The Visionary Director of ‘Ex Machina’ Addresses the Controversy Surrounding His New Film
RISING FROM HIS SEAT in the screening room of a London post-production facility, Alex Garland casts a shadow over the projection of his new movie, Annihilation. The 47-year-old filmmaker jumps up to point at a patch of hazy daylight. “I reckon we’ve got too much blue in the sky,” he says to the digital colorist stationed behind a control board. “We could put a bit of dark gray up top.”
This is the last week of post-production on his second directorial effort, a tortured three-year process following his successful debut, 2015’s Ex Machina. After several color adjustments and crops, Garland adds, “At the risk of us dropping back into this nightmare rabbit hole, I’ve got one more thing.”
He scans forward to the first appearance of “the shimmer,” a mysterious alien phenomenon into which a team of experts ventures, including a biologist (played by Natalie Portman) seeking answers about her damaged husband (Oscar Isaac). On-screen, the effect is hauntingly beautiful: an undulating, iridescent field. Garland asks to blow it up (and up and up).
“That’s better,” he says. “What’s the zoom now? Like 4 percent?”
“It’s 12 percent,” the colorist replies.
Garland purses his lips. “F— it,” he says. “The question is, if you don’t work in VFX, do you ever notice? Given the fact virtually no one will see this on a big screen, they’ll watch it on their iPhones, does it f—ing matter?”
Garland has reasons to fret about the fate of his new movie—reasons that in a few days will become public and explain his editing-room angst. What’s apparent for now is that his hotly anticipated film has been delayed, amid whispers of friction between the film’s major backers, David Ellison and Scott Rudin, and upheaval at the film’s distributor Paramount.
Garland just wants to make the film. “I just try as hard as I can to do the thing,” he says. “Everything past that is not really my problem. Or, put another way, I wish it wasn’t. I’m almost certain it will be.”
Undeniably cerebral, at times impenetrably so, Annihilation represents Garland’s uncompromising vision as both a writer and a director, and yet he shares a grim view of its prospects. “Does it look like a slam dunk? No.” History may view the film as the novelist-turned-screenwriter-turned-director’s most ambitious work—or his undoing. Perhaps both. Either way, Garland is willing to risk everything for it. “If it changes a lot, I’ll start a nuclear war,” he says. “I’ll use conventional weapons. Sharpened sticks if I have to.”
Earlier, as we huddled in a back room of a nearby private club in Soho, Garland explained the origins of his latest project. “This was very, very hard, but I knew it would be going into it,” he says. “That was part of the intention.” Adapted from Jeff VanderMeer’s 2014 novel of the same name, Annihilation became a high-concept artistic exercise. “Reading the book is like having a dream, so when I finished it, I sort of set out to create a dream of the book. I never reread it. I didn’t refer back to it. Everything was based on fractured memory.”
What emerged is a fragmented, stream-of-unconsciousness narrative teeming with allusions and allegories. Beneath the movie’s surrealism and striking visuals lies an exploration of subjectivity and the human need for self-destruction. “One aspect of self-destructive actions is that you are often not aware they’re self-destructive at the time,” Garland says, adding a dark chuckle. “Retrospectively, so much about making Annihilation was a self-destructive act. It’s in the approach. It’s even in the f—ing title. It’s in everything.”
Garland, who rejects the label auteur, is quick to deflect praise to his cast, collaborators and crew. Clad in a blue sweatshirt, gray twill pants and Nikes on this early December Saturday, he seems at ease with his unease, which is to say his brooding tension is directed inward. “He’s incredibly hard on himself, but actually quite generous to others,” says Portman. “He cares about everyone he works with and treats everyone very well, which isn’t the most common attribute in a director.”
Neither is citing as a prime influence the double helix of science and communist politics. “I can see very, very clearly how those two strands play out in my working life,” he says. His grandparents were, he says, “on one side seriously left wing and on the other it was science-based.” (Garland’s maternal grandfather, Peter Medawar, won the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1960.) The dynamic continued with his mother, a psychologist, and his father, a political cartoonist (although he’s private about his family, he lights up when he takes a call from his father, who is looking after his 10-year-old daughter, the younger of his two children with his wife, actress Paloma Baeza).
Growing up in Hampstead in north London, Garland spent his youth listening to punk music and backpacking with pen and sketchbook in hand. “Many writers somehow figure out that they want to be writers from the age of 12,” he says. “All through my teenage years I was drawing.” After graduating from Manchester University, Garland got his first paid work doing cartoons and illustrations. Many of his father’s friends were journalists, and for a time Garland, who’d trekked across Southeast Asia, harbored dreams of becoming a foreign correspondent. He was unable to reconcile himself to nonfiction, though; he couldn’t pretend to be capable of true objectivity, much less commit to a view he knew would evolve in his mind.
He was liberated by writing fiction, until he felt trapped by it. For his first book, The Beach, he mined his travels. Published in 1996, when Garland was 26, the novel earned praise and heady comparisons to Graham Greene. Two years later, he published The Tesseract, a story as structurally complex and interconnected as the titular four-dimensional cube. It was the first time he would careen from accessible to ambitious, in this case to brilliant effect, burnishing his reputation as a writer of serious fiction. And then, for several years...nothing.
Rumors spread that Garland was suffering from a debilitating case of writer’s block, when in reality he had thrown himself into screenwriting. “It’s bullshit,” he says. “I got asked to comment on having writer’s block, and I was writing till 3 a.m. every night.” His shift in focus was a response to Danny Boyle’s film adaptation of The Beach starring Leonardo DiCaprio, which omitted the darker themes he valued in the book. “I thought, to exert control over that, I need to be involved in writing,” says Garland. “That came with a concurrent realization: I never really planned to be a novelist, and it’s not what I want to do.”
Garland returned the advances for a pair of future novels. Publishers thought he was insane. His first script, 28 Days Later, directed by Boyle, became a critical and commercial success, spawning a slew of imitators (the Walking Dead comic book series, with a very similar premise, appeared the following year).
Next Garland wrote Sunshine, a bleak space drama evoking Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris, about a quixotic mission to rescue humanity by restarting the flickering sun. Hollywood studios dangled large sums in front of Garland for the script, but he opted instead to work with Boyle on a smaller-scale production. Their visions for the film’s ending diverged, and afterward they parted ways. The movie disappointed at the box office but critics revered it, and it has since attained cult status.
Garland then tackled a pair of adaptations: Never Let Me Go, an elegiac work by Kazuo Ishiguro, who received the Nobel Prize in literature last year; and Dredd, based on the 2000 AD comic books Garland loved as a child.
Garland was a natural choice to adapt Ishiguro’s acclaimed 2005 novel. Having forged a close friendship out of mutual admiration in the late 1990s, the two have met to exchange ideas about works in progress. Garland also introduced Ishiguro to the artistic potential of science fiction, which unlocked the novel’s dystopian plot about clones raised to be harvested for organs. “He opened me up to that whole universe,” says Ishiguro. ”That’s why Never Let Me Go, to some extent, became possible.”
Ishiguro wasn’t surprised when Garland produced a finished screenplay in less than a week. “I know how he works,” he says. “He gets into some sort of very intense state of creativity. Ideas come to him more or less whole, and he has to get them down. He just works and works and works and works. He doesn’t sleep, he doesn’t shave. Then he turns up looking like a wild man, clutching the screenplay.”
Garland took the role of executive producer on Never Let Me Go and “had a very, very strong influence on the way the film was made,” Ishiguro recalls. “He was everywhere. He was probably ready to direct a long time before he actually did. Because the producers and the people around him respected him so much, he was playing this kind of quasi-director role.” Instead, he became mired in Dredd, a script he rewrote numerous times over a span of years, part of a filmmaking process Garland has called “deranged.”
“I don’t know whether he’s being honest about this,” Boyle says, “but he went through a period of absolute deep dissatisfaction with directors, including myself. His writing suffered. This eventually emerged in his directing Ex Machina, which he did beautifully. He’s at his very best now.”
Ex Machina earned Garland an Academy Award nomination for best original screenplay and the film appeared on numerous best-of lists, propelling its lead actors—Oscar Isaac, Alicia Vikander and Domhnall Gleeson—to stardom. Ostensibly about the promise and perils of artificial intelligence, the film was also a rumination on gender wrapped in a bizarre love triangle. For Garland, taking on the role of director allowed him to put his belief in artistic collectivism into practice. “It’s a collaboration. It’s really simple,” he says. “I’ve got my take. Other people have theirs. Some people do find it slightly unnerving. Everybody’s in the deep end.”
“He’s one of the best people I’ve had a chance to work with,” says Isaac. “We made a pact we’d do everything together.” Isaac was willing to pull double duty while shooting Star Wars: The Last Jedi, juggling production schedules at London’s Pinewood Studios to film his scenes in Annihilation, in which he plays a Special Ops soldier who returns from the shimmer afflicted with a mysterious sickness. The collaborative experience with Garland energized him. “It feels like we’re two mechanics,” Isaac adds. “He designed the car. I just help him put it together. It’s really enticing to hear, ‘Hey, I’ve got this new project to put together. Do you want to come hold the wrench?’ ”
Throughout Garland’s career, each project has been a reaction to the last one, and Annihilation is no exception. “Ex Machina was like making a watch,” he says. “I wanted to do something more about instinct and intuition than clockwork precision.” Garland knew from the start it would invite wildly divergent interpretations. “Whoever sees it will have their subjective take of my subjective take of Jeff’s subjective take. There is no truth to be found anywhere within that spectrum.”
If the result is a bit like a hall of fun-house mirrors, that was the goal. Garland and his team created a hallucinatory visual vocabulary, with crystalline trees emerging from a beach, a village of humanoid plants and a tiny fawn with cherry-blossom antlers. An awe-struck VanderMeer described an early cut as “mind-blowing” and likened its conversation-starting potential to Kubrick’s 2001.
The film’s depth and complexity drew Portman to the project: “It was just such an incredible synthesis,” she says. “Infidelity and cancer and mutations, the messed-up ways we behave, the beauty of mutations—all of that.” As her character explores Area X within the shimmer, she finds everything refracted and continually morphing—the laws of biology and physics, time and place, her own psyche. “It’s a journey into herself,” Portman explains, a quest to understand what led her to make a choice that drove her husband away. “She is going to investigate her own mutated mind, trying to figure out why she did what she did.”
As with dreams, Annihilation is ripe for analysis. The allusions and allegories comprise an intricate interior scaffolding. “It’s there if people are interested,” says Garland. “If they’re not, it’s not, I guess.”
ONE OF THE film’s central allegories—that humanity is somehow programmed to self-destruct—offers a tempting metanarrative as Garland is left to ponder why he did what he did in making Annihilation, especially given what transpired after our meeting. Several days later, it emerged that Paramount had washed its hands of theatrical distribution of the film in most international markets, inking an agreement granting Netflix streaming rights everywhere outside of the U.S., Canada and China.
According to the Hollywood Reporter, Ellison, who co-finances a portion of Paramount’s slate and whose producing credits include several Mission: Impossible movies, Baywatch and Geostorm, demanded significant changes—including a new ending and a more likable version of Portman’s character—after poor test screenings last summer, calling the film “too intellectual” and “too complicated.”
Rudin, patron of indie filmmakers such as Wes Anderson and the Coen brothers and an executive producer on Ex Machina, rejected these revisions. As the battles became more heated, Rudin—who had wooed Garland to make Annihilation and also had final cut—was able to preserve the film’s content but not how it would be released. Garland doesn’t dispute the account, though “much of the article related to things I had no direct knowledge about,” he noted later via email. “But it’s true that Scott Rudin was always creatively protective of the film.”
The complaints surprised Garland and confused some critics, who believe taking him to task for being cerebral, complex and challenging is like blaming the rain for being wet. As one headline on Gizmodo put it: “The Hollywood Drama Around Annihilation Shows Why We Can’t Have Smart Things.” Separately, both Rudin and Ellison denied the account and said they have never had a conversation about Annihilation, with Rudin adding, “I haven’t spoken to David Ellison since the week True Grit opened.” Paramount did not address the dispute but issued a statement saying, “We are proud of this brilliant film,” and that the deal was designed to reach the largest global audience.
“We’ve got a shitload of problems with this film, right?” Garland says. “A shitload. I love the film, I stand by it, but I understand the problems.” It’s a movie that challenges viewers and forces them to think. There’s no antagonist—the alien entity is neither good nor evil. As frustrated as Garland is, his main issue with the Hollywood execs is their lack of foresight. “It’s ‘What do you do with a film that costs this much that tests the way this tests?’ ” he says. “Did we test brilliantly? No, we didn’t. Is that dangerous waters? If it is, I couldn’t give a f— because it’s so self-evident. For anybody who understands testing, it’s not a surprise.” Asked if Ex Machina performed better at test screenings, Garland replies, “No. F— no. Nothing I’ve done has come close to testing well.”
Garland argues that he made the exact film he said he would. “When it says it in the script, it’s like a contract—that is what I’m going to do,” he says, adding that he got buy-in from his backers and the studio for the visuals and the cast and that he stayed within budget (just under $40 million). “Now, listen, at the end of the day, is that difficult for the people making it and for the studio? Yeah, it’s really f—ing hard. It was difficult to make, and it’ll be difficult to sell. I’ve been working in film long enough to know that if I wrote this script and we tried to make it, I knew where that would lead. I wasn’t under any illusions. Sure enough, that’s where it led.”
Garland makes it sound fatalistic, as if he embarked knowing he’d have to go to war for his art. The reality, however, may be less about his gripping his work tight than the grip it had on him.
“I’m not kidding when I say I don’t approach this as a long-term strategy,” Garland says. “I write based on a current set of obsessions and preoccupations—basically out of compulsion. It’s not a plan. It’s more like an addiction. It just isn’t really in my control.”
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