Ever since the Danny Boyle film Sunshine was released in 2007, its admirers have been puzzled by an abrupt late change in tone. What begins as a meditative science-fiction drama about a crew of astronauts on a suicide mission to reignite Earth’s dying sun shape-shifts without warning into a slasher movie. What could the writer have been thinking?
Alex Garland, the writer in question, confirms it was initially something very different. Rather than knife-flashing chases down spacecraft corridors, his original script – vetoed by producers – ended with the mission’s lone survivor, played by Cillian Murphy, teaching himself to play chess as his ship slowly and inexorably flies into the sun.
“Because that’s essentially what life is, right?” Garland asks me. “If you were told you had two months to live, would there be any point in learning how to play chess? Is it any different at three months? Or four? Is the right amount of time left in your life to learn chess six months to a year? When are any of us legitimately allowed to learn how to play chess? That’s what I was trying to argue for.” He pauses. “So you can see why no one wanted to put me in charge of a film.”
Facing an existential conundrum in Danny Boyle’s 2007 sci-fi movie Sunshine (2007), which was written by Alex Garland.
Garland is the London-born son of a psychoanalyst and a political cartoonist, and his two-pronged mode of creative attack – sometimes searching, sometimes sending up – neatly aligns with his parentage. No other filmmaker is on quite the same page, though his use of sci-fi and horror to unlock existential conundrums – the nature of consciousness (in 2014’s Ex Machina), the strangeness of free will (in his recent miniseries Devs), the unconscious human self-destructive urge (in Annihilation, 2018) – gives him something in common with Christopher Nolan and David Cronenberg.
Early in his career, Garland, who is now 51, made a name for himself as one of Boyle’s star collaborators. In his mid-20s he wrote The Beach, the bestselling backpacker novel which Boyle made into a film with Leonardo DiCaprio in 2000; two years later, he provided the screenplay for Boyle’s zombie film 28 Days Later. Yet during the making of Sunshine, he decided the time had come to strike out on his own.
“I think what I really am is a writer,” says Garland. “I only wanted to direct in order to remove other directors from the equation. I essentially got where I am so I didn’t have to sit there any more thinking, ‘Oh f---, don’t do it like that’.” This isn’t a slight against Boyle, “the most complete, truest filmmaker I’ve ever worked with. I learned an awful lot from him. But nonetheless there were things in Sunshine that made me think ‘No, don’t do it like that.’ And I tried to let them go and found I couldn’t.”
Garland is talking from New York where he’s taking a brief break from directing his fourth film, just before his third, Men, opens in cinemas. Men caused a stir at Cannes: gasps, groans and even horrified walkouts during its grisly cadenza, which involves Jessie Buckley, an axe, a dream holiday home in Gloucestershire, and an uninvited guest.
Horrors await Harper (Jessie Buckley) in the English countryside in Men.Credit:Kevin Baker/A24
Buckley plays Harper, a young widow who retreats to the English countryside after a traumatic incident, and finds herself in a village where all the menfolk look uncannily alike. (Each one of them – landlord, vicar, publican, yob, et cetera – is played by Rory Kinnear.) These oddballs have two further things in common, the first being their tendency to belittle, coerce and threaten members of the opposite sex; the other is a certain connection to the Green Man: the folkloric figure whose leafy countenance is hewn into the altar in the local church, as it is in many churches around Britain and elsewhere.
Garland’s script for Men was the “third or fourth” he’d attempted to write with a connection to this ancient and deeply ambiguous motif, for which no underpinning mythology seems to exist. For Garland, that was part of the appeal. “All you can really say with any certainty is that it’s very old and typically male. So from that, people will project meaning onto it.”
For its admirers – including this writer – Men is a brilliant provocation that’s arrived right on time. But a quick scroll through various online film platforms reveals the alternate view is hardly a niche one. Meanwhile, the US polling firm CinemaScore gave Men a lowly D+ rating, suggesting its opening night crowd overwhelmingly didn’t get what it came for. (Other notable Ds include Punch-Drunk Love, American Psycho, Hereditary, The New World and Eyes Wide Shut: not bad company to be in.)
Rory Kinnear plays a number of roles in Men. Credit:Roadshow Films
“Look, I’m not expecting everyone to like it,” Garland shrugs. “I know when I put something out there if it’s going to piss a bunch of people off. The film I’m making now is also going to wind some people up.”
That would be Civil War, which Garland is shooting in Atlanta, and which he describes as a “companion piece to Men in some ways”. Starring Kirsten Dunst and Sonoya Mizuno, the lead actress of Devs, it is “set at an indeterminate point in the future – just far enough ahead for me to add a conceit” – and serves as a sci-fi allegory for our currently polarised predicament.
The village oddballs in Men have a tendency to belittle, coerce and threaten members of the opposite sex.Credit:Kevin Baker Kevin Baker/A24
With Men, did he think twice about wading into a subject – misogyny – that magnetises outrage?
“I think that if you’re going to try to join a conversation, it’s incumbent on you to be as thoughtful about it as you can be. I have some female friends who are very engaged in feminism and have been talking about this stuff for a very long time now, and they were able to suggest looking at some things in different ways.”
Garland says Civil War will probably be the last film he directs; he’s planning to return to only writing scripts, at least for a while. What about another novel? (The Beach was the first of three.)
Maybe not. “I only wrote books because I could do it on my own with no resources,” he says. “It was hard, lonely work. And I stopped feeling connected to The Beach pretty much as I wrote the last word of it. I remember seeing it in bookshops and thinking I might feel a surge of achievement. But I felt completely neutral, as if someone else had written it.”
He switched to screenplays because of a desire to direct, but found his tendency to argue the toss over his more bizarre scenes – see solar death chess, above – didn’t open many doors. He wrote both Never Let Me Go, the haunting Kazuo Ishiguro adaptation, and the comic-book action thriller Dredd specifically so he could direct them himself, but these were eventually passed to Mark Romanek and Pete Travis. (On the latter, Garland was also unofficially heavily involved behind the camera.)
“I can be a bit odd and my instincts aren’t very mainstream,” he concedes. “I don’t get offered Marvel movies, but if I did one it would clearly be a disaster. And I think people knew that, and kept me at arm’s length.”
Alex Garland on the set of Oscar-winning Ex Machina (2014).
Both shoots proved frustrating. “I lost patience with the whole thing,” Garland recalls. “What was happening was stupid. So on Ex Machina I just thought, ‘I’m not doing this again.’”
That was a script Garland felt he could hardly be turned down for: four actors, one location (a spectacular modernist boutique hotel in Norway) and lots of dialogue. It was so straightforward they’d have to let him do it. They did – and the result won an Oscar, swept the British Independent Film Awards, and became a significant cult hit.
His next, Annihilation, had a more dispiriting fate: after struggling at the US box office, Paramount cut their losses and sold it to Netflix. Even so, he’s relieved it exists in the form that it does.
“If I’d given that script to someone else to direct it would have just been a weird mush,” he says. “And listen, some people think Annihilation is a weird mush. But at least it’s the weird mush it was meant to be.”
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Unusually among writers-turned-directors, Garland understands the power of images whose effects can’t quite be captured in words. Men contains some corkers, including a scene in which Buckley impossibly sings in harmony with her own echo. Then there’s Ex Machina’s disco scene, in which Oscar Isaac and Sonoya Mizuno dance in perfect sync to Get Down Saturday Night while Domhnall Gleeson looks on, stupefied.
How did that come about? “I was hunting around for ways to be disruptive,” says Garland. “And having disco in this cerebral movie felt like that.”
It was a lesson he’d learned on Never Let Me Go, “which established a mood really beautifully, but never moved off it. After that I realised how much what’s enjoyable about cinema comes from disruption. Yes, there’s satisfaction in hitting a tone. But the pleasure comes when you break it.”
Men is in cinemas from June 16.
The Daily Telegraph
