Alex Garland is in LA to talk about Ex Machina. Garland has always been interested in computers and programming them so it should come as no surprise that he has written and directed a film about Artificial Intelligence. He flew back to London after the interview for the British Independent Film Awards, in time to see his film sweep with four wins. I had the chance to catch up with him to find out more about creating Ava.
Awards Daily: It’s really exciting to be talking about Ex-Machina, even after all this time and to see the film getting love again.
AG: Yeah, it was a really nice film to work on, in terms of the process of making it. When it came out, people really dug it and that really doesn’t always happen.
AD: Where did the whole idea for the film arrive from?
AG: It started, in a way, when I was a kid and I was messing around with computers and trying to figure out how they worked and how to program them. It was in a very innocent kind of way. I mean, I’m talking about a nutty 12 year old who was very interested in that kind of stuff. I just always retained an interest in that and I used to keep reading about Artificial Intelligence and about consciousness in humans and what are the issues there. How the problems of one become the problems of another. Some 30 years later, that sort of morphed into a screenplay.
AD: At what point when you were writing the screenplay did you say, “I’m going to direct this” or did you always have that in mind?
AG: No, not exactly. It was more just about exerting the particular kind of creative control. At a certain point, it becomes easier to say you’re directing it as well. It wasn’t always the intention, I see myself as being the writer.
AD: What’s different about writing a novel as opposed to writing for a movie?
AG: In the actual writing, they’re weirdly similar. But, the overall process is ultimately, fundamentally different because you write the novel on your own. The absolute essential, essential thing about film is the collaboration. It’s not just you, it’s a group of people in which you’re one. Novel writing is basically just solitude.
AD: I love Alicia Vikander; I think everybody does. And I also love Oscar Isaac. When you were writing it, did you have anybody specific in mind?
AG: I had Domhnall Gleeson in mind because we had worked together. This is the third film we’ve worked in together. The previous film I wrote called Dredd and the one before that which was Never Let Me Go. In fact, I also worked with his dad on 28 Days Later. While I was writing it, I was thinking about Domhnall for the part he played. I approached him as soon as we got the casting call notice. For the other two, it was a more traditional casting process just having discussions with people and watching tons of film and seeing each of them in different movies. I just approached them asking if they’d be interested.
AD: You got a perfect cast together. When it came to figuring out how to mold the technology in the film, how much research did you have to do on development of A.I.?
AG: I didn’t exactly do any research because it was a subject nature I was actually interested in and reading up about anyway. It was more that I had an area that I was interested in and was reading about for my own reasons. At a certain point, a story for a film just kind of floated out. Just in my day-to-day life there are various things I start reading up about for one reason or another and sometimes they end up being related to movies and sometimes it’s just something interesting me at that time. It was great that a whole generalized interest in Artificial Intelligence just came up.
AD: Okay, I have to ask you this. Who is the villain in the film? I think it’s Ava to some extent, but is that correct?
AG: It’s not correct for me, no. Actually Ava’s the hero. It’s funny (laughs), I just did another interview and in the interview, the person who was talking said, from their point of view, Ava is the hero. I said, that’s the same from my point of view too. But not everybody agrees with that, sometimes people see differently and they’ll say, “No that’s impossible, how could you possibly think that?” It’s subjective, and about what people take into the story. I think it’s about whose perspective you choose to see the story from. If you see it from Ava’s perspective, she’s not doing anything bad. She’s a prisoner and she’s trying to escape which is fair enough. At a certain point, the other characters in the film, give her a reason so that she can’t really fully trust them and rely on them and so she feels that she has to do this herself. For me, she’s definitely not the villain, but if that’s how you feel, that is your subjective view. Can I ask why you think [she’s the villain]?
AD: She’s almost a villain, but not quite. At the beginning, I feel it’s Nathan and then Caleb becomes the villain.
AG: It’s up to the individual. I don’t think any of them are fully bad, but not really good. No one’s sort of purely pure, and there’s no one who’s evil.
AD: What about the tension that we see between Nathan and Caleb? Aren’t they friends in real life? How hard was that to create?
AG: Well, it’s not really me who creates it. A lot of that is just them two. As a writer, you write the scene and then you hand it over to actors and you trust them to take the characters on. A lot of what you see is their performance and they way they handled the script. It’s definitely not from the direction, it’s their interpretation of the words.
AD: One thing I really liked about the film were the moments of silence. They worked so well especially in terms of the storytelling. Did you script those or were they improv? Was that easier or harder to write?
AG: That’s in the tone of it from the writing and pacing of it. I guess the way I think about it is that had a kind of vibe that was then interrupted by moments of whatever it happened to be. It could be disco dancing, violence, or tension, but it had a kind of stillness to it as well, The stillness is very important to be kind of measured. It’s just the kind of film it is, it’s a quiet, thoughtful movie.
AD: I like that. Two of my favorite scenes in the movie are obviously the dance sequence, which is just great and, I think, is definitely one of the best scenes within film this year, and also when Ava puts her clothes on. What can you tell me about those two scenes?
AG: Well, the dance scene just felt like the perfect opportunity to sort of come out of left field and just surprise people. It’s using disco songs as a funny kind of aggression from one character to another. Even though Nathan and Kyoko are doing this dance, Nathan is intimidating Caleb while he’s doing it. It’s quite a strange idea, but there’s something about it I just thought was quite cool I guess. At the same time, it’s also being slightly aggressive to audiences because it snaps into it quite unexpectedly and it breaks out of a certain kind of mood. And then it’s a very hard cut out of it. Maybe just as the audience is really starting to enjoy it, then you cut out of it. It was to be sort of disruptive of the tone and where the movie was at, I guess. The scene about getting dressed, in a way, that was a much more orchestrated and weirdly complicated scene. Of course the was the choreography you had to do and the actors had to learn this dance, which they did. That obviously had a whole bunch of complications going into it, to do with how we present this in, tonally, the right way. It’s a very great long scene and it has lots of stages and sequences in it. It was quite a number really, but I felt incredibly happy, actually, with how it worked out. It was exactly what I hoped for.
AD: They’re both fantastic scenes. Ava is one of those characters where it’s hard not to fall in love with her. What’s your favorite part or thing about her?
AG: It’s hard to say. [Laughs] The thing is, I wrote it being on Ava’s side from the get-go, even before she appears in the script. It was always about her so in some senses, I’m just very emotionally attached to her as a character. I think that can happen with writing, you have characters that you feel very wrapped up in and I was very wrapped up in Ava and the dilemma she was in. The thing I like about her most is her intelligence. She’s very smart, if you listen and watch how the scenes are constructed, she is subtly often driving the scene and doing it in quite a delicate way. Some of that is the character and, of course, some of it is Alicia Vikander and the very gentle control over her physicality but also her speech that she brought to it. It was really lovely. I guess, it’s the subtle way that she drives what’s around her.
AD: And how did the budget influence the film? You’re working with a low budget, the set was simple, but the film is so incredible.
AG: Personally, I feel, in my working life, I tend to be working on low-budget films, not medium or mega big-budget films. I like working with a low budget, it forces a kind of inventiveness. Also, it forces people to take risks because, somehow, you’ve got to punch a different was because you’re competing against that which has much more resources available to it, both in the making and the film. You have to just go for it and I like the way it forces that.
AD: You collaborated with a comic artist on this. Talk to me collaborating with Jock.
AG: Me and Jock have worked really, really closely on this film that we did just before Ex Machina called Dredd. Jock was a comic book artist and he was very close to that comic book world we were adapting. We just got on really well and when it came time for Ex Machina, I just called him up and said, “Hey, do you feel like working again?” and he said, “Yep, let’s do it.” We got stuck into working on the design and then Andrew Whitehurst came in and the theme just continues to expand. Jock was the first person in the payroll of the movie, the first person who actually was working on the film, instead of just a small group of people hoping. He was the first person who came in, I guess.
AD: So what’s next for you, Alex?
AG: I’m trying to get another film off the ground with exactly the same group of people, same crew and same producers. It’s a film called Annihilation, set up with Paramount and I’m really hopeful it’ll work out.
AD: Wonderful! How exciting! Thank you for taking the time to talk to me and thank you for making this movie.
AG:Thank you! Take care.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYGzRB4Pnq8