Alex Garland, director of the new science fiction film “Ex Machina,” talked to college journalists from around the country about directing for the first time, the appeal of science-fiction storytelling and what he’s working on next.

Question: You’ve written quite a few films, and this is your first time behind camera.  Did you know when you started writing this that you would ultimately direct it or did you make that decision later?

Alex Garland: I didn’t think in those terms.  I don’t – in a weird way, I don’t really care about those terms, it’s partly ‘cause I just don’t – in a way I don’t really overstate the role of the director.  I think directors are very important but I also think DOP’s are very important and production designers and so it goes on.

So the – I think at the point I was writing it I was really just trying to figure out does this work, is there a movie here, does it work in its own terms, you know.  And the directing aspect of it was something that just came later and just felt like it made sense.  It was nothing– there was no great sort of epiphany about it and it wasn’t a very big deal actually.

Q: What was the most important thing that you’ve taken from each of the other sets and working on other films just as a writer that helped you direct?

AG: To set up a set and an environment where as little possible–  time as possible was spent on b*****t politics and bad feeling and arguments and ego and stuff, and have as much time as possible just in a pleasurable relaxed environment with people that liked each other and were all pointed in the same direction. 

And the most important thing of all from my point of view was that everybody involved in the film was making the same movie.  And it’s quite easy on a big project that some people are making one film and other people are making another film and I wasn’t interested in that.

Q: What were the challenges of adapting your own writing from the page and then like going in the director’s chair?

AG: They were exactly the same challenges as on proceeding films.  I mean, I’ve never just written a script and handed it over and then sort of come back in a year and a half and see what turned it –you know what it turned into.  And it’s not just me I mean that’s true of lots of people who work in film. 

The challenges are I tell you, I mean the challenges are often that something works on the page and it even works when you’re on the set – you know when you shoot it on location or in a sound stage, but it doesn’t work in the edit. 

And it cannot work for all sorts of weird reasons and –but it’s pretty scary when it – you suddenly discover you’ve got some massive problem that you didn’t anticipate until you were cutting the film together.  And I’ve never worked on a film where that didn’t happen.  It’s – and I’ve been doing this now for like, I don’t know, like 15 years or something and I’ve written several movies and I still can’t seem to get that right. 

And it’s just something mysterious happens and it’s even weirder because film scripts are not like just read by one person and then executed.  You get like literally hundreds of people read them by the time it goes into production but there is a way that you can convince someone that something works on a page by a facility with language. 

And then on the shoot the actor will do that bit of convincing at that moment and then suddenly you realize on the day that –or rather when you’re cutting it there is a truly massive logical problem that nobody had anticipated let alone a kind of theme problem or a sort of nuance problem.  It will be like a grade A sort of logical problem like the plane doesn’t have any wings or something.  It’s kind of weird actually but it always happens.

Q: What is it about the science fiction genre that drew you to it and what is it you feel you have to do in order to make a project like this work so the audience can buy it?

AG: The reason to work in sci-fi from my point of view is that you’re just allowed to deal with big themes and big ideas and not be embarrassed about it.  You know if you try to put that stuff in an action movie or even an adult drama like sort of a sophisticated adult drama, people get kind of sort of almost self-conscious about really big questions and feel like it might be all be too pretentious or whatever. 

But sci-fi audiences are very relaxed about that kind of thing.  They want big ideas, they like them being named checked, it’s seen as an advantage rather than a negative.  And from a writing point of view that’s just really nice you know because it means you can have a lot of fun with it really.

 

Q: Was there a concerted effort to keep the film grounded in realism while exploring sci-fi elements and artificial intelligence or other things like that?

AG: Yes definitely in some crucial respect, 100 percent yes.  I mean basically because it’s an ideas movie, that’s really what it is, it’s a – it’s got a bunch of thoughts and questions and it’s proposing them and only answering some of them I’d say.  And so because it’s an ideas movie if the ideas, by the way which are not my ideas, they’re ideas that I’ve encountered through reading or sort of studying in one way or another. 

If the ideas are either bad or badly expressed then the film is failing.  And so there was an attempt to be very thoughtful and very reasonable in the presentation of these things and because I know unfortunately all too well what my own limitations are and failings either in talent or intellect, then what I would do – then what I did do is after getting the script as good as I could do it, I then sent it to people who were able to critique it on a –in a –on a particular level.

Q: Are you able to talk about what you might have in mind to do next?

AG: Yes, well in intention, I mean that doesn’t necessarily mean it happens.  In my sort of track record working life I’d say out of three projects I try to make maybe one of them gets made.  So yes, the strike rate is something like three –one in three.  I hope this one turns out to be the one, it’s an adaptation of a novel by a man called Jeff VanderMeer and he wrote a really strange and beautiful book called Annihilation and so I’ve been – I’ve written an adaptation of that and it’s been submitted to a studio and we’re just waiting to find out if we get the money to make it.

            “Ex Machina” is now playing everywhere and is rated R for graphic nudity, language, sexual references and some violence.