Alicia Vikander plays a robot, Ava, that was designed to pass the Turing test in Ex Machina.Universal Pictures
Alex Garland, writer of the screenplay for 28 Days Later, the Judge Dredd comic books and various high-profile video games, always seems to be a sort of spiritual cousin to figures like J.J. Abrams and Joss Whedon, brainy men in their 40s with an unabashedly geeky affection for science fiction, comic books and genre entertainment. The main difference is that while Abrams and Whedon cut their teeth on television, Garland came from literature.
A few years out from his history of art degree, a foray into comic-book writing (his father is a political cartoonist) and some treks around Europe and Asia, the London-born Garland became a literary phenomenon at the age of 26 for his 1996 novel The Beach. The book, about a commune of young European and American travellers in a remote island in Thailand, was translated into 25 languages. It became one of those celebrated "voice of a generation" works that could have easily consigned Garland to yesterday's hipster hell.
Instead, after witnessing preparations for the film version of the book (shot by Danny Boyle and starring Leonardo DiCaprio), he threw himself into the world of movies. Though he has written two other books, The Tesseract (1998) and The Coma (2004), he is best known for his "running zombies movie" 28 Days Later, and the sequel 28 Weeks Later (on which he served as an executive producer). He has also written two more science-fiction movies, Sunshine and the adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro's novel Never Let Me Go. Other ventures include the script for Dredd, adapted from the Judge Dredd comic-book series, and a couple of video-game writing credits.
It's a surprise to realize that Ex Machina is his debut as a film director, a head game of a movie that hasn't forgotten about the sexy bits. The script is about a young computer programmer named Caleb (Domhnall Gleason) who wins a prize to visit the home of his boss, search-engine billionaire Nathan Bateman (Inside Llewyn Davis star Oscar Isaac). Bateman enlists him to participate in a version of the "Turing test," a test invented by the late Alan Turing (the subject of the movie The Imitation Game) to determine whether machines can think: Specifically, can a computer fool a human being into believing it is a sentient being? Unlike the original Turing experiment, which was strictly text-based, the machine in Ex Machina is no abstraction. The robot, named Ava, is definitely female – with hips, breasts and classic estrogen features of full lips and wide eyes – linked together by a metal skeleton and sheathed in a mesh exterior. Ava is played by Swedish actress and former ballet dancer Alicia Vikander with an unblinking gaze and gliding movement.
Garland's been industrious in promoting the movie, travelling from country to country to do interviews, and he looks, if not exhausted, at least well rumpled. Today, it's Toronto at the Trump Hotel, with two days of one-on-one interviews sandwiched between phone calls and round-table chats. Reviews have already been positive. Why the push? The question is like spiking a word vein.
"I care about the film and I felt so conflicted about other films I've worked on and also because it's a tough movie to tell and I kind of need it to work. I've been working in films for 15 years and what tends to happen is I make movies which have some varyingly critical response, but broadly sympathetic, and the same reaction from audiences. But almost nobody sees them and they lose money. And the argument to raise finances is getting harder and harder. I want to be able to keep doing this job."
Another way of keeping his job, he says, is to work cheaply, to let ideas rather than special effects do the dramatic lifting. An executive once told Garland that there was no such thing as an "ideas movie," which he wanted to challenge. He thought of Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange as a perfect "ideas movie" which was fully dramatized and cinematic. There's even a little homage to Kubrick in Ex Machina, though it was the actor Oscar Isaac who had the idea: Give the genius a working-class Bronx accent.
The ideas, says Garland, always come first: "That's how it goes with me. There's a fixation that appears before the story. And the story is a way of working through the fixation, and it materializes as a story. A story with a real simplicity to it. … By now, I know how these things work. Do anything that adds more dollars to the budget, throw in a motorcycle chase, you gain more unwanted attention, and I needed to protect this film."
Garland's fascination with filmmaking, as opposed to just liking films, first came when he sat in on production meetings for Danny Boyle's 2000 adaptation of The Beach. It looked much less lonely than writing books.
"You see the chaos and fun and energy, so I decided I wanted to make a film – so I wrote a spec script [28 Days Later] about zombies. That's where my apprenticeship started. I learned that the key relationship is not with the writer and the director, but the writer and the producer. I was working with a producer [Andrew Macdonald, whose films included The Beach, Shallow Grave and Trainspotting,] who had been a line producer, not just a big-picture guy, and he knew what every person did, what they were paid and who you could get rid of. I saw him attach a director, put together a crew and cast it, right through to the end."
Garland loves certain filmmakers (Kubrick, Paul Thomas Anderson) but he's skeptical about an emphasis on the director's role: "The director may actually be the only person on the set who knows nothing about filmmaking. I've been on films where the [director of photography] set every shot and the actors directed themselves, when the actors even banned directors from the set."
Where then, does he identify the consciousness inside a film?
"I know I'm supposed to say I learned from directors, but the truth is the other people I learned the most from were directors of photography. I saw the way they arranged what was captured and the little dances they have to do to make directors think it's their idea. I watched the glances exchanged between DOP and first assistant directors and how the focus-puller chooses to draw attention to a mug in the actress's hand rather than her face. And within these strata of relations is where the real filmmaking takes place."