Interview with Alex Garland, writer/director of Ex Machina
Alex Garland’s résumé reads like a laundry list of recent sci-fi and horror cult hits, with screenplay credits including 28 Days Later (2002), Sunshine (2007), and Dredd (2012). His latest, Ex Machina, may stand to follow that same path of cult adoration – although hopefully for Garland, its box office will follow more in the footsteps of 28 Days Later than those of Dredd. The sparse, character-driven sci-fi film follows Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson), an office drone at a major tech company who wins the opportunity to spend a week at the secluded home of his employer, Nathan (Oscar Isaac). Caleb discovers Nathan has recruited him to test the behavior of an android, Ava (Alicia Vikander), that Nathan has developed. As Nathan begins to display a more megalomaniacal side and Ava proves even more emotionally developed than expected, Caleb’s big week with the boss starts to slide unsettlingly south.
Director Garland made his first big splash in 1996 with his book The Beach, later adapted into a movie by Garland’s repeated collaborator Danny Boyle. He also wrote Never Let Me Go (2010), and has forayed into the video game industry as the writer of Enslaved: Odyssey to the West (2010), and story supervisor of DmC: Devil May Cry (2013). However, Ex Machina represents Garland’s first film as director. Garland chatted with CinemaNerdz about the origins of his fascination with science fiction, the future of real-world artificial intelligence and why he doesn’t really care if he returns to the director’s chair.
CinemaNerdz: This movie goes very much against the grain of most mainstream sci-fi movies. It’s quiet, thoughtful, philosophical, and relies more on performances than effects. Was it challenging for you to even get this movie made in the first place?
Alex Garland and Alicia Vikander on the set of “Ex Machina.” © 2015 – Universal Pictures International.
ALEX GARLAND: I thought it was going to be. I think when I sat down and wrote this, I was thinking along the lines of I might be able to raise something like, I don’t know, $3 million or $4 million. I guess I was going to go to places like Film Forge in the UK, where financing is sort of like pocket money in a way. It sort of has a different set of criteria in terms of why they finance films. But the producers said, “Look, we might as well try to get a budget that allows us to do visual effects at the level that we really ideally would like to do it.” So we did. And then to my immense surprise we found that there actually were people who were willing to back the movie. So that’s a long way of saying yes, I was really, really surprised. It’s not what I expected at all.
CinemaNerdz: What drew you to doing a story about artificial intelligence?
GARLAND: It’s probably largely just that kind of sci-fi instinct, where if you’re into sci-fi – which I am, I love science fiction – you look for collisions between some kind of scientific concept or philosophical concept and also something that relates to the real world as you live in it right now. Sci-fi handles that quite well, I think. It’s quite comfortable with that. In this particular instance it is that if you look at strong artificial intelligence, you are inevitably also looking at human intelligence and consciousness. And that kind of connection is sort of irresistible, I think. So I guess it was something like that.
CinemaNerdz: Did you do much research on real-world AI as you wrote the movie?
GARLAND: I did. The story actually came out initially not from researching a story as such, but just simply reading about AI. It was something that had interested me for a long time. And I’ve got a limitation in my ability to read up about it, particularly as far as books or papers about getting technical. I’m left behind very quickly. But some of the broader aspects of it I found really engaging. And it was while reading about that stuff, in particular a book by a guy called Murray Shanahan, that the idea to present it as a narrative occurred to me.
Alex Garland, Domhnall Gleeson, and Alicia Vikander on the set of “Ex Machina.” © 2015 – Universal Pictures International.
CinemaNerdz: What were some of the broader aspects of the technology that intrigued you?
GARLAND: Partly I was interested in the fact that we didn’t have it, and in fact that we’re a long, long way from having it. Because I think that the popular conception of AI is that it’s just around the corner and maybe it’s already there, like in some laboratory at some big tech company. And actually any amount of reading on it will quickly lead you to the conclusion that the complexity of having a self-aware machine or a machine with something even resembling an emotional existence is a long way away from us, because we’re lacking some really big conceptual breakthroughs and breakthroughs of understanding before we can get there. So one of the things at a technical level that interested me – or I guess on an actual level, I should say, rather than a technical level – was just about what the disconnect was between the way people perceive AI and where it actually exists. And this is where the crossover between AI and theory of mind really start to occur, is in conversations between people who are really at the forefront of this stuff, or close to it perhaps, about where this breakthrough will come. Is consciousness something that’s kind of emergent from complexity, or is it something completely different? I found that quite interesting too.
CinemaNerdz: You’ve said you consider this film more skeptical of human intelligence than having that sort of anxiety towards artificial intelligence that we often see in movies.
GARLAND: Yeah, yeah, certainly human behavior, definitely.
CinemaNerdz: So it sounds like you’re not too worried about the potential of AI even further down the road, in this long-term scenario you’re talking about.
GARLAND: Yeah. Just out of interest, have you seen the movie?
CinemaNerdz: Yes.
GARLAND: Okay. So then this will make more sense, I guess. I think the position that the film takes is not to say that there’s nothing to be alarmed about, that it’s not implicitly dangerous or inherently dangerous in some way, but just that it’s not one thing or the other in terms of the position you might take. In terms of good and bad it’s not binary. The film very often draws a connection between nuclear power and Oppenheimer, and AI research and Nathan. It felt to me like there was a decent analogy that could be made between the two. Nuclear power has a huge amount of latent danger but it’s also got some very good things about it in the way that we can use it to produce energy, for example. So I think I was trying to position AI around there, you know, as something that it’s understandable why we might be alarmed about it. But if we deal with it with sort of sufficient checks and balances it could be very good for us.
Alex Garland and Oscar Isaac on the set of “Ex Machina.” © 2015 – Universal Pictures International.
CinemaNerdz: So the alarm we might have about it should be more dependent on the quality of the people who create that technology?
GARLAND: One-hundred percent on the people who create the technology and the people who then use the technology. My concerns are definitely based on people. I think in the case of AI there’s a reason to be not exactly – I’m trying to think of the right word. I suppose it is “distrustful.” There’s a reason to be distrustful of big tech companies, not because they are doing anything wrong – I have no real idea whether they’re doing anything wrong or not – but just simply because they’re so powerful. And when things are that powerful you just have to be cautious with them, simply out of prudence, I think. So it’s not actually a criticism of any tech company in and of itself. It’s just a sort of general requirement that says when humans are in a position, or when organizations or particular bodies of humans are in a position, of a lot of power it’s wise that that power should have oversight and checks and balances. That’s all.
CinemaNerdz: You’ve done pretty diverse subject matter underneath the umbrella of sci-fi. What interests you about working with this genre in general?
GARLAND: I think it’s the permission, from my point of view. You’re allowed to throw in big ideas and even to have overt philosophy if you want without having to feel bad about it, because it kind of reflects this space that people can get into in response to big ideas and philosophy. It’s a word they kind of reach for automatically, which is “sophomoric.” And I think they reach for it out of a kind of embarrassment, really – an embarrassment of your fear, and an embarrassment of the idea being expressed. If you put these kinds of things in an action movie, or even actually in an adult drama, it basically boggles people. Science fiction is just more relaxed, I think. It’s just more laid-back about the whole thing, and science-fiction audiences are quite up for having thoughts proposed or floated around and explored to one degree or another. I think they just take a pleasure in it. And from my point of view that’s nice. It makes for a really nice candor, and it’s sort of like a collegiate, easygoing place to work in.
CinemaNerdz: When did you develop your fascination with the genre? Is this something you’ve been interested in since you were a young man?
GARLAND: I was. I was interested in it since I was young. But I had a problem, which was that although I was interested I wasn’t good at it. I’m in my mid-forties now, and when I was a kid, twelve or thirteen years old, my parents got a home computer. I tried to learn how to program in it. I could do very basic programs in a language actually called Basic. But I was terrible at it. I had no aptitude. I was very bad at maths at school and in fact I was so bad at the sciences, like physics and chemistry and biology…I never sat in the exams in those subjects. So I’ve always been a step behind and struggling, I think, to understand and read about these kinds of things. But in my early twenties for whatever reason I gave it another shot, which was not out of nowhere, because I had been interested in it when I was younger. I got a kids’ book actually. It was about the atom, which was actually aimed at ten and eleven-year-olds. I read it and I thought, “Well, I did understand that, at least,” so I carried on reading. And then from that point I’ve continued to read about this stuff throughout my adult life. In fact, I read much more about science than I do about anything else these days. But I’m very aware of my limitations with it. The limitations I had as a child, I’ve carried through till now.
CinemaNerdz: There are really only three main characters in this movie. Did that minimalistic, intimate, character-driven type of story make things easier on you as a first-time director, or did it present more of a challenge?
Oscar Isaac and Domhnall Gleeson in “Ex Machina.” © 2015 – Universal Pictures International.
GARLAND: Neither, I think. It was a mutual state. It may seem easier as a production, because you have a limited cast and also that cast is in a limited location. That makes many aspects of the production quite controllable and actually frees you up so you can spend more on visual effects than you might be able to otherwise. But from a directing point of view – or actually I think I’d rather just say from a filmmaking point of view, from the point of view of being one of the filmmakers on the film – the issues are very similar. No, let me put it another way. They’re not similar. What you save on one thing, you might lose on another because the [unintelligible], which is effectively what you just described, might be cinematic in some respects and might push towards being more theatrical like a stage play. And of course it is a film, so that gives you something unique to watch out for and fight against, whereas if you’ve got something that’s on a bigger canvas with lots of sweeping crane shots and action sequences and stuff like that, then that’s obviously in that sort of bubble.
CinemaNerdz: The cast is so essential to this film and they pull it off well. How did you go about selecting the three leads?
GARLAND: Well, Domhnall Gleeson – this is the third time I’ve worked with Domhnall, so I know him very well. We’ve worked together closely in the past under quite difficult circumstances, so we had a pretty tight bond, I’d say. So that was quite straightforward. I just called him up. He was the first person that was cast, in fact. I said, “Do you want to do it? Here’s the script. Take a read. Let me know if you want to do it.” The other two, I guess it was just a more formal, traditional process. I had seen both of them in other films and they’d been very striking. Nothing particularly interesting about that, because good actors usually are obviously good actors. Anybody can spot that quite easily. These two are good actors, so I spotted that as one would. I’d seen Alicia in a film called A Royal Affair and Oscar in a film called Body of Lies, and both of them in those parts did something that felt relevant to these parts. So I was lucky enough to get them.
CinemaNerdz: You’ve been in the movie business for quite a while, but this was your first time in the director’s chair. What surprises came out of this process for you?
GARLAND: No real surprises. I’ve been working on films – you kind of implied that I’ve been working for a while, I think. And I have. I’m on set usually every day and there’s something very particular going on. I’m there every day and I’m there throughout the edit and pre-production, so this is all much the same, you know? This film was made by a group of people, of which I was just one. And many of those people have been on all the productions I’ve worked on. So there was really no very meaningful change between the films before this one and this one.
CinemaNerdz: Would you like to return to directing again?
GARLAND: In some respects I don’t care. The goal is just to make interesting films up to the limit of one’s ability, you know? I can easily imagine writing something that somebody else directed, or I can imagine not bothering with that and doing it myself. To be honest – I’ve really now talked about this in several of the interviews that I’ve done – I think there is a way we perceive directing. I don’t perceive directing in that way, so I frame the question slightly differently. I really do see a director as being just another person in the crew and not the kind of godhead figure that we’re constantly suggested the director is.
See Ex Machina in theaters everywhere on April 24, 2015!
Patrick Dunn
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- Interview with Alex Garland, writer/director of Ex Machina - April 24, 2015
