on the neutrality front, just for what it’s worth, that scene is quite a good example, because the people are being executed according to a criteria. Now, the film does not specify the criteria, it just does it, right? And that is non-neutral, but it’s non-flagged, if you see what I mean.
I just wanted to ask you a little bit about the soundtrack, because I think you made some really interesting choices, and specifically about using Sturgill Stimson’s Breakers War, I thought that was a really powerful choice and an unexpected choice for that scene. I just wanted to talk to you about why you chose that.
Well, one of the things actually was something to do with making a war movie, what is essentially a war movie, and the way music can be used and accidentally, in a funny kind of way, change the tone and make it too seductive or too enjoyable. So often the music choices are slightly jarring. They come in at a strange moment, not actually in that example, although it might be subtly jarring, but then start to make sense. It’s particularly true if it’s music alongside violence. You have to be thoughtful in terms of what effect these two things will have together. We tried to choose bits of music that, for a lot of people, would not be immediately recognizable, because a whole bunch of extra information arrives with that, and also avoid really contemporary music, because that would date the film in a particular kind of way, and that also brought information in that we were kind of trying to keep out. So, it was surprisingly complicated. In the end, that means sitting with your phone in an edit suite, and it’s me and Jeff and Ben who are composers and Jake the editor, and we’re kind of looking through our iTunes and Spotify and saying, do you think this might work? Should we try it? Sometimes you play it through the speakers of the phone, and it sounds awful, and then you download it and try to be discreetly confrontational in a funny kind of way with the choices.
Civil War is now playing in theatres nationwide.
image courtesy of Getty Images
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