Alex Garland joins GQ as he revisits some of the most iconic films from his career so far: from the innovative post-apocalyptic horror of 28 Days Later to the action film Warfare, co-written with former Navy Seal, Ray Mendoza.“In the script, I think that was like four lines,” says the English screenwriter and director of the now-iconic scene of Cillian Murphy (Jim) walking through a completely vacant London. Watch the full episode of GQ’s Iconic Characters as Alex Garland breaks down his most iconic films.----------Director: Joe PickardDirector of Photography: Grant BellEditor: Matt BraunsdorfTalent: Alex GarlandCreative Producer: Kristen DeVoreLine Producer: Jen SantosProduction Manager: James PipitoneProduction Coordinator: Elizabeth HymesTalent Booker: Lauren MendozaCamera Operator: Brooke MuellerSound Mixer: Justin FoxProduction Assistant: Fernando Barajas; Spencer MathesenPost Production Supervisor: Jess DunnPost Production Coordinator: Rachel KimSupervising Editor: Rob LombardiAssistant Editor: Justin Symonds
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00Well, I want to just briefly touch on Devil May Cry and how you worked on video games than some of the others.
00:04Yeah, no, I did f*** all on that.
00:1328 days later.
00:16The animals are contagious! The infection is in their blood and saliva!
00:20One bite! Stop! Stop! You have no idea!
00:26For me, I think it's two things.
00:30One is you have a compulsion, which is not really very rational.
00:33You just have a compulsion to do a thing and follow through on it.
00:36And there's another thing, which is I just get interested in something.
00:39And then the longer I wrote, the longer it went on, the more guided I was by that interest.
00:45But in the case of 28, I remember I had been to a country that was suffering some very intense kinds of hardships.
00:55And when I went back to England, I was sort of frustrated in some ways by some of the complacency of the country.
01:03And I was thinking of bringing some of those hardships back home, I suppose.
01:08As well as that, not long before writing 28 Days Later, sort of dovetailing with that bit of traveling I was telling you about, there was a game on the PlayStation, Resident Evil.
01:18And what Resident Evil did was it reminded me how much I loved zombie movies.
01:26And I thought, I love those, but there hasn't been one for ages.
01:29And there was a thought there, I suppose.
01:32And there was another thought, which is, after I got good at playing the game, I was thinking, the zombies are not actually very scary because you can kill them quite easily or you can get away from them with a brisk walk.
01:45But there was something else in the game, which were these dogs.
01:50And the dogs moved really quickly.
01:52And they actually would give me a jump sometimes.
01:54And I think that's the thing that gave the sort of idea of a zombie movie, but where the zombies move quickly.
02:01Water.
02:02Water.
02:05Oh, you're OK.
02:07The quick zombies, I think, really did come from playing Resident Evil.
02:10The rage virus aspect was, I can see this super clearly now.
02:16I can actually see it back in the beach where two characters are talking about one version of multiverse theory, which flows from space being infinite.
02:26So if space is infinite, there's an infinite amount of chances for something to happen, which means you will get a reproduction.
02:32of whatever state you're in, except with some small differences
02:36and big differences and no differences,
02:38because if there's infinite chances, it just will happen.
02:41Basically, what I'm saying is I'm a sort of science nerd,
02:44and that really took over my writing life at a certain point.
02:50In 28 days, I wasn't taken by the idea
02:55that the zombies were caused by something supernatural.
02:58Normally, zombies are dead people who've been resurrected,
03:03so they'll come out of graves, say, or out of morgues,
03:06and the dead are walking, would be the sort of strap line,
03:09in effect, of a lot of zombie movies.
03:11That just didn't sort of push my buttons,
03:13and so I came up with some completely bullshit idea
03:17about viruses and chimpanzees looking at violent imagery,
03:21or, I don't know, it's just silly stuff.
03:23Danny, as a director, I didn't realise this
03:35until I worked with more people.
03:37Danny's a very un-neurotic director,
03:39so he's not threatened by writers.
03:41So Danny was like, OK, well, we're auditioning,
03:44so be there at 10 o'clock.
03:46And so I was sitting in on the auditions,
03:49then in pre-production and rehearsals,
03:51which was a really interesting thing to be part of,
03:53then on set, and then in the edit.
03:55Every week there was a new cut, and we would be discussing it.
03:58And, you know, Danny is self-assured in the idea,
04:00I am directing this film, and he's not undermined
04:03or made neurotic by other people.
04:05I then learnt that most directors are incredibly neurotic,
04:08and as the writer, when I said, OK, well,
04:11we're rehearsing tomorrow, they'd be like, what the fuck?
04:14And really, really concerned as I just sort of marched in
04:18and said, OK, let's look at scene 13 or something like that.
04:21I didn't realise.
04:23Because I came from novels, I had a sort of atypical position
04:27where I arrived not believing in auteur theory.
04:31Auteur theory basically says the director is the author,
04:34but I was thinking, well, not really,
04:36because you didn't come up with the themes or the characters
04:39or what the characters are saying or why they're saying it,
04:42or, you know, you might have notes, but that's not the same as creating it.
04:47So I never bought into the auteur thing.
04:50I think that was because of starting as a novelist.
04:57Hello!
04:58My wife had just done a job with Killian,
05:01so I got to know him then.
05:03You know, we were all very young.
05:04In terms of walking through London,
05:06I think that is a really good example of then what a director does do,
05:11because in the script, I think that was like four lines or something.
05:15It said, you know, Jim walks through empty London.
05:18I'm not even sure it said where.
05:21What Danny did was, as a director, then construct an entire sequence out of that,
05:27that for many people was actually the hook that made the film land.
05:33The strangeness.
05:35We're more familiar with that imagery now, I think.
05:37The strangeness of having a metropolis sort of emptied of people.
05:43It reminded me a little bit of when I was a schoolboy.
05:46If you ever went to school and you were there like an hour and a half
05:51after the end of the school day and everything was empty,
05:53it had this strange quality.
05:56It felt so different from the place you're in.
05:58And it was like the whole of London was an emptied out school
06:01and it had this other strange element that post-apocalyptic movies have,
06:06which is they are in part a wish fulfillment.
06:09You know, they're bad.
06:10It's an apocalypse.
06:11You know, it's not ideal,
06:12but there's also something satisfying about them.
06:15Execute code red.
06:27It's probably nothing.
06:29It was a good, really good object lesson in another part of the way cinema works.
06:34Good early lesson, which is the imperative for a sequel when something makes a lot of money.
06:39And to be honest, I think I'm sort of distant enough away from it now to be able to say this.
06:44I don't think anybody can get hurt, as it were.
06:47The difference between making something in a kind of enthusiastic, non-cynical way
06:53in comparison to a project that is generated by a different sort of imperative,
06:58which is there should be another one.
07:0228 years later.
07:03It had been talked about on and off between Danny and Andrew, Peter Rice and myself,
07:23those are director, producers and writer respectively.
07:27I had like someone at some point, someone else had had a crack at writing scripts.
07:31And I had had a sort of really strange idea about Chinese special forces arriving in the UK
07:37and making a subtitled film.
07:39And then it really felt I had an idea that was honest in its intentions.
07:44I wrote it and showed it to Danny and the guys.
07:50And Danny said, yeah, OK, let's do this.
07:52And that was it.
07:53Boom, boom, boom, boom.
07:56Moving up and down again.
07:58There's no discharge in the wall.
08:01It was really inventive.
08:03It's the kind of thing, yeah, that sort of rocks you back a bit
08:06because it makes you think, how did you put that idea together?
08:10Like, where did you get the idea to use that?
08:12It also had a very strange connection with the film that I'm currently releasing.
08:19This is not a sort of elegant or deliberate, cynical sort of drawing threads together
08:25of what I am essentially promoting, which is this film Warfare.
08:28What that bit of sound design is, is like it's an audio recording of a Kipling poem
08:33from like 1911 or something like that.
08:36Really interesting recording.
08:38When the trailer came out, I was really stunned by it.
08:41And I was talking about it with my son, who's in his early 20s.
08:45And he said, oh, you should know that spoken word.
08:49And I said, why?
08:50And he said, well, because the guy you're working with, the Navy SEAL,
08:53they use that the whole time.
08:54And I said, what are you talking about?
08:56They use that.
08:57So I then contacted Ray, who I made this film with.
09:00And he said, yeah, yeah, we use that for part of interrogation training.
09:06We play that at top volume for like six hours to people in cells to fuck with their heads.
09:13And so I had this strange life unexpected in the trailer.
09:18My son points out and it turns out Navy SEAL use it to destroy people's brains.
09:22It's slightly misleading for me to say Ex Machina was the first bit of directing I did.
09:32And in fact, when I think of Ex Machina, I almost think if you know about filmmaking, it's almost clearly not the first bit of directing in some complex sort of technical ways.
09:45And in truth, what happened to just to be, I suppose, candid about it, a lot of time has passed.
10:00I ended up on some films essentially doing ghost directing, something would be going wrong or I would feel something was going wrong.
10:13And I saw the execution of scenes and I would be thinking, that's not really what that scene is like.
10:20It's missing this key, key component part.
10:23And it doesn't quite make sense to me without that key component part.
10:27I could also see that then when the film was released, people didn't care whether that key component part was in there or not, but I cared.
10:34Do you want to be my friend?
10:36Of course.
10:37Will it be possible?
10:39Why would it not be?
10:40You learn about me and I learn nothing about you.
10:45That's not a foundation on which friendships are paced.
10:48It came from a very long running argument I'd been having with a friend of mine.
10:53When I say very long running, I mean like it was at least 10 years.
10:56It was sort of about machine learning.
10:58It was about artificial intelligence.
11:00It was therefore about consciousness, as in human consciousness or animal consciousness for that matter, but specifically human.
11:11And in a way, the argument was, are we understating the potential of AI or are we overstating what human consciousness actually is?
11:22Just talking around it and around it and around it and around it for literally years and Ex Machina kind of floated out of that.
11:29If you knew the trouble I had getting an AI to read and duplicate facial expressions, you know how I cracked it?
11:37I don't know how you did any of this.
11:39There's a Reddit theory out there that Caleb Donald's character is actually an android and the whole movie is a Turing test where the audience is the judge of it.
11:49No, no, there isn't.
11:51Although it's interesting because, you know, there were various films I was super aware of.
11:55One of them was 2001, which has within it really a very, very good discussion of AI, but also Blade Runner.
12:03I made an assumption that a smart audience member at a certain point would say, I know what's going on here.
12:13Donald Gleeson, you know, Caleb. Yeah, he's the AI. That's really what's happening.
12:18That's why there's a scene where he cuts himself open because he then starts to ask himself that question.
12:24But he's not an AI. He's a person.
12:27I told you, you're wasting your time talking to her.
12:31However, you would not be wasting your time if you were dancing with her.
12:38I remember one of the producers, Elan Reich, had seen Oscar Isaac in something and said, this guy is like seriously good.
12:45Casting is an art form and it's complicated and nuanced, but there are elements of casting that sort of anybody could do.
12:52The key one is this, is that you don't need to be a casting director or you don't need to be a producer or you don't need to be a director to know if someone's a good actor.
13:01The people who are really good actors, there is really a kind of consensus on it.
13:06And the example I've used when making this point in the past is Philip Seymour Hoffman.
13:11I've literally never heard anybody say that guy can't act ever because he clearly can.
13:18Alicia, Donal, Oscar and Sonoya, all of them clearly could act and just felt right.
13:27They all really understood what their roles were.
13:30They all really understood the film.
13:32They were also enthusiastic about the project.
13:35You know, they weren't being strong armed into it or bought into it.
13:38So that meant there was a good attitude on set.
13:41It felt completely right.
13:42I also read that the plot is a loose adaptation of The Tempest.
13:46Is there a way to that?
13:47No, that's absolutely not true.
13:50I'd like to say it was.
13:52It would be pretty cool.
13:55Civil War.
14:00I'm just saying.
14:01Just saying just what?
14:02You're American.
14:03Okay.
14:04Okay.
14:05What kind of American are you?
14:08It came from populist politics and polarization and an awareness.
14:15I'm left wing personally, but an awareness that people on the left were simply not listening
14:21to people on the right.
14:23They were not listening to their fears and their complaints.
14:29They were just getting angry with them.
14:31And exactly the same was true on the other side.
14:34The complete absence of communication.
14:37I began to think, what could we agree on?
14:41Hence Texas and California being on the same side in the film, which then of course incensed
14:47lots of polarized people who felt their polarized state was offended, which is what they like to be.
14:54Broadly speaking, people on the left and the right should agree that a fascist president who demands three terms and disbands the FBI and is oppressing their own citizens.
15:06That shouldn't be a left right issue.
15:09That should be a we don't want this issue.
15:11It stemmed from just an increasing awareness of polarization and the consequences of it and populism, which was not an American phenomenon by any means.
15:21Netanyahu is a populist leader.
15:24Boris Johnson in my country was populist.
15:26I mean that I mean actually they're everywhere.
15:28It's just that America has a position in the world that no other country has.
15:33So it felt like the right place to set it.
15:35So America had a civil war, which was fought over a very clear issue in terms of slavery.
15:39It was really like apparent why that was being fought.
15:42Lots of other civil wars are really just they're not exactly fought.
15:47Well, they're certainly many of them are not fought over a single issue.
15:50They are they are essentially a disintegration.
15:53What I felt I was seeing amongst other things was a disintegration.
15:59In fact, I still think I'm seeing a disintegration, a sort of disintegration of civility, disintegration of observing and believing in the function of democracy and believing in the function of the rule of law.
16:11You know, the famous thing about those who forget history doomed to repeat it.
16:15And it feels like elements of history are being repeated.
16:19And it felt like to make it over a single issue would actually be to make it easy in a way that was dishonest.
16:34The journalism element of civil war came from something slightly different, which is that the populism is unfortunately fed in part by the media.
16:44And the media has also been demonized by the populists.
16:48And that's a that is the same kind of unhealthy cycle that the left and right have got into.
16:53It's a kind of symbiotic state of self-destruction.
16:57And I was interested in what it is to present a narrative without a clear position and instead rely on the audience to to interpret and to think or converse or whatever it happens to be.
17:19Sound is just super important in film and one of the really interesting things in film is that if you take a frame of film, you're likely seeing the work of composers and production designers and the director of photography and the actors and the writer.
17:37And it's this strange layered stack that also includes a sound designer, but in the moment of experiencing it ideally you're not really thinking about any of those things.
17:59You may have a background awareness like that sound that's pretty cool sound or that's a beautiful piece of photography or that's a good performance, but really you're not deconstructing it into these sort of, you know, geological layers.
18:13If you work in film, you quickly learn how important sound design is.
18:18If you're ever scared in a horror film, hit the mute button.
18:21You will instantly not be scared.
18:23I have worked with the same sound designer now on every single film I've ever done and or been part of.
18:30Very familiar with him, not just him, but his team.
18:34It's good to work with people who are really good, who will say, all right, step back, watch this and then come back a few months later with a whole plan and then you discuss it.
18:45You know, there might be some refinements here and there, but basically you're seeing the work of a really good sound designer in their team.
18:51Civil War had some particular things it was doing, which may or may not be visible to people, but it was kind of taking its cues in terms of actually often in terms of violence.
19:03But in terms of grammar, not so much from cinema and slightly more from documentaries and news footage.
19:09And that included, for example, when someone was shot, you didn't get, as it were, a big blood hit and a cable that then got painted out by VFX as they flew backwards across a room or whatever it happened to be.
19:24Instead, they would just collapse and you might not see any blood for a little bit because it hasn't started leaking out of them yet.
19:30And the sound design had to fit that same aesthetic.
19:33There's ways you can make guns sound and you will often hear guns in films sounding that way, where the sound of the gun actually has a few other things embedded within the sound, as it might be sub bass or something, to give it a different vibe, which isn't close to what you would hear if it was.
19:58close to what you would hear if someone was shooting in close proximity to you.
20:03And we stripped all of that stuff out.
20:05The beach.
20:06My whole career has been unexpected and surprising to me.
20:27I was a backpacker.
20:28My whole life sort of revolved around backpacking for many years, really.
20:32I'd work to try and get some money and the goal for the work, which would be, you know, the typical sort of work that young people do.
20:39It was bar work or construction work.
20:41It was always with the intention of buying a plane ticket and getting a visa and going somewhere.
20:48So I did that for a long time and was sort of accumulating stories, I suppose.
20:53I also grew up around journalists.
20:56My dad was a cartoonist, but he worked on a newspaper.
20:59So I was surrounded by journalists.
21:01His friends were journalists because the newspaper usually has one cartoonist or maybe two.
21:05So his buddies were journalists, a lot of them were foreign correspondents, and I had a hazy thought or hope that that's what I would become.
21:14But instead, the stories just coalesced into fiction and a book, a novel, and that was it.
21:22Suddenly, I had a potential career if I managed to follow it.
21:28It was a beach, a lagoon, you know, a tidal lagoon.
21:32It's sealed in the cliffs and nobody can ever, ever, ever, ever go there, ever.
21:38Initially, it was just a book that had come out.
21:41It was there and it sort of existed somewhere in a bookstore if you looked for it hard enough, I suppose.
21:48And then, I think it was, I'm going to guess it was about six months after it came out.
21:54I started to hear from the sort of backpacker community that I was part of, someone saying,
22:01hey, your book's being passed around in, you know, Koh Samui or wherever it was, Koh Pangang.
22:08And it's like, and I'd be like, oh, wow.
22:10And then it became a book within the backpacker community and they sort of brought it back.
22:17And then it suddenly exploded.
22:19It just turned into a bestseller and I was, I thought I'd be very pleased.
22:23And I suppose I was pleased in some ways, but I was really actually quite taken aback
22:26because it felt like by that point something I wasn't really attached to, I think.
22:32Like it had a life of its own.
22:34And then I learned that's actually what always happens with a project.
22:37It stops being yours as soon as you send it out, I guess, and then it becomes other people's.
22:43And you, have you shown this map to anybody?
22:45No.
22:46No.
22:47No.
22:48No.
22:49Good.
22:50I was a film fan.
22:53So I thought that was kind of cool.
22:55And also you have kind of hazy ideas of another sort, which is Hollywood.
23:01Like, oh, cool.
23:02You know, that sort of reductively just that, oh, cool.
23:05Then, however, I saw what a film set was like and I saw the atmosphere.
23:13But really what I saw is that film sets are collegiate.
23:16They're groups of people working together and you write a book on your own.
23:22And I was immediately struck thinking, hang on a minute.
23:27I never planned to be a novelist like this.
23:30Some novelists, as they were really children, like 13 or 14, they were thinking, I want to be a novelist.
23:36I certainly, that was not me at all.
23:38I thought, no, this is what I want to do.
23:40I want to be not on my own, but with a group of people working together.
23:46I had a deal for two more books, which was really based on the fact that the first book had sold well.
23:55And I spoke to my wife and said, this isn't for me.
23:59Are you cool with us taking a risk?
24:02And she said, yeah.
24:03And I paid the money back to the publishers, which they were very surprised about, I remember.
24:09Not as surprised as my agent at the time, who was mortified.
24:12That's really furious with me.
24:14Mushroom, Richard.
24:19Oh, thank you, Daffy.
24:22I don't need any help to see the writing on the wall.
24:24I had no say in that film.
24:26I had no input.
24:27To be honest, I was much, much less interested in the film as I was in the process of making the film.
24:33That was the thing that sort of struck me.
24:36I went to set in the pre-production period.
24:40So I didn't see any of the filming.
24:42It was just the teamwork.
24:43That's what I saw was the teamwork.
24:45I just thought that, yes, this is what I want to do.
24:49Sunshine.
24:50What is it?
24:51It's the Icarus One.
24:52It's impossible.
24:53It's been seven years.
24:54Clearly it's not impossible because you can hear it with your own ears.
24:55Are you saying they're still alive?
24:56I was really interested in an idea which comes from one potential future for us, which is the heat death of the universe.
25:13That there's really nothing you can do to stop or alter the fact that we're all going to die.
25:21That whatever future the human race has, we might get to Mars.
25:26We might get beyond Mars.
25:27We might even get to another solar system.
25:30Or we could get to another galaxy.
25:32We could invent all sorts of things.
25:34We won't, but we might.
25:36But that wouldn't change anything.
25:38You still end up in exactly the same place, which is you and everything else, your species and all other things die.
25:45And I was thinking, so, okay, so if the sun was dying, which is our close proximity object that gives us life,
25:53and a mission was sent to sort of kickstart it back into life with some non-science,
25:59what if someone said, no, that's an act of cowardice?
26:02Because what you're doing is you're taking the moment of the horror of extinction,
26:07and you're saying, that's too scary for me to deal with.
26:10I don't want to deal with it.
26:11Instead, I'm effectively going to make my great, great, great, great, great,
26:15to the power of whatever ten grandchildren.
26:18They're going to have to deal with it.
26:19I'm going to pass that horror on to descendants, which felt like a strange thing to do,
26:25and also is in a way parallel to the actual state we live in.
26:31And that just interested me and puzzled me.
26:33And then a sci-fi movie grew out of that.
26:38Captain.
26:43Captain.
26:45There was an idea that was implicit, which that space in the spaceship was supposed to represent,
26:51which is the sun is the thing that allows for life.
26:56So it has a godlike quality about it.
27:00It is also extremely hostile to us, not as an act of conscious hostility,
27:07but it's hostile in as much as that if there's one place you're not going to survive very long,
27:11it's going to be anywhere near the sun, right?
27:13The sort of dizzying qualities of that and somebody embracing the state of that just interested me.
27:20And how it would take the ship's kind of, you know, psychologist essentially into a cosmic zone.
27:36Do you have a process for making your characters feel different from each other or feel unique?
27:42I did not at that point.
27:45So I think some difference would just arrive in some ways, but I wasn't very thoughtful about it.
27:51I didn't get thoughtful about it until the next project I did, which was an adaptation.
27:57It was called Never Let Me Go.
27:58It was an adaptation of a novel by a very brilliant British novelist called Kazuo Shiguro.
28:04And I'd read the novel and I was lucky enough to have got to know that guy.
28:09And I called him up and said, will you let me adapt this into a film?
28:13What I was doing was adapting the work of a much, much more sophisticated writer.
28:19And I knew enough about writing at that point to be able to recognize the sophistication, like to see, oh, right, he's doing that.
28:29It was to do with the way themes and story were and character were all meshed together.
28:36And I think what I did was sort of superglue those things together, kind of bolt them on in some kind of way.
28:45And he integrated them.
28:47So they were they were sort of in a in a fluid kind of snake eating its tail way.
28:53They were just all interconnected.
28:55And that also related to characterisation.
28:58I think it it took a lesson from an older, better, more sophisticated writer where I was forced to confront what he was doing and I was not doing in order to learn about the size of the gap, really.
29:14And and then think I should I should consciously try to get better.
29:19And then I wrote Dread, which might seem like a surprise.
29:24Dread.
29:25Somewhere in this block, two judges.
29:30I want them dead.
29:33I'll climb every level.
29:36Not the judges down.
29:38You better move.
29:39At this period, television was changing quite dramatically.
29:45And there was some very, very brilliant television shows that were changing the way television film drama was specific.
29:53Really not just perceived, but also changing what it was.
29:57Best example, most famous examples, probably The Sopranos.
30:01In a way it began earlier than that.
30:03But Sopranos is such a perfect example of it.
30:05What television did.
30:07Television and film is really very similar.
30:09And people who say it's not similar are more wrong than they are right.
30:14In TV, this writer showrunner has the kind of authorship button handed to them.
30:24And in film, it's the director who has that.
30:28They can't both be true simultaneously.
30:30Television is not so different from film that suddenly, magically, it's the writer showrunner and now it's magically the director.
30:37And some people I were working with, their principle was, well, why don't we take that concept from television and use it in film?
30:44For complicated reasons, that just didn't work.
30:46It created just a bloody mess.
30:48Within this is a disservice to Pete Travis, who's the credited director, who did some fundamental, crucial things and he deserves that title.
30:59He was put in an absolutely impossible situation.
31:03Retrospectively, the longer I've worked, the more ridiculous I think it was.
31:07How do you plead?
31:12Defence noted.
31:14After the experience of making Dread, what I said is I am not doing that again.
31:19Just let me do that job.
31:21Let's simplify this.
31:24Annihilation.
31:29A religious event, an extraterrestrial event, a higher dimension.
31:36We have many theories, few facts.
31:39Scott Gruden, the producer, sent me that book.
31:43As I was reading it, what I was thinking is, I'm really enjoying this book, but I also have no idea how to adapt it.
31:51The act of reading this book is quite like, in some ways, very like having a dream where things are having a kind of consequential sense, but actually are also not having a consequential sense.
32:07And which is it?
32:08And when are they shifting from one end to another?
32:11And where am I?
32:12And who is this person again?
32:14And that dream quality that everyone more or less is familiar with.
32:19I thought, well, that then is the key to adapting the book.
32:26I will make a dream of the book.
32:29I'll make an adaptation about the quality of experiencing the book, as opposed to the text of the book.
32:41What is it?
32:43I don't know.
32:44When you do an adaptation, you really have to ask yourself, why am I doing this adaptation?
32:48Now, look, one answer to that might be I'm doing it because I'm being paid, right?
32:51That would be a completely legitimate response.
32:54But if that isn't the motivation, then what is it?
32:58Like, what is the thing that spoke to me here?
33:01And the thing that spoke to me was that intangible quality.
33:06How does one make something intangible in a medium film where at a certain point you have to pick up a camera and point it at something?
33:15And that thing is tangible because it's a it's a constructed set or it's an actor and they're speaking some lines or whatever.
33:23So how do you find the sort of odd gap?
33:26I then also I got I got hung up on another idea, which is I, you know, sci fi fan and aliens often represented in books or in cinema or wherever.
33:39So often the aliens would have a human agenda.
33:43Now, the agenda might be to eat humans, so it doesn't have to be favorable to humans.
33:49But eating things is the kind of thing that humans do.
33:52Maybe they want to teach you about a galactic federation or like like whatever.
33:57But but it is it is aliens acting in the framework of humans.
34:03And in the rolling arguments with Ex Machina, one of the things that me and this guy used to talk about a lot was was an essay, a famous essay called what it is like to be a bat, which is saying you don't know what it's like to be a bat.
34:17And you can't know what it's like to be a bat because a bat has bat consciousness and you're not able to access the reality of what it would actually be like to be a bat.
34:28You can have a sort of imaginary version, but that isn't what it would really be like.
34:32It's about how hard it is to conceptualize a consciousness that is not your sort of consciousness.
34:38So then I started applying the what it is like to be a bat idea to annihilation and to try to to conceptualize an alien that did not have any kind of human agenda.
34:50It wasn't interested in talking or it may be that its mind, if that's the right word, worked at a completely different clock speed to us.
35:02Maybe it was much, much slower than our clock speed, which could mean it is only fleetingly or vaguely aware of us while we are in a space or it's that kind of thing.
35:13So it was the idea of trying to create an alien alien.
35:18I sometimes think, in fact, annihilation is probably a good example of this, that having started as a novelist has given me in some ways an advantage and in some ways creates a problem in screenplays.
35:40Because I can, in effect, make something work on the page, I can function like a novelist, so the reader is having that kind of visceral or emotional sort of response to the thing that they're reading.
35:56So that's useful because it means I could get annihilation financed because it might feel a little bit like Predator, say, while you're reading it.
36:04You're thinking a bunch of people in a jungle type thing with guns, aliens, that's a bit like Predator.
36:10So then the script, which is actually very, very strange, is hiding how strange it is because of the novel writing tricks.
36:17That is useful, although it can buy me into trouble in some respects.
36:22What's less useful is that I can also sort of trick myself because I can make something work on a page as a writer that won't necessarily translate well to screen.
36:37The bear was like, there's something freaky and a bunch of these people are tied to chairs by one of them as peers have gone mad.
36:52And then a bear that has the consciousness of another one that's died has walked into the room and that bear is bad news.
36:57That's easier though. Like the ending was much harder to convey.
37:01Something weird happens was the description probably.
37:04I think that was just a sort of act of faith on behalf of like everybody involved.
37:09It was a kind of act of faith.
37:10And sometimes you don't really discover that until actually even until the edit, oddly,
37:16because on the day you were shooting it, you just shot it because that's what it said on the page.
37:20So that's what we had to do. So you just shoot it.
37:22And then in the edit, you think, hang on, that's just like bananas.
37:25And so I've been wrong footed like that many times.
37:31Warfare.
37:34I don't know if you're familiar with dogma, a school of film that made films with quite clear strict rules.
37:52We had a dogma like rule on warfare, which was we weren't allowed to invent anything.
37:58And we were only allowed to try to recreate the memories of the people involved in this thing as accurately as possible where we were able to believe in the memories because they were sufficiently corroborated by other memories.
38:14So it was really just an exercise in trying to be honest and trying to be honest about the nature of a memory, just to say.
38:24Now, the sound then is part of that, which relates goes back to Civil War.
38:28And again, it's an extension of it.
38:30We had no music. Music would have been a kind of editorial manipulation of moments that would not have been appropriate for that dogma rule.
38:39And also sound was the subjective memory state sort of built into the subjective memory state that we're trying to repeat and recreate.
38:51So, for example, you have the Ray Mendoza, who's the co-director, co-writer character in the film, who is in an IED explosion and he's wearing headphones.
39:02And those headphones are broadcasting chatter at him in reality constantly.
39:08But in his memory, he doesn't become aware of the chatter until he becomes aware he's being shot at and starts to drag his friend Elliot, played by Cosmo Jarvis, up a driveway back into the house.
39:23This is profane. We're seeing activity converging to your north and south.
39:27And at that point, suddenly the noise of the chatter becomes very dominant in his memory because it's overwhelming him slightly.
39:35And he can't get the headphones off because his helmet's on and it's part of the chaos of the fog of war.
39:40Now, that becomes a significant part of sound design, but it is rooted in Ray's account of the state of shock he was in, partly concussive shock because he'd been in this massive explosion
39:53and that concussion sort of scrambles people's minds, I suppose, is one way of putting it.
39:58But also the shock of seeing how badly injured, in fact, he thought his best friend was dead and it froze him to the spot.
40:04And he simply had no awareness of noise or no awareness he was being shot at.
40:10So then the sound design just attempts to recreate exactly Ray's account of that moment.
40:24My job on this film was very different to every other film I've worked on.
40:29And of course, that's a lot to do with the fact that there was a co-writer and a co-director.
40:32Every other project I've worked on, actually, whether it's a book or a film, you're thinking about characters, you're thinking about scenes,
40:38and you're asking yourself questions like, would it be a good idea to have this moment in a story?
40:43Is this bit of dialogue or is this action a good thing, a positive thing to have?
40:49In this story, you never ask that question because it's all about verifiable information.
40:54And once it's verified, sufficiently verified, it has to be in the story.
40:59The person who is the ultimate keeper of that is Ray, my colleague, in making this film.
41:08So he was, I mean, your question is essentially about the cast, is that right?
41:11They felt like an actual unit to me.
41:13And that's because Ray ultimately selected them and trained them.
41:18And his training method is actually a methodology to make them bond.
41:24I mean, it's to make them do all sorts of things like move across a room in the right way or handle a weapon in the right way.
41:29But really what it is, it's making them into a cohesive unit.
41:33Yeah, it really comes across. It's very, very strong.
41:35I'll tell him.
41:36Please do.
41:37Yeah.
41:38I'm privately very disappointed. You didn't say devs, which is a TV show.
41:42Well, it's all on my list. I haven't gotten there yet. I got men and devs down here as well.
41:45Oh yeah, and men. Shit, I forgot that one. Yikes.
41:50Shit.