The Big Picture - 'Annihilation,’ ‘Ex Machina,’ and Alex Garland’s Disturbing Sci-Fi Vision | The Big Picture (Ep. 51)

Episode Date: February 23, 2018

Ringer editor-in-chief Sean Fennessey speaks with acclaimed writer and director Alex Garland about the making of the Natalie Portman sci-fi thriller ‘Annihilation’ and the tricky nature of adapting Jeff VanderMeer’s best-selling book. They also discuss Garland’s first film, ‘Ex Machina’; his time as a novelist and screenwriter of movies like ‘28 Days Later...’ and ‘Sunshine’; and a lot more.For more movie coverage, check out The Ringer Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I said to Jeff, I don't know how to do a faithful adaptation of your book. I just literally don't know how to do it. And if what you need is a faithful adaptation, then you will need someone else because I'm not the guy who's going to be able to do that. I'm Sean Fennessey, editor-in-chief of The Ringer, and this is The Big Picture, a conversation show with some of the most exciting filmmakers in the world. Some movies hum at a different frequency. The writer-director Alex Garland makes quiet movies that eventually roar in a way that is different from other sci-fi.

His debut, 2015's Ex Machina, was an exploration of artificial intelligence that became a surprise hit and an Oscar winner. His latest, Annihilation, is an adaptation of the novelist Jeff Vandermeer's best-selling book, though Garland takes some fascinating liberties with the story. Natalie Portman, Oscar Isaac, and Tessa Thompson star as explorers and scientists on a mission to explore a colorful, spectral disturbance called the Shimmer

that is taking over a massive land in the American South. The closer they get to the Shimmer, the more horrifying it becomes. Garland and I talked recently about the making of this unusual and masterful movie, his early days as a novelist and screenwriter of movies like 28 Days Later and Sunshine, and a whole lot more. Here's Alex Garland. I'm really excited to be joined today by one of my favorite filmmakers, Alex Garland.

Alex, thank you for coming in. It's a pleasure. Thank you. Alex, I want to know what kind of movie you knew you wanted to make after Ex Machina and the success of that movie. Did you have a sense of the kind of film you wanted to do next? No, not really. But I do think that I always react against the thing I just did. Before Ex Machina was a film Dread, which is a kind of drug-fueled, ultra-violent, psychotic movie, very different to Ex Machina. And then before Dread was Never Let Me Go, which is small, sort of sad, contained,

literary adaptation. So there's always a sense of trying to avoid what you just did and move against what you just did. But past that, not really. Did that extend even to when you were writing the novels? Were you trying to do something that was completely different? I think it's always been the case. Yeah, definitely, actually, because I think the first film, the first film I ever wrote was 28 Days Later. And that was a reaction against the book I'd just written. And also in a funny way, the film adaptation of The Beach, which was a book I'd written, the first book I'd written, which I thought was kind of soft in some respects and wanted more aggression and some more sort of punk attitude in it, I guess. And then, so it started all the way back then,

28 days later was a reaction against that, I think. So it's not necessarily a reaction against something because it's bad. It's just a reaction against it because that's just the place you've been and you get bored. Yeah. You want to change it up. Yeah. Did you have control over that as a screenwriter though? We usually hear that, you know, the director obviously is in command of the medium. Were you working for hire when you're writing screenplays? Did you have more control in those scenarios than people think you would? Yeah, partly I think because I came from novel writing, so I just didn't buy into the whole idea that the screenwriter is being dominated in that respect because the act of writing is kind of similar. I suppose you're coming up with story and themes and characters, what the characters are doing and why they're

doing it. And so I felt not exactly ownership, but responsibility or something like that. And actually, by the way, in reality, I think that's less uncommon than it's perceived to be. I think we present films a certain kind of way. But if you lift the lid and look underneath of how the film is made, I think it's actually more common. That's interesting. So how does Annihilation come in? How does this become the thing that is a reaction to Ex Machina? Well, Annihilation is kind of like this weird metaphysical sort of hallucinogenic atmosphere piece in a funny kind of way.

It's less sort of rigorous. It is actually rigorous, but it's less overtly rigorous. Right. It's not as practical. Yeah. And Ex Machina is like a little, uh, sort of Swiss watch type film. It's sort of all cogs and gears and ticking parts. When did you read the book? I read it in post-production of Ex Machina. Um, it was in galley form. Uh, one of the producers of Ex Machina had bought it Scott Rudin and he he sent it to me and he said you should check this out I was still in the edit of Ex Machina and and I read it and immediately I was really struck by it's really incredibly original book and it's very atmospheric and I just said yep I mean had a sort of struggle about trying to think how to adapt it but I had a couple of conversations with Jeff and actually I just said, yeah, I mean, had a sort of struggle about trying to think how to adapt it.

But I had a couple of conversations with Jeff and actually I just launched into it. And I started writing it pretty promptly, actually. Was there anything that you did on Ex Machina that you didn't want to repeat in a more like process driven way? That, you know, you had made a certain kind of film one way. Did you say, I want to make sure it's different than this? No, I think process is dictated by the project. So say in a case, a film like Ex Machina,

I mean, in a way, it's sort of crass talking in these terms, but there's a sort of practical truth to it. Ex Machina is a $15 million film with a six-week shoot with a very small cast and and uh really a single location it's four people in one house and um uh that actually makes it quite manageable in all sorts of respects and the weird thing is that we had more time and more resources actually

with ex machina than we did with annih, which sort of notionally has a bigger budget. But the budget is what, I don't know, two and a half times the size of Ex Machina. But we're trying to do something which is like six or seven times more complex in terms of the scale of the cast and the number of locations and the VFX requirements. So on a day-to-day level,

the reality of making Ex Machina was much more guerrilla filmmaking by comparison than Ex Machina was. That's interesting. Did you know you wanted the reality of making Ex Machina was much more guerrilla filmmaking by comparison than Ex Machina was. That's interesting. Did you know you wanted the scope of your next film to be bigger regardless? No, I don't think in those terms. Just write the thing, the thing that grabs you, the thing you're obsessed with, just do it and then figure out how to make it. And then all of the, what is the phrase? It's like function follows form or form follows function, whatever the fuck it is. Anyway, it's like you come up with the idea and then you figure out how to do it

and then an enormous amount of how to do it becomes what the film is in a weird way what obsessed you or captured something in you in the story well in jeff's book it was the atmosphere i found that reading the book was a weirdly similar experience to having a dream. And there was something. That's how he wrote it, right? Isn't that the origin story where he was dreaming it and he woke up and he went downstairs and he started to write? I believe that could be, I've not heard that before. I mean, that could be the case. So initially it was that it was, it was the book, which I thought was just original and provocative and stuff. And separate to that, I had another set of preoccupations.

Always the films I work on have got some obsession or another that gets sort of jammed into it, I guess. Particularly in the case of Annihilation, it was really about self-destruction. It was about the ways in which people are self-destructive, the sort of hidden ways and the obvious ways, and why it is that all of us are in some way self-destructive. I just sort of found it a weird thing. And I don't know you.

You assure me this is the first time we met, although for some reason I think we have met before. But anyway. I hope that's true. And I forgot. Whether we've met or not, I don't know you, but I am pretty sure that you are self-destructive in some ways, in some parts of your character.

More than you know, Alex. More than you know. Well, exactly, right? And vice versa. And when you stop to think about it, that's sort of odd. It's just an odd thing to observe. I mean, I noticed, obviously, some people's self-destruction is very obvious. They're addicted to heroin or alcohol or they're recidivists or something and you can see it it's straightforward but then you

meet people who are very together and they seem very comfortable in their own skin and they're very sort of self-possessed and they've got a great job and everything it's like they know the secret of life are you describing me now that's this is you okay great and and then you get then i get to know you and i discover that there's fissures and cracks. And in between the fissures and cracks is really weird behavior, where you're like dismantling an old friendship with a childhood friend. Yeah, you're nodding because that's exactly what you're doing. That may be me. Yeah, right.

And it's sort of weird. We do these meaningless acts of self-discipline. So that became like the fixation of the movie. That's really interesting. When you talk to Jeff about the book and you say, this is something that compels me about it. Are you guys in agreement or is it okay if you have a different interpretation? I hope we're okay. Jeff was very generous about it. I said to Jeff, I don't know how to do a faithful adaptation of your book. I just literally don't know how to do it. And if

what you need is a faithful adaptation, then you will need someone else because I'm not the guy who's going to be able to do that. And Jeff was really generous and relaxed and in a way gave me the permission that I needed to make this rather sort of weird adaptation of his really beautiful book. I thought that the changes that you made were fascinating and worked really well. When I read the novel, I couldn't understand how it would be a film. So it's fascinating to me that you even, that Scott thought of it as a film and that you immediately responded to it. When you make changes like that, especially as a person who has been adapted and knows what this

process is like. And knows that it can suck. Exactly. How do you explain some of those things to an author? Do you even feel like you have to or you just go off and do your thing? No, I try to explain it, not in terms of the specifics of the changes, because I think you can only really demonstrate that with the changes themselves. You can't say, I'm going to do this and this and this.

What I did was I just wrote it and I showed it to Jeff and said, look, this is what I came up with. But as much as possible, try to be transparent about intention and process, I suppose. And just try to be straightforward. And the key way to get around creatively complicated things is primarily honesty. You described the shooting as obviously a little bit more difficult because you had this huge scope in this story and more actors and you're outside from just on a technical level. Yeah. What, um, did you have a sense that they would be that much of a challenge when you started making the film?

Yeah, because I've been doing this 20 years now. And, and I know, you know, I know if I write interior podcast room day, right. And, and it's this room here. Delightful conversation. That's all you have to write. Exactly. Yeah. And then say the actors get on with it. See you later. The shooting this scene in many ways is going to be straightforward. You can find some interesting angles, but basically we're going to end up with some conventional stuff like a wide and a couple of singles and some mids. And, you know, there'll be some sort of familiar grammar to it. Yeah. You know, conversely, if you say exterior, swamp, mutant, bear, day, except it's not day, it's sort of psychedelic twilight, then things are going to be trickier.

Yes. You have to literally invent a different consciousness, a different reality. Yeah. I think it all flowed from Jeff's book really, but there was a lot of requirement for unexpected imagery that would be sort of beautiful and maybe disturbing often at the same time. And it didn't give us too many safe spaces to retire to. You know, if you're doing a political thriller that has a car chase in it, there's some grammar. There's some familiar grammar that you can latch on to. And then you can find a great stunt supervisor and mess with the grammar and subvert it.

But you're on, in some respects, familiar territory. Roads, cars, speed, handbrake turns, whatever it is. You know what I mean? There's no grammar for mutant bears though. There's probably some if you aren't around, but yeah, basically. Right. Did you reference films, watch films before you started working on this? Did you have some things you look back on? Yeah, but it's all very untrustworthy. I mean, I think that-

Why do you say that because when people say what are your references or what are your influences it's often uh a sort of a bit of a rationalization and uh it's usually just a list of stuff you like rather than the actual influences and and so much much later somebody says, you know, this scene sort of reminds me of X. And suddenly you think, oh yeah, yeah, that's true. It is, that is where it comes from. It is an influence of that thing.

And the real influences tend to be more unconscious than conscious. But, you know, while we were making it, there was a bunch of films we talk about, Stalker, Apocalypse Now, Southern Comfort, but you know while we were making it there was a bunch of films we talk about uh stalker apocalypse now um southern comfort uh which provided various sorts of reference points but the the real reference points were probably a bit more obscured how did you go about designing the actual look of some of this stuff because you know we are entering essentially a new world the shimmer which is a huge part of the story it is a visual it needs needs to be visually executed. You know, it's not just an idea in a book anymore.

Well, the true answer to that is that I write a script and then I distribute the script amongst the collective of people I work with. And then what happens is a rolling conversation where a bunch of people are saying, what about this? What about that? And that collective of people who are all working together, but are also all autonomous, start a sort of organic evolution, which is via a large interdepartmental conversation that ends up being the film. Have you personally thrown yourself headlong into some of the more technical aspects of filmmaking? Because I think people hear, well, he was a novelist

and then he was a screenwriter for many years. Obviously you were on sets, but making a film like this is quite complex. So do you feel like you have a grasp of how every single element of this stuff works? No, I have a grasp of how the key elements that I am really concerned with work. I see the process as being like a sort of parallax view of a mountain range

that as you shift your perspective, some peaks sort of recede or grow in importance or shrink into the distance. And rather than a sort of simple pyramid structure, a sort of monolith pyramid structure. So I don't want to sound like me knowing a little bit of technical knowledge is taking away from the departments. The departments are basically autonomous but involved in a conversation which we're all sharing. This is masterful leadership, though. This is the thing that – I know you've talked about this in the past, too.

It's the absence of leadership, I think. In some ways, maybe because I'm 47 and because punk arrived at a certain time in my life or something like that, some notion of anarchy has located itself in my head. The dubious of the authority of the auteur. I'm dubious of authority full stop. I don't like pyramid structures anywhere, you know, that I find them irritating. The key thing is that there is a notion of anarchy, which is like not chaos, but actually something slightly more collegiate. An organized lack of order. A sort of benign lack of order, a sort of friendly one. Sure. Where you've got a common goal, you're all aiming in the same direction, you get on with it in your own ways. It's something like that.

I love that. How'd you put the cast together? Why these people? Oscar Isaac, I just adore him. And I really like working with him. I like him as a human. And I think he's an incredibly gifted actor. And so Natalie Portman had a particular quality that I was really keen to get, which relates actually to the thing

we were just talking about the different sorts of self-destruction models that you can have she has enormous sort of poise and a sense of control but she also has the ability to within that sense of poison control to sort of display glimpses flashes and then great sort of explosions of damage. And it was particularly the sort of coexistence of those two states that was important. And with Tessa and Gina and Tuva and Jennifer, it was much more just old-fashioned casting. Is it important for you that, obviously, with someone like Oscar, who you have a relationship with and who understands your work, this doesn't have to happen. But with someone like Natalie,

do you have to have a series of conversations where you say, this is what this film is, or you tell me what you think this film is, and then we'll see if this makes sense? Yeah, but it wasn't a series. It was one. It was one long conversation. It was a long time before we started shooting like maybe I mean really a long time we we met and she'd read the script and she'd watched Ex Machina we we just sort of sat down and I said look here's the plan a lot of what we talked about actually was process I said this is this is the intention and this is how I work and do you think that's a way you would fit in with? It was that sort of conversation. But the thing about someone like Natalie Portman

is that she's in many respects a very sort of demonstrated known quantity. Natalie, when's the first time I saw her in something? She was probably like 11, Leon or something. I mean, that's really a long time ago. There's a lot of films. And so- Yeah, we all have a relationship with her in some way. Leon or something I mean that's really a long time ago there's a lot of films and so yeah we all have

a relationship with her in some way you feel like you know much more about them than they know about you I was thinking recently about

if you ever go back and look at the films that you've written but didn't direct and if you thought about how you might have done those things differently

if you were directing the films not to undermine the people who actually directed those films but because now you have taken on a bigger film with a bigger budget.

And is there a part of you that says, oh, actually, I might have done this differently? That's a complicated question. It's difficult for me to answer it too honestly. I mean, I try not to bullshit, I think, when talking. And so if I feel like I'm about to, I'll probably try and dodge the question. I mean, I asked specifically because of the experience that you have now that maybe you didn't have if you were on set 10 years ago, working on a film or something like that. I would say that broadly what happened was the first guy I worked with was Danny Boyle. And Danny is, is someone who is not intimidated by

writers and not intimidated by having them around. So he wanted me on the set. I was in rehearsals and I was in the edit. And that is because Danny is basically not neurotic. And once that, because that was my schooling in film, I just carried that through. So if then somebody said, I'm not sure I want you in rehearsals I'd be like what the fuck are you talking about I'm going to be in the rehearsal because my schooling came from Danny

and it's difficult for me to talk about that makes sense that's interesting though do you still have a good relationship with Danny? oh yeah does he see your films? do you guys talk about it? yesterday or two days ago or something

will you show him your films and say yeah I showed him an early cut of this and wanted to know what he thought and um uh i can get a lot of uh i can get a lot of insight from danny uh because we've got such a long old history i mean it goes back uh more than 20 years and so we we don't have to dance around each other. We can sort of say quite simply, why did you do that? Or why don't you just cut that? I'm interested in how you write the metaphysical in the screenplay. That's obviously a huge part of this story. How are you able to convey what you want to see on screen in that format? Sometimes it was difficult because language is not as precise

as we think it is. I often think about lawyers and judges and I think, so here you have people dealing with words that are written in order to be as clear as possible and yet you have an entire industry of judges whose job it is to interpret the words that are trying to be clear and that tells you a lot about language and so when you're dealing with abstractions you you can feel like you're in a kind of mad loop where you're saying something as clearly as possible but everyone's looking at you blankly and you just don't know what the hell to do with it because because now you're running out of tools that are available us available to us for communication you know i'm not psychic so i can't play you know it's sort of a weird problem uh what often used to happen

particularly between me and andrew whitehurst the vfx uh supervisor and also with the vf with the production design team is we'd have sheets of paper and drawings and we'd just be drawing stuff because actually in a weird way a drawing can quickly convey something, uh, and which the words just would never have got you anywhere. Yeah. I ask because I, and I think it's not spoiling anything just to say that, you know, the third act of the film, especially the end of the film is, is a visual and oral experience that I can't, I have a hard time visualizing what it even looks like in a script. I mean, some of it would not be contained in the script. It would come out of the conversation and the collective, you know? And one of the

problems with attributing ideas is that ideas usually come out of a pre-existing conversation. So if somebody says, why don't we do this? If the preceding conversation hadn't happened, then they wouldn't say that. So where do you attribute the idea to? It's just part of an organic process. But say at a certain point in pre-production, with regard to a sort of moment of notional combat between Natalie Portman's character and a manifestation of herself, you start to think, why is it that all, not all, but so many stories end up with a punch up? Like it could be a verbal punch up in a courtroom, or it could be a physical punch up in a bar or the edge of a cliff, or it could be a gunfight or a helicopter chase or whatever it is. But basically it's a punch up.

A physical showdown basically yeah and like like where does that come from and and seeing the ritualistic aspect of it and the aspect of it which is like a dance and then thinking you know what let's make this literally a dance let's get sunoya mizuno who i'd worked with on ex machina and is an incredibly gifted actor, but also incredibly gifted dancer and can sort of communicate an enormous amount physically and put her opposite Natalie, who's also got a lot of history and interest in dance and start to create a sequence that way. And let's not be shy of it. Let's just fucking do it. And so it's, you know. It is.

I hadn't quite put together the thread of choreography there that happens with the last film and with this film too there's some some synchronicity to those two things oh hugely actually i mean i've always i've i i think dance is a really fascinating thing and and that aside uh i often try to reach a point in scripts where they become dialogless and uh key sequences no longer require talking they're just things that you observe and and sort of experience why do you do that well just because i dig it it just seems interesting but it's powerful compelling yeah yeah yeah that it can be kind of mesmerizing and you leave behind all the kind of discourse. And there's something really lovely about that.

And there had been elements of that in Ex Machina and I really responded to was some of the characters' incredible ability to explain things in compelling ways, to use exposition, but as a means to explaining a character's motivations, the things that they're interested in. This movie, there is a little bit more. But just to say, it's a funny thing about exposition being a sort of dirty word type thing, but that is what we do a lot of in life. Yes, we're doing it right now. We're doing it right now. Yeah. Yeah. And we do it with any number of different things.

I think it's because most exposition is bad. And people, when they're watching it, they know right away that it's like, oh, this character has to tell us what's going to happen so that we're situated in the next scene. Yeah, something like that. Yeah, because it's unmotivated by any truth of the character. So you often get, I was watching this in a film not that long ago, actually,

where there were some people running towards a bridge that they were going to set charges on and blow up. And as they were running, they were saying, you set the charge over here and then do that to the dead of that. And you sort of think, well, you discuss all that before you run. There was a plan. Yeah, like you must have had a good half hour before where you could have gone through all that stuff. And, um, uh, and so in moments like that, you can feel all the artifice and the story is creaking under it. And

you, you, you lose the sense of truth, but you know, some people in a room who are trying to get their head around whether something is sentient or not, or they're going to talk about it. That's legit. Yes, that's reasonable. I think I was just responding to it because I think there's a quest for truth and exposition in this story that is a little hard to land on. In Annihilation? Yes, and quite purposefully, it seems like.

Yeah, it's got a different process because in Annihilation, I think there's an element of this in Ex Machina, but there's much more in Annihilation, is that it's done by inference, not by statement. So it requires a kind of participation by the audience in an explicit way. I think if you watch the film with a closed mind or an expectation to be just spoon-fed in a particular way, it just won't function because the audience has to step to the film as much as the film steps to them. Do you feel the weight of a pressure with that making a film for a major studio, but a film that is obviously intellectual, for lack of a better word, that asks an audience to work a little

bit harder than it normally is asked to? I really don't, actually, because there's two reasons. One is actually the transparency I was talking about. I write a script, and when I show the script, I'm not kidding. That's the plan. I'm going to shoot it. So if you don't like it, don't finance it. It's sort of a pretty fair contract, it seems to me. But that aside, I don't think there is any shortage of very, very sophisticated, interesting drama around. Like, I really don't. I thought Moonlight was an incredibly complex, sophisticated, beautiful bit of filmmaking on the big screen. I thought Handmaid's Tale was a just remarkable bit of film narrative on the small screen. But your film does have something in common also,

just more broadly speaking, with Transformers. Because it is a big studio film, it is a sci-fi and a rapper. Yeah, but it's not. Because, I mean, right, I understand. You know what I mean. I know what you're saying. It's just a comparison. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. I totally get it.

But the VFX budget for transformers would be considerably larger than the entire budget of, uh, annihilation. Right. I mean, annihilation is a $40 million film, which is a massive, massive chunk of change, but it's a smaller chunk of change than 250 million. Right. And, and so with that comes different requirements and expectations. However, however, it is in a danger zone, right? It's absolutely in a danger zone because Ex Machina is a $15 million film that A24 could platform and gradually release in a completely different kind of way. As soon as you're in $40 million, you are actually going toe-to-toe with big movies

which are probably going to annihilate you actually. I mean, look, there's a broad truth to what you're saying, but there's a, there's a, I don't know, a slight issue with the comparison, but I get what you're saying. How do you define success for a film like Annihilation personally? Personally, only on the film, like on the film itself. I, I have lost money for film studios more often than I've made it. In many respects, I don't know why I keep getting serious questions. I think it's because people like your films, honestly. I think they like the stories.

Do you know what I think it is? I think it's because I trick them. I think it's because I write genre. And people see the genre and maybe think, oh, yeah, maybe this is mainstream. And then I make it and then they go, oh Christ. Your films have made money. Some of them have. You want to check out Dread. Isn't that movies though? That's the movie business.

I'll tell you what. Sunshine lost the bomb. Dread lost the bomb. Never Let Me Go lost the bomb. Those three films were back to back. Ex Machina made some money, but it really looked like it was going to lose it. And it was a weird surprise for everyone involved. And now Annihilation.

It's not, that's not a brilliant track record. I'm not trying to talk myself out of a job. You shouldn't. I don't get why I keep getting financed is what I mean. Well, given that Jeff's books are part of a trilogy, is that something you were thinking about when you were making your film? It's like, maybe this will be part of three films I'll make.

No, I knew, obviously, because I'm not naive, that studios weren't franchises. I understood that. But I made it very, very clear that I'm not going to be a person who is going to be involved in a franchise. And I'm not interested in franchises. I sort of tried it once with Dread. And in a weird way, it was incredibly relieved that I then didn't have to follow through on the promise.

Because after three years of working on a film, the last thing I want to do is stay in that world. I actually never want to look at the film again, let alone make another version of it. Do you never rewatch your work? I've never rewatched any film. I've watched like snippets of it. Like sometimes when you do a Q&A,

the thing is still showing and so I'll see like the last five minutes or something like that. Okay. But no, no, I've never watched a film I've worked on. It was just announced that you're going to be making a tv show yes that's what i'm trying to do next how are you feeling about making that shift to television from your films and you know you've done you've written novels and written video games but this is your first proper tv

experience yeah so i feel a bit nervous yeah tv is a great venue for doing not obviously long form narrative, but also more sort of some more complex stuff in some respects. What's the most fun part for you? Quite like writing first drafts because there's a lot of excitement and sort of optimism in it. But I really like editing. I really, really like editing. Why? Because it's kind of calm and reflective. And it's like doing a massive sequence of super satisfying crossword puzzles. Because you're presented with a problem and you can't figure out what could possibly be the solution.

And when the solutions arrive, they can be so elegant and sort of like gratifying. And at the end, there's the thing that the collective has worked on all all the people have worked on and then you can just watch it and say look this is what we all did there's something nice about that i love that i like to end every episode by asking filmmakers what's the last great thing that they've seen so alex handmaid's tale yeah did you just watch it? No, I watched it about six months ago. I wanted to ask you a little bit about the music in your film.

And there are a lot of strong music cues in Handmaid's Tale as well. Is that something that you responded to in Handmaid's? When I'm really, really enjoying something, I stop deconstructing it. And I can often tell the difference between something I'm enjoying and not really enjoying because I start to think about that stuff. And with Handmaid's Tale, I didn't think about anything except what was happening. I was just locked into it. So when you talk about the music, I have no idea about the music. I've got the haziest sense of how it was shot, which I remember being kind of beautiful and that the performances were great, but really it was the narrative. I was just in the world of it.

What a pure experience to consume. I think people will have a very similar experience with Annihilation. Alex, thank you so much for doing this. Thanks, man. Cheers. Thanks again for listening to today's show. Next week, I'll be back with a new bonus episode

compiling some of the best conversations Bill Simmons and I have had with the Oscar nominees of 2017. And I want to give a shout out to all of our Oscars coverage on theringer.com. I'll be writing exhaustive previews of every race. Lindsay Zolad's tackled the foreign language category this week.

Cam Collins has a smart take on the best directing category. I joined the Rewatchables podcast for a special instant Oscars episode hooked to Jordan Peele's Get Out. And a host of Ringer staffers are looking back on the disastrous and hilarious 2013 Oscars

on their five-year anniversary. So please check all that out and meet me back here next week for a new episode of The Big Picture. Hi, Bachelor Nation. Thank you. night by going to the ringer.com slash podcast or by subscribing to bachelor party wherever you get them come for the recaps and roses stay for the drama and for moments like this please tell me you don't already have a little wiener i do not have this so yeah you did awesome don't forget subscribe to the bachelor party podcast today it's available everywhere including apple and spotify and google It's available everywhere, including Apple and Spotify and Google.