Civil War Director Alex Garland Talks About Every Alex Garland Movie

Photographs: Getty Images, A24, Everett Collection; Collage: Gabe Conte

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Civil War director Alex Garland materializes in a Zoom window, against a junket-room backdrop as black as outer space. He is 53, salt-and-pepper-bearded, and characteristically dour. It’s just past noon on a Wednesday; he’s been in an L.A. hotel suite all morning doing back-to-back-to-back interviews with reporters about Civil War, and when it’s suggested by his latest interlocutor that his day’s probably been a whirlwind already, he responds with a slight clarification: “It’s been a fucking whirlwind.”

Civil War is a bit of a fucking whirlwind, too. By now you probably know the setup: It’s the near future, America’s at war with itself, a battle-weary war photographer (Kirsten Dunst) sets out from New York with three colleagues, hoping to make it to Washington before insurgent armies from Texas and California take the White House, and the trip does not go well. Garland made the film for something like $50 million, reportedly the biggest budget in A24’s history—you get the feeling what they spent on military-vehicle rentals alone could have covered what it cost to make Lady Bird. But while the posters promise an apocalyptic blockbuster, what we get is a film in the spirit of John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13 and Escape From New York, built mostly from tightly-scaled, breathlessly tense set pieces, including a nerve-racking one-scene cameo by Jesse Plemons that might unseat Nazi Todd from Breaking Bad atop the Evil Plemons Power Rankings.

Garland’s taken some flak for making a movie about the logical endpoint of the present-day American schism that defies you to read it through the lens of red-team/blue-team politics, even as it harvests politically loaded images and references to give the story a sheen of plausibility and an eerie electrical charge; there’s a reference to an “Antifa massacre” whose details aren’t specified, and at one point the characters fall in with some machine-gun-slingers in boogaloo-chic Hawaiian shirts. But the absence of moral clarity seems like the whole point; if Garland’s making an argument here, it’s that any faction that unleashes its worst impulses in the name of ideology has automatically forfeited the high ground, even if they’re right.

Garland, who broke into the business as the screenwriter of Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later (and is attached to write the forthcoming second sequel), has directed three movies before this one, each of which operates in an intriguing gray zone between speculative fiction and pure mood. A few weeks ago he told a Guardian interviewer that after Civil War he has no plans to direct again, and although he’s clarified that this doesn’t mean he’s done with filmmaking—we'll get to that distinction later—this seemed like a good moment to look back at the projects Garland's put his unique stamp on over the past twenty-plus years.

The Beach (2000)

American backpacker (Leonardo DiCaprio) stumbles upon a remote island paradise whose occupants will go to great lengths to keep it a secret; based on Garland's novel, written for the screen by John Hodge, directed by Danny Boyle

GQ: Even before it became a Leonardo DiCaprio movie, The Beach was a huge hit. You were 26, and this was your first book. Did you think you’d made it, and that you’d be a novelist from then on?

ALEX GARLAND: No, I didn't. I think I particularly didn't feel it because I hadn't wanted or planned to be a novelist prior to The Beach, so it felt slightly weird to have written a book, with no great ambition to write a book or desire to.

Weirdly—this is going to sound too neat, but it's actually true—I grew up around journalists. I thought I would be a journalist, and I wanted to be a journalist, and I planned to be a journalist, and then I found that I couldn't write nonfiction. I wanted to write nonfiction. I still almost exclusively read nonfiction, but I couldn't write it.

I turned to fiction as I felt that hope slip away—and then I’ve ended up making a film, years and years later, about the journalists that I really admired when I was younger, and still do.

Your old man was an editorial cartoonist?

Dad was a cartoonist, exactly. Yeah, we used to call them political cartoonists. But newspapers typically had [only] one guy doing that job, so his friends were not the other cartoonists. His friends were journalists. Some of them were like leader writers or political journalists, but his best friends and my godfather, and a different guy who was my brother's godfather, were both foreign correspondents.

It was specifically foreign correspondents that [stuck] in my mind, I think, because I was a little kid and they were such striking figures. They were coming back from, in those days, Cambodia or Vietnam, full of stories and funny little gifts, like toothpaste or a little bag that was my school bag for years and years afterwards. That really imprinted itself on me.

In fact, the first time I tried to write a book, I had done some rather sort of juvenile attempts at trying to be a foreign correspondent. I would go to some country and I would write about it in a way that was really just exercising a fantasy. But you never know—sometimes you exercise a fantasy and it might turn into a reality. The experiences that I had accumulated almost as a byproduct gave rise to [The Beach]…then the next thing I know I'm a novelist.

It's become a term, it didn't exist when I was younger—impostor syndrome. I definitely, tangibly felt like an impostor. Nothing about this is deserved. People are certainly going to realize that I should not be a novelist and I shouldn't be here, and I'll quickly get thrown out of this strange club I've wandered into. I actually think I stopped writing novels partly to get out before I was thrown out.

So you had no choice but to start making movies. You needed to get out of fiction writing.

There is a thing about writing a book, which is you sit on your own in a room for days, and then weeks, and then months, and, in the end, years. Round about two years, I discovered, was how long it took me to write a book. Then I walked onto a film set, because the first book I'd written was being adapted into a film. I immediately thought, "Oh, hang on—this looks like a lot more fun.”

In the end, a work choice becomes a lived-life choice. There was just something about film where I thought, I will enjoy my life more if I'm working with other people, and working in a solitary way didn't suit me. Maybe because I'd always conceptualized being a journalist and then I spent a lot of time with journalists, including as a teenager. I lived for six months in the Philippines, where one of my two godfathers was based. I saw the kind of collegiate world that they inhabited, of hotel bars and that kind of thing.

Some of that collegial hotel-bar atmosphere shows up in Civil War, when they're getting ready to leave New York and Stephen McKinley Henderson wants to hitch a ride.

Yeah. It’s collegiate, but also contains rivalry, and a kind of scanning of where other people are and what they're doing and someone suddenly disappearing. Are they getting the jump on someone else? Yeah.

28 Days Later (2002)

Coma patient (Cillian Murphy) wakes up in a London devastated by a zombie plague; screenplay by Garland, directed by Danny Boyle

What made you want to write a zombie movie?

I think, maybe as a product of how I thought my life was going to go, I always wrote stories that were drawn in some way from something observed. I never stopped traveling, and I'd just been in a country that had been in a very, very difficult situation for a long time. Returning home to Britain, the dissonance and the contrast was so extreme that it made me think about what this country would be like if you laid waste to it in the same kind of way.

Then, well, how do you lay waste to it? Zombies—but the zombies are going to run. There was this video game called Resident Evil, which had come out on the first PlayStation. I really loved it and it reminded me that I loved zombie movies. I hadn't thought about zombie movies for years, but playing the game, where you get to inhabit a space in a way that you don't get to inhabit it in the same way with a film ... You imaginatively inhabit it, but there's obviously something more interactive with a video game.

I kept thinking, These zombies would be harder to deal with if they could run. There was actually a monster in that game, a creature, which was a dog, which moved really quickly. I remember thinking the dogs are trickier to deal with than the zombies. They'd give you a jolt—that's what I remember. It was like, Oh god, the window's smashed, and quick, I've got to get my gun. I've only got two bullets. What am I going to do? That kind of feeling.

The look of that film is really interesting, especially today. That low-res digital video cinematography really nails it to the early 2000s—it’s almost as if time really did stop in 2002.

Yeah, absolutely. That’s a funny thing about films. I noticed it twice recently, in films from not an entirely dissimilar place and era. One was in this Bob Fosse movie, All That Jazz, and the other was in an Alan Parker movie called Fame, which is really a musical—in fact, they’re both sort of musicals, set in New York in a particular period. I suddenly became really aware of how much [of the] texture of New York in that period was contained within the fiction. They were suddenly working not just as movies, but as documents of the period. I guess 28 has an element of that, in the literal way they shot it.

It’s been more than twenty years since that movie came out—does it feel like a time capsule of circa-2002 London to you?

That has a nostalgia to it, true—because what you see is empty London. The way we shot that was by shooting it in summertime in the very, very early morning. London was silent and quiet and empty. These days, London is not silent and quiet at any time of day. So even that has a funny kind of documentary aspect within it, surprisingly.

Back then, were you able to shoot those scenes without clearing the streets?

They were cleared to an extent, inasmuch as that there were people—one of them was the director's daughter, Grace, in a yellow [safety vest]—who would stand at the end of the street, not saying “You're not allowed to go down here,” because we didn't have those sorts of permissions, but “Would you mind waiting for a moment?”

Usually, people stopped. Every now and then there'd be like a black-cab driver, as in the sort of classic London taxi, who knew their rights and was like, "No, you can't stop me" and would just drive straight across the shot, or someone on their way to work that's like, "Are you kidding? No, no, I'm not stopping." Which of course is fair enough. If you've got to get to work, you've got to get to work.

It’s interesting, because 28 is your first screenplay, and it feels very close to Civil War, which plays, to me, a bit like a zombie movie without the zombies.

I know what you mean. There's something else, probably, which is that 28 Days was shot in a handheld sort of verité style that always brings with it an element of realism. Whether it's the affectation of realism or actual realism is like a different thing, but it makes it feel more real. Civil War is very much in that [same] handheld zone. Yeah.

Sunshine (2007)

Cillian Murphy leads astronauts (including Chris Evans, Michelle Yeoh, and Hiroyuki Sanada) on a one-way mission to save the world by reigniting the Earth’s dying sun; screenplay by Garland, directed by Danny Boyle

I’ve heard you and Boyle disagreed on whether or not the sun was supposed to represent God.

I'm a science nerd. When I say I read nonfiction, a lot of it is history or science. That's the zone that I go into the most. What we had was a conceptual difference, which was really to do with physics, believe it or not—with what the future of the universe was. For me, Sunshine was a story about a world that's dying and somebody saying, "By saving the world temporarily at this moment, all you’re doing is delaying the horror of extinction to your ancestors, and that's not fair on them. We should take that horror ourselves, and not hand it on, as it were, to our great-great, great, great-grandchildren," because you are going to reach the same point, which is the heat-death of the universe.

Danny was like, "No, we'll find a way." I was saying, "We're not going to find a way." That disagreement, a sort of physics-based disagreement, expanded out into all sorts of things to do with the film and what the antagonist believed or represented.

It was a complex lesson for me, which was partly to do with collaboration and different forms of collaboration, and what matters and what doesn't matter. I had then, as I still have now, a lot to learn. You never stop learning. Part of the reason filmmaking is good and interesting is because it does contain collaboration. It's why, when I think about my own filmmaking life, I never think in terms of auteurism. I find that idea slightly irritating and sort of oppositional to my own sense of the reality of making a film.

Dredd (2012)

Adaptation of the long-running comic-book series, with Karl Urban as a law-enforcement officer in a neo-fascist future; screenplay by Garland, directed by Pete Travis

Speaking of collaboration: Where should we place Dredd in your filmography? You wrote the script, but a lot of people, including Karl Urban, have said you should be credited with directing it, as well.

I'm going to be slightly oblique in the response. What I'm going to say is what I have learned from filmmaking is that you never really know how a film is made unless you worked on it. There are all sorts of reasons films get sold in a certain kind of way, or a narrative is created about how a film was made, but unless you were on the film, you don't know.

In that respect, Dredd is no different to any other film I've worked on. It's never how it seems. All I would say is Dredd had a lot of people working on it, just like all the other films I've worked on. They all had a lot of input. And everyone wants that—in that kind of filmmaking at any rate. I’ll just skid around that, in that way.

Never Let Me Go (2010)

Boarding-school friends—played by Andrew Garfield, Carey Mulligan and Keira Knightley—come to terms with their own mortality after discovering they’re clones bred as part of an organ-harvesting program; based on Kazuo Ishiguro's novel, written for the screen by Garland, directed by Mark Romanek

How did this one happen?

It was a sort of odd movie for me because it was an incredibly faithful adaptation of a book, or it was as faithful as I was able to do. It opened up a strange question: What is the purpose of an adaptation? If this thing exists in book form, is there really a point in attempting to make an exact replica?

The other adaptations I've tried, which were Dredd and Annihilation, were in some ways informed by that first one, Never Let Me Go. Because I thought, "If you are going to do this, there has to be a reason to do it beyond just being faithful." Being faithful—it becomes like an act of devotion, rather than a film in and of itself, in some ways.

Ex Machina (2014)

Tech-bro CEO (Oscar Isaac) recruits programmer (Domhall Gleason) to Turing-test a fembot (Alicia Vikander) he believes is artificially intelligent; written and directed by Garland

People talk about there being an identifiable “A24 aesthetic,” at least visually. This one feels like a touchstone for that. And now it’s one of three A24 movies the studio is re-releasing in IMAX, along with Uncut Gems and Hereditary.

To me, one of the interesting things about that is simply that you are able to put it on IMAX, which has, understandably, a kind of mystique around it, because of the size of the screen and the sound system and the immersive experience of watching something that big.

The idea is that an “IMAX film” needs to in some ways be thinking of IMAX at the point it is being made. Ex Machina, in digital terms, I think I'm remembering this correctly, was in effect a film shot in 2K resolution. So what you have is a film shot on digital at a kind of lower grade [resolution] expanded out, and apparently surviving, on that size screen. What that does is open up many, many, many other films to IMAX that were not necessarily ever, or certainly weren't, ever thought of that way. I think that's great, because IMAX theaters are actually pretty spectacular. Their range is greater than I had previously understood it to be.

I also kind of like it because somewhere within filmmaking there can be a kind of preciousness about how things are shot. There's a kind of weird virtue in shooting things in a particular kind of way, whatever that happens to be.

I think, actually for audiences, film works on all sorts of different levels. It's been demonstrated that you could shoot something on an iPhone and that's fine. There really isn't any virtue implicit in that. It's just what's right for whatever project, so I liked that. I liked discovering that about IMAX, for lots of reasons. I like the kind of democratising thing that lies behind it.

Did you write this one intending to direct it?

I did. There'd been a process. I think with Ex Machina, I thought, "I do not want to have a debate about the intention of this scene." I actually saw Ex Machina not so much as I am directing this film, but I am removing this conversation from the execution of the film.

So it was you trying to change the power relationship between the screenwriter and the rest of the production, essentially?

In effect, yeah.

Did you start with a set of ideas you wanted to explore and then find a story that would allow you to explore them, or did you have the story first?

This goes back to where we started. I think—very, very roughly [speaking]—there's two kinds of filmmakers. Some are making films that are in effect about films that they loved when they were younger, and some are making films about something they're observing in the world around them in one way or another. In those very broad terms, I fit into the second category. That may date back to my starting ambitions, which loosely would be to write about what you see.

Ex Machina was the product of reading about things like machine learning, and also things to do with consciousness—like what “sentience,” or specifically “consciousness,” might mean or imply. There was a whole set of conversations happening, which I had been thinking about for years and reading about for years and trying to understand. Because some of them are quite complex and slippery, inasmuch as that you feel you can understand it while you are reading it, and the second you stop reading it it disappears again.

How you hold onto those thoughts is a problem I often have, actually, particularly in reading about science. Sometimes it feels like a very existential exercise for me, because it disappears from my mind so quickly, however hard I try and hold onto it.

So you're reading all this heavy stuff and then you're kind of half-remembering it, and creating something out of whatever stayed with you?

Yeah. Then, in the case of Ex Machina, what I did was I tested the script. There were some people working in artificial intelligence and in philosophy and I needed to ask them, "Am I giving a fair account of this?" Ex Machina name-checks various sorts of thought experiments and stuff like that. It'd be easy for me to get that stuff wrong, so I checked it with people.

Annihilation (2018)

Scientist (Natalie Portman) begins to question her own identity after leading a research team into a mysterious biological quarantine zone in the Florida wilderness; based on the novel by Jeff VanderMeer, written for the screen and directed by Garland

This was your third adapted screenplay, after Dredd and Never Let Me Go, and of the three it’s the least faithful to its source material. It’s almost an improvisation on the themes of the book.

I think Annihilation was a really interesting proposition. I'd just come off Ex Machina, which as a film construction is a bit like a Swiss watch. If you were to fuck with one of the cogs, it would all stop working. It had this very contained, precise structure.

Annihilation was a book that had been optioned, and I was sent it as a possible adaptation. I read it and I really enjoyed it and I found it quite powerful. The effect of reading it for me was very much like being in a dream. So I thought about that. What is one adapting? What is a dream like in film form? If that is the effect it has on me, and I'm the person doing the adaptation...

I'd done these two previous adaptations. [Never Let Me Go was me] just very faithfully attempting to reproduce the book—which fans of the book could dispute, but that was the attempt. Dredd was [about] holding onto a character and a tone. In Annihilation I thought, "What I'm going to do is [make this] like a dream. I'm going to make it a dream of the book."

I worked from my dream-like memory of the book—which meant it diverged, because memory is so imperfect, but hopefully [it] held on to the experiential quality of reading the book, of being in the same internal space as the book. That probably all sounds a bit kind of intellectual or even pretentious, but that was what I tried to do.

That’s what I love about it. The book is pretty dreamlike already, and you’d expect the movie version to be more linear and plot-driven, but it almost goes the other way.

Having been through these two other forms of adaptation, I thought, "Okay, I'm going to take a slightly strange swing here." Which actually comes from something else, probably: I, evidently, don't make commercial films. Every time I do one, I'm thinking, "This will probably be the last time I'm ever allowed to do this, so I might as well swing as hard as I can," because maybe there's no other shot.

What I like about all the movies we’ve been talking about is that, even though they’re engaging with big ideas and offering them up for the audience to engage with, they also work purely on the level of—for lack of a better term—vibes. It feels like there’s this ever-growing class of filmgoers who want everything to add up—if something doesn't immediately make sense they want to be able to go on Reddit or read an explainer post and crack the code. I would argue that a movie like Annihilation is a richer experience if you don’t approach it that way.

I also think that doesn't entirely necessarily come from filmgoers. Some of that is received wisdom from legacy film studios or television financiers or networks, or whatever.

I think that one of the interesting things that A24 has done is demonstrate that there just is more space for different kinds of narratives provided you make them at the right level. What doesn't work at a quarter-billion-dollar budget might work as a 9 million budget. Find the right audience enough to justify its existence in financial terms.

Devs (2020)

Convinced that her boyfriend/coworker did not actually die by suicide, a software engineer (Sonoya Mizuno) investigates her employer (Nick Offerman), who turns out to be building a quantum computer that allows him to “see” into both the past and the future; all eight episodes written and directed by Garland

Devs is pretty obviously an extension of ideas you started playing with in Ex Machina.

Yeah, a hundred percent. I think actually in the case of Devs, it was two things. One was to do with quantum physics and quantum computing, which are two super-interesting areas, but also another phenomena, which was to do with tech leaders being perceived as geniuses, simply because they've worked in tech.

Increasingly I was feeling that they're not geniuses— they're entrepreneurs who coincidentally are working in tech rather than milk production. We are ascribing qualities to them—or they’re assuming those qualities and believing they contain them themselves—on the basis of not much evidence. So that was in my mind, I guess.

The skeptic in me worries about enormous concentrations of power in people or organizations that are not subject to the kinds of rules that we give otherwise to places of power, like governments. Corporations that are very, very powerful but do not have systemic checks and balances on them, and end up being more powerful than nation-states. It's not a secret that power is problematic. If you have a sudden arrival of massive power concentrated in a small space, particularly when it ends up with individuals, it's just wise to be skeptical, I think.

You seem to have an atheist's distrust of the god that we’ve made of technology.

Yeah. I'm not big on any kind of deification of any sort ever. That's probably why I'm skeptical about film directors.

Men (2022)

Widow (Jessie Buckley) rents a cottage in the British countryside and extremely British folk-horror ensues; written and directed by Garland

Civil War (2024)

Journalists traverse war-torn America as loyalist forces clash with insurgents; written and directed by Garland

On the one hand Men feels like it’s pulling from very old sources—these folkloric images like the Green Man and the Sheela na gig. But it also feels informed by very modern ideas about gender and the pervasiveness of misogyny that have entered the public consciousness since the #MeToo movement. Were those things on your mind when you wrote this?

I was thinking about that, sure. I was thinking about context, but I was also thinking about tone. What is the tone of the debate? It's a complicated set of things, but with Men, and also with Civil War, I was leaning consciously and deliberately to a particular thing, which was to embrace the concept of subjectivity and the line between what the writer does and what the reader or viewer receives, and how much of that is contained in them, and whether that line is really maintained.

You've said you wrote Civil War first, is that right?

I wrote it first. I wrote them back to back, which is I think why they share this funny connection—which is probably just a private connection. It's not something that would be obviously contained in them at all.

But yes. They were literally written back to back in a very intense five-week period. I’d got ill with COVID right at the very beginning—obviously not as ill as some, but I got pretty ill and was knocked out of action for quite a while, and was, in a way, only dimly aware of a lot of stuff for quite a while.

When I came out of that, there was a funny, slightly 28 Days Later sense of things having moved. Time had taken a big jump forward and things had moved in a way that I wouldn’t have guessed [would happen] in January, say. I got ill in March and sort of came back into the world, in a really observant way, around May, something like that.

These films [were] a product of that—it provoked some really intense kind of writing surge in me, and I wrote those two scripts back to back.

You've made some headlines lately by telling people you're going to stop directing films after Civil War. Has that been misreported?

The Guardian interviewer reported exactly what I said. There was no distortion in it. I said, "I'm going to stop directing for the foreseeable future," which is a very kind of open-ended statement.

It's also just a literally true statement, because I'm working as a screenwriter. I'm writing something for Danny Boyle. I'm working with a guy called Ray Mendoza. I'm working with someone else, in fact, two other people as well.

Somewhere embedded in this this relates to my own atheism about directing in this respect, which is that there's a contained assumption, [that] if you're not directing, you're not filmmaking. What that does is erase the role of screenwriters, who are categorically also filmmakers, and also directors of photography, and sound designers, and editors, and so on. To me, this is just a kind of over-interest in the role of directing, which I don't share.

Originally Appeared on GQ