The Big Picture - ‘Ex Machina,’ ‘Annihilation,’ and ‘Men’: The Mind-bending Movies of Alex Garland

Episode Date: May 20, 2022

Sean is joined by Joanna Robinson to discuss the beguiling movies of writer-director Alex Garland, including his latest, the eerie folk-horror film ‘Men.’ (1:00) Then, Garland talks with Sean about his work and where his career is headed (52:00). Host: Sean Fennessey Guests: Alex Garland and Joanna Robinson Producer: Bobby Wagner Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, it's Bill Simmons. We're not just reacting to the NBA playoffs on my podcast. We're also doing it on the Ringer NBA show and the Mismatch podcast. They are coming after some of these NBA playoff games. Check it out Monday, Wednesday, and Friday nights on the Ringer Podcast Network. I'm Sean Fennessey and this is The Big Picture, a conversation show about the curious and bewitching films of Alex Garland. Later in this episode, I'll be joined by the man himself, one of my absolute favorite writer, directors, and interview subjects.

We had what I thought was a pretty interesting conversation about his work and the responsibility of audiences watching his movies. But first, since Garland's got a new film in theaters this weekend, a folk horror emotional freak out of a movie called Men, joining me to talk about Garland is not a man. It's the great Joanna Robinson. Hi, Jo. I thought you were about to say not Amanda. And I was like, I know she's back. Where is she? Hello. Happy to be here. I'm happy to have you. Curious week at the movies. We've got a handful of films going directly to streamers.

We've got a Chippendale Rescue Rangers movie out in the world. We've got a... That's very good. Yeah, it's pretty good. We've got a movie called Emergency out of Sundance going straight to Amazon. We've got... Have you seen the second Downton Abbey film? You know, I'm not a Downton Abbey person, which is really off-brand for me, but true.

I'm surprised to hear you say that. I got to tell you right now, I saw this film, and while I understand the social and cultural tenuredness of Downton Abbey, especially in these times, I thought the movie was delightful. This is two Downton Abbey movies in a row that I really enjoyed. The emotional and psychological and structural polar opposite of Downton Abbey is men and the work of Alex Garland. Wait, can I tell you what, what movie I saw in conjunction with men? I, then I saw men in a morning screening the night before I saw Top Gun Maverick. So those feel like extreme polar opposites, uh, to me.

Truly the high and the low of the human experience right there. Yeah. Um, let's, let's start by talking a bit about men. I want to have an expansive conversation about Garland's work. I know he's a favorite of yours as well, which is why I wanted to chat with you about him. He is a unique person. He's an English filmmaker who got his start as a novelist. People who have seen 28 Days Later and Sunshine, those Danny Boyle films may know his work. The Beach was his first novel and it was adapted by Boyle into a film starring Leonardo DiCaprio. And so we'll go through

his screenplays and a little bit about his novels, but really talk about how he has evolved into one of the more compelling, I guess for lack of a better word, kind of science fiction genre filmmakers. But I think his work is kind of grasping beyond that at this point. And that takes us to Men, which is technically his 10th produced screenplay and is produced by A24, which is the same studio that brought us his directorial debut, Ex Machina. And it's a real tangle. It's a biblical mythological story that is also very small and contained. It's about a woman who, in the aftermath of some tragedy, the death of her partner,

retreats to a beautiful countryside home. And she looks to get some me time, some reflection, some reacting to grief and coping with grief. And as she does so, an ominousness creeps in, as it often does in all Garland films. And someone or something in the

woods appears to be stalking her. And then we see that this town is almost entirely populated by men and all of those men all seem to have the same face. And that face is from the man called Rory Kinnear, the incredible English actor. The woman, of course, is played by Jessie Buckley, one of my favorite actresses. And the story doesn't necessarily have a ton of story. It's mostly about this woman who has retreated into this space and is trying to relax. And she gets the opposite of that. So off the bat, what do you think of men, Joanna? Well, one thing I want to clarify, and I think it's actually kind of important for her character, she goes to retreat and disconnect, but she brings her work with her. She's doing work while she's on this retreat, which I think is- A little bit like you right now joanna i am also in a vacation home doing work it's true i found that to be really relatable content um i want to i i think the premise of

this movie is so interesting i think i like this movie overall and i we're gonna have a lot to say i think about it but in terms of that core premise of like, how do we feel it plays to have one actor with a few exceptions, Rory Kinnear playing all the other parts and Jesse Bucky Buckley playing the lead at the center of it. I think it almost works like really well. Rory Kinnear is so talented. As you mentioned,

there's so much that people will have seen him in but i was reminded most of his penny dreadful performance where he plays frankenstein's monster and i think he like tapped into a lot of that for this but i think when i saw it i was i saw years ago i saw a production of henry james's turn of the screw um on the stage and it was the same construction where there was like one woman and one man and he played all the other roles. And in a theatrical space, that worked. So it's one of the scariest things I've ever seen. I was completely transported. It's a little harder to pull that off, I think, in a filmic space, especially, and this isn't a spoiler, I think it's in the trailer, that like the part where he's asked to play like a younger boy, that's the part

where the concept really stretches. So Kinnear is chameleonic in this performance. He's got a bunch of wigs and teeth and other things helping him, but he's also just an incredible performer. So he inhabits all these other characters. But I was curious how that conceit worked for you over the span of the movie. It's interesting. I didn't know that he did that turn of the screw performance which oh i didn't sorry i didn't see him in that i just i was reminded of a show like that so oh okay um i think he is many people will know kaneer from um i think the national anthem the black mirror episode um is probably to us i guess in bond you're right and bond this is sort of the um i what is he sort of like the agent attache, you know,

the sort of like the administrator of MI6? It doesn't challenge, that role doesn't challenge him at all, but I'm happy for him to collect his bond check every couple of years, you know? Yeah. In this film, you know, he plays the innkeeper from whom Jesse Buckley's character rents a home. He plays a bartender. He plays a police officer.

He plays, as you mentioned, a child. He plays a vicar. He plays a great number of characters. And the idea of one actor portraying all of the men in a film, especially a film called Men, the takeaway is fairly standard, which is that there is a kind of sameness to the masculine experience for many women in the world, for many people in the world. And this is really not so much a movie of story as it is a movie of ideas. And it's not a movie of thundering conclusions. It's, I think, actually the first Alex Garland movie, all of which are somewhat mysterious, that I think really resists the idea of making any kind of proclamation about the human experience or the characters that he's put in the story. i do agree with you that at times there are parts of the storytelling that feel a little bit

mannered or a little bit like um over designed and you see like you feel like cg the cgi say of the child performance on the other hand the movie is so dreamlike at at its start and it has this incredibly i don't i don't think we're really spoiling anything to say it has this phantasmagoric conclusion this kind of like grab your chest and my god what is happening right now kind of sensation to the ending that i'm not sure we're supposed to understand this movie as a movie of realistic execution and more so much like something happening inside of someone's mind. And I find that interesting.

And that's just my reading. And I think Garland has kind of gone out of his way and he went out of his way with me to be like, what did you think? You know, what do you think this is about? And I appreciate that. And I think, again, I think in, Kinnear is so good and Buckley is so good.

And overall, I love the idea of this. I just think in the suspension of belief that is the theater, this idea works a little bit more than in the space of the cinema. That being said, you're right that there are a lot of other surrealistic aspects to this story and all of Garland's work that allows for all of this to exist in a dream space and allows for this. Again, what do I think this is about? Is it true that Garland, the filmmaker, thinks all men are alike in some way? Or is it true that our main character who has gone through this traumatic experience sees all men as the same man because of what she's going through? You know, and that's, you know, one of the beauties of the story is you could read it any way you like, or you could argue that it's not one of the beauties of the story.

But I think that you and I would both agree that so much of this rests not only on Kinnear being able to do all of this, but Buckley being able to react to all of it the way that she does. And you and I have already talked elsewhere about how much we love her as a performer. But I just think i i think she might be my favorite actress she and olivia coleman are kind of up there which is why the lost daughter was such a treat but the not just the way she physically psychically inhabits these roles and does something that is really different but uh recognizable but the the choices she makes and what role she's taking on, I really admire what she's doing. I do too.

I think the first time I saw her was Wild Rose, the film about a young woman who's released from prison and pursues a career in country singing. And I can't believe the direction she's taken her career after that movie. I think I expected a person who was going to consistently pursue sort of like vivacious character parts and trying to be like an Irish Julia Roberts or something.

And she's the opposite of that. Yeah. She often works with auteur filmmakers. She's often taking on these roles of these very challenging, difficult roles featuring female characters who don't necessarily always reveal everything that they are feeling. You know, the Wild Rose character was so external. Yeah. And if you look at her character in The Lost Daughter, if you look at her character here,

even if you look at her character in Chernobyl, you know, most of those people are not necessarily saying all of the things that are on their mind. This is an interesting example of the challenges of acting in a horror movie. Because in some ways, this is a horror movie. I don't think it really is going to satisfy your traditional Scream franchise horror movie fan. It's much more abstract and absurd at times. So this isn't a slasher movie per se, though it does have kind of those typical feelings of dread surrounding it but buckley has to do a lot by not saying a lot because she's alone a lot yeah there's a long sequence at the beginning that's just her walking in nature and she has to hold our attention i

think it's something like 12 minutes and it's it works because of who she is and how compelling she is and something that i think garland has talked about before in terms of the way that he puts these things, these stories together is how highly, you know, when he talks about annihilation, he talks about Natalie Portman as like a coauthor on that film. And he said similar things about Rory and Jesse on this,

where he like, he comes with his story. This is, I mean, I don't know if he talks to you about this, but I read somewhere that this is a story he's been working on like since before Ex Machina,

like a really long time, right? Yeah, he's had 10 plus years. Yeah, kicking around. So for him to take that story, bring it here and say to the actors, what do you think? How should we change this

that it makes more sense for you, for all of us, et cetera, I think is, and it, you know, not every writer director approaches their storytelling that way. So. But one thing that's interesting is him coming from this writing background is he's such an extraordinarily gifted visual filmmaker. And this movie is probably his, I think Annihilation is the biggest canvas that he has made a film on, but this is the film that feels like the most curated

in terms of images because there's so much metaphorical imagery he's pulling from um the shielena gig and this kind of this world of kind of mythology and religious visualization and it feels very determined to burn the images in your mind now in annihilation you know we see this sort of like desiccated bear and that's very memorable or we see the shimmer and that's very memorable but this movie with the the tree at the center of the inn where she's staying and the apple and the biblical imagery that's coming in there and then of course like i said that kind of thrilling disgusting conclusion he's like in a very rare class of image makers right now and i tried to get to the bottom of this with him or I was sort of like, can you talk to me about how you write the things that you see in your head? And he was a bit elusive about it. What do you think of him as like a visual storyteller at this point?

Well, I was trying to think about the Garland machine, the larger Garland machine as he's like moved through his career, right? So as you mentioned, like he starts as a novelist with the beach, Danny Boyle makes the beach and Garland said, that movie doesn't have a ton to do with my book, which is true. If you've read the book and seen the movie, there's not a lot of crossover DNA there. However, he obviously had a good enough relationship with Danny Boyle that he goes on to write a number of Danny Boyle films. And then eventually makes Ex Machina, I think, because he wants to be in full control of these stories that he's writing.

Then he goes on to adapt Annihilation. And it's really interesting that he does a similar thing to the Vandermeer book that Danny Boyle did to his book, which is… He does. Change it. Massively change it. I think that's fascinating. about his movies, his three movies and devs, I would say, is that he has the same DP in Rob Hardy, the same composer, Jeff Barrow and Ben Salisbury, the same production designer, Mark Digby, and the same sound designer, Glenn Fremantle. And the sound and score in an Alex Garland project, along with those visuals that you mentioned, which are so seared on the brain, but the sound, you notice it, especially in this, because he does something

really interesting with the, you know, they all did something really interesting with the soundtrack here in which Jesse Buckley and Rory Kinnear's voices are used throughout the whole thing to create the sound design and the score. And I noticed it as I was watching and I was like, and I think he achieved something really unsettling. There's a lot of DNA between this movie and The Green Knight, a movie that I greatly admired. And the sound design on that film is also one that is meant to really unsettle you because there are sounds on that sound design that have nothing to do with the organic story or you're watching and it just puts you in this dream space so i just think he you know he has his little like a lot of filmmakers do but he has his core group of

creatives that have followed him through every project and they've all put their stamp along with his stamp and that that alex Garland brand encompasses those other creators. And I just think that there's nothing else like it at all. And the other, I mean, I'm hopping ahead a bit, but the main thing, as you and I rewatched all of Alex Garland's stuff, the main thing that I think he's doing different storytelling-wise that he does differently from other sci-fi people is this obsession with nature and how the nature encroaches on the sci-fi and the sci-fi encroaches on the nature in a space where I think we're often taught to think that sci-fi has to take place in the far future or in space I mean he did it he did a space movie but in there was a huge garden on his spaceships and his space movies you know and in sunshine so that blend of nature and technology and how he sort of all views it as one i don't know anyone else i could be ignorant but i don't know anyone else

really doing that do you know what i mean he is very distinctive in that way i think the encroaching power of technology only to be matched by the uncontrollable chaos of nature it feels like the major kind of theme of a lot of his stories but that's something that makes men a little bit different um men is i think the only piece of technology in this whole movie is a cell phone and it And it's interesting to see him devoid of artificial intelligence and devoid of guns and weaponry and the scale of annihilation. Or he wrote the screenplay for Dread or Never Let Me Go

and the idea of cloning. A lot of that stuff is absent. And this is a much more ethereal kind of a story for him. And it feels, like I said before, much more kind of bound up in the psyche. And it's interesting to watch him stretch. It's funny to imagine someone at home and at peace with deeply intellectual science fiction. That doesn't seem like a safe space for many people's minds.

But for him, you can see that he has an incredible amount of comfort here. And this feels like him really stretching his abilities to tell a story. And insofar as like, there's not a whole lot of story. You know, there's not even really three acts to this story. It's just kind of like a series of encounters and an increasing, growing level of dread to the Buckley character's experience. I think it makes sense that this is a script, an idea that he had, like a young idea, right? I think you often see that with filmmakers where they're like, now I'll finally make that thing. And it feels like a younger version of them.

And it's interesting. And I think it's always fun to watch those things. And I think it's interesting. I've seen him sort of express a kind of taxonomy for his stuff where he puts Ex Machina and devs in a sort of cerebral space and then Annihilation and men in a sort of vibey other space. And I hate to disagree with the man himself, but I think Ex Machina is the perfect blend of the two. And I think they sort of wander all over the map. I would never put Annihilation and Men in quite the same bucket. But I like the primal, almost primordial thing that he's going for with this one. And in terms of the horror that you mentioned, I'm not the biggest horror biggest um horror devotee but i was i this was scarier to me than a lot of more intentional horror i was gripping the arm of my seat for a lot of this

movie and um it has images i you know i was reminded a lot of aronofsky's mother which you and i talked about kind of recently when we were talking to adam um like this movie's gonna stick with me and whether or not i think it's a perfect product it's one of those things like mother where i'm not gonna forget about the experience of watching it do you know what i mean i do you know i i want to talk a little bit about kind of the commercial prospects of this movie as a means to talking about where he exists in the Hollywood framework because Ex Machina which is largely a people in rooms talking movie as you said you know there's a kind of static nature to a lot of that movie even though it has these really high-minded concepts about artificial intelligence and we do have this amazing kind of creature design for the Ava figure in the film. But that movie did actually really good business

and is one of kind of like the signature A24 movies that kind of like when that studio was emerging. And it won an Oscar for them, you know, so yeah. Yes, and he was nominated for Best Original Screenplay and it got a lot of attention after he had been, you know, banging around Hollywood for almost 15 years as a screenwriter.

And Annihilation was bigger. And I think a little bit of a disappointment at the box office. It has its champions, me among them. I think it's a pretty awesome achievement, even though I read the novel as well. I like that he changed the novel because I find the novel unfilmable.

It's a similarly kind of like life of the mind movie or book that he tried to make into a movie. This movie is, I would say, deeply uncommercial, even though it is a horror movie. Yeah. And I think it's going to give a lot of people the same feeling that you had at the end of it, which is like, dear God, it's like there's something kind of upsetting about it when you get to the end of it. And it's going to be a tough word of mouth movie.

And yet, there's no one else making movies like of mouth movie and yet there's no one else making movies like him at the moment there's no one else who is like unafraid of pretension i've said this to him before when we've talked that he is unafraid to be like this movie is about god and man and birth yeah and the powers all around us and i love that he does that i mean that's really why i wanted to do this episode is that i love that he's unafraid of making something that is this breathless and this serious that can still be funny and still be kind of charming and entertaining and and you know and full of dread and horror sequences but that he is I mean devs probably more than anything he's done is a challenge to the audience I mean he made an entire fx series that is like

is it better to be in control of our past and future or is it better to let life happen to us? And I don't necessarily have a question for you. I'm just kind of like, I'm really happy that he exists in the framework of movie and TV culture. But I think when you take risks like a movie like Men, it's a risk.

It's not surprising to me, for example, that he's already got his next film in production because you don't want to have to wait for the returns on a movie like Men to try to mount your next movie, which is called Civil War. Right. Where do you think he stands kind of in the framework of the industry as well as as a storyteller? which again like encompasses a little like creative team um has such potency and respect that almost and especially like with what a24 is interested in doing which is curating a brand that that will linger in the film conversation for years to come i like i don't know how and it's really interesting how they launched this one i talked to you a couple weeks ago about how i

was invited out to new york i live in californ I was invited out to fly, to be flown out to New York for a splashy premiere screening that they did at the Alamo in New York. And like, I know a lot of people who live in New York who went, but I've never had a studio reach out to me to say, would you like to fly across country for something like this? And they were really courting, you know, certain, certain people to be there. It was like a star-studded affair. They did a live simulcast in LA, you know, certain people to be there. It was like a star-studded affair. They did a live simulcast in LA, you know, and that it premiered in New York is interesting in and of itself. And I, you know, A24 is riding high right now, obviously, but I think it's not like they saw this and were like, well, this is a weird little curio that we can say,

well, at least we make our Alex Garland films. They're really pushing this in an interesting way and in a sort of like film Twitter influencer kind of way, which I think is a really fascinating approach. And I love that they're backing. I love that he gets to make his movies and I love that they're backing something like this. Devs is so interesting because,

I don't know, I think that's kind of one of his less successful efforts, at least as far as I'm concerned. But they shot it in Santa Cruz up near where I live. So I got to go watch him direct some of it. And again, I think what is so fascinating about if you think about, I mean, obviously, if you're going to do a show about a tech company, you're going to maybe try to film in the Bay area, but the fact that he put it in the deep woods of Santa Cruz, which is not where tech companies usually are. And again, like with ex-Machina, the fact that this guy's a weird robot bunker is in the middle of like lush wilderness, no one's doing it like this and no one's thinking like this. And I, the question that

i have for you that i think is really interesting is why do you think he's so interested in these films about women i saw him give a really interesting answer about who can tell what stories and he actually gave me a similar answer when i asked him about devs but like what do you what do you think is on his mind when it comes to that? I did ask him about this. It's very, well, it's very, I mean, I don't want to speak for him and I'll let him speak for him. But it's very notable that in this moment, in this contemporaneous experience of not just movie watching, but who gets to make movies and the conversation around who gets to make movies and tell stories in the aftermath of Me Too and any number of things that

have happened in the last five years that he's chosen now to finally execute on this story. And I do think it will raise a lot of questions and it will say like, well, is this a self-abnegating kind of story about how a man who knows that men are terrible is making a movie about how men are terrible and how they attack and destroy the psyches of women all around them. That's like a very surface level reading of the movie. I think that the title kind of invites that reading of the movie. I think it is after something, as you said,

much more primal and primordial about the historical nature of human existence and like how bonds are forged and destroyed over time. That seems to be much more what's interesting to him. You can't really tell that story about specifically birth, let's say, from the perspective of a man. You just can't. As a new father, as I like to say on this podcast, there is so much that even in the face of my new parental experience,

I simply can't understand. My wife is doing so much more and experiencing so much more than I am even in the face of my new parental experience. As a father of a daughter. I simply, I can't understand. I can't, my wife is doing so much more and experiencing so much more than I am for a variety of physical, emotional, and intellectual reasons. And so I think it is interesting that he is swinging at this. I think many people are probably asking him

the questions that I asked him when we spoke. I just think he is much more interested in the psychological framework of women because he does not have access to it and so he is like constantly questing for access to it yeah i like one of my favorite answers i ever heard him give was at the south by premiere of ex machina i think it was the q a there that he was talking about um you know spoilers for ex Machina, but you know, at least if it candors AI escapes and, you know, the men are either dead or,

or left to perish essentially. And, you know, not knowing Alex Garland's written work, but not ever having seen something that is wholly Alex Garland. You're curious whether or not he thinks this ending is a triumph or a horror story you know and he was just like i'm on the team of the ai actually like i'm rooting in general in general i'm rooting for ai in the world and i you know i'm i'm on i'm on her team and i want

her to succeed and you know so it's not a case of, oh no, the T-Rex has gotten loose in San Diego. It's like, you know, and I think that that really surprised me and interested me. And so ever since then to watch Annihilation, which is about, you know, four different women and their experiences with grief, to watch Devs, which centers on this young woman. As you mentioned, this is the first men is the first film without uh heavy technology and it's also his first project without senoya mizuna which i think is interesting i was like looking for her around the apple tree she's not she's not here but i think i i really like your interpretation that it's like a a puzzle that he's he's so smart and it's a it's a puzzle for him to keep trying to crack at.

I think that's fascinating. Well, the thing, just hearing you talk about Ex Machina, what it makes me realize is that the real match, the real pairing, I think, with men is probably Ex Machina, specifically because

the two key characters in the story that are not Ava, the Oscar Isaac character and the Donald Gleeson character, think about where they are by the time we get to the end of the film. The two big revelations that we get are that donald gleason's character has kind of has fallen into a kind of love and empathy with ava and that he he sees in her a kind of purity

and and also has a kind of like a savior complex about her which is a way that many men do feel about women and the the Oscar Isaac character, who is kind of this creator and controller figure, is someone who sees that in order for Ava to be a fully realized artificial intelligent woman, she needs to be cunning and duplicitous and to be able to manipulate. These are two critical ways that men do view women and two terrible ways that men view women and this movie men is in conversation with those ideas you know like this is something i don't know what i mean this is this is my interpretation but i feel i feel fairly confident about it um at least in the term in the case of ex machina movie that i've seen many many times that may be in my most watched

of the last seven or eight years list and revisitited last night. And I'm struck by this again and again. What, why can't, why does he feel he can't really access the way he's married? He has a wife. He's, he's, you know, he's worked primarily with, with female leads, as you say, in the last four or five projects. And he seems, uh, he seems mystified by, by how they move through the world, which is a very interesting proposition. And in some ways, I think is a beautiful curiosity.

And in other ways, it leaves me like a little uneasy. Right. You know, and that's not necessarily a criticism, but I'm like, why do you keep going back to this? Exactly. What are you trying to say? What are you, hopefully there's something you're trying to prove, but what are you trying to say? And I was rewatching Ex Machina this morning and at the climax when both the female AI stab Oscar Isaac and the knife goes in so easily, slides like you know hot knife through butter it's

it's ridiculous and uh I think there's a very similar moment in men and I'm just sort of like what it you know it's just this like ease of taking someone apart and then like the ending of men again we're not going to get specific because you really have to see it to believe it, I think, right? That's what we've decided. But he has talked generally about this idea that, like, the patheticness of men, which I think is so fascinating. Especially when you think about his early works, when you think about 28 Days Later or Sunshine or The Beach. That's very much like a young male protagonist insert kind of those stories. And here, when I see him as an insert, I see him most probably in Oscar Isaac's character or Nick Offerman's character in Devs, right?

When you see the God creator character in a movie from a writer director, like that's, that feels like authorial insert. And I'm just fascinated that he, those are kind of, those are villainous characters with like, you have a little sympathy for, but largely villainous. And it's, that's,

that's fascinating. That is really fascinating to me. To the point of overt criticism, you know, there's that moment in Ex Machina where Donald Gleeson and, and Oscar Isaac have that first conversation about what it would mean to have created AI. And he says this is the stuff of gods. And then

the next day, Oscar Isaac's character purposefully, it seems like, misinterprets what Gleeson says to saying that he is God. And we can see that this guy who is a tremendously accomplished, I guess sort of Mark Zuckerberg-esque figure who has created this search engine called Blue Book is an enormous egomaniac and addict and narcissist and has all

of these flaws and failures despite his brilliance. It's pretty easy also, I think, to read onto that. All filmmakers, you know know all filmmakers have to be these kind of yeah these kind of monomaniacal figures and like actually that leads into something you wanted to talk about too which is sort of like where Garland is going with his work too and like how he sees himself as a filmmaker yeah he gave this really interesting interview to Kyle Buchanan at the New York Times where he talked about how he was thinking of not directing anymore. And it's really fascinating. You and I were talking about this before we started recording in terms of our understanding. We both talked to Alex Garland. We've both seen him work. We've both studied his

work over and over again. We feel like we understand who he is. In talking to Kyle Buchanan, he talked about how he maybe doesn't need that being a director is something he forced himself to do. I think forced is the word he uses, right? And that part of that is to be in full control of your story, which is something you can understand and be sympathetic to if you're a screenwriter. And again and again, maybe you've seen as much love and respect you obviously has for Danny Boyle, like you've seen your story get changed and you're not the one who gets to change it. That would frustrate me. Well, fine, I'll do it myself.

Right. And then he does X Machina, incredible work. And, um, and then he's just decided that that the work that comes with directing, which is not just, I get to be creative.

It's, I have to be the captain of a ship and all these people are looking to me and I have to constantly talk to people. I don't know if you know this about writers, but they often don't like to talk to people. So I,'t know if you know this about writers, but they often don't like to talk to people. So I think he sort of, for the sake of control, for the sake of being the god of his own universes that he creates, he put himself in a role

that makes him feel uncomfortable. At least this is what he said to Kyle at the New York Times, right? So this idea that this movie that he's currently making with Kirsten Dunst, and then maybe he steps back from directing and just, you know, and he mentions a couple great directors like Peter Weir. He's like, sometimes filmmakers just stop being filmmakers. And it's not because their talents are declining or anything like that. They just stop. There has to be a reason for that. So I think to that point of curiosity, his like curiosity with like,

what's a woman? How do they work? Or his curiosity with these godlike figures that are somewhat reflections of himself. Is there villainy there? What's going on there? I think he has a curiosity of authorship. What does it mean to be the author of a story? And do I need to be in control of every aspect of it as a director, writer, et cetera? Or can I go back to just spinning the universe and let someone else captain the ship? What do you think? So when you shared this with me, I had my doubts. I have my doubts. I have my doubts about this self-analysis from Alex Garland. In the words of Meryl Streep, you have such doubts. I think, well, one, I hope he doesn't stop. I think that that would be a blow.

I think there are very few filmmakers whose work I anticipate more than his. And I've told him that many times. I think he has tapped into something that's kind of critical about living right now that many filmmakers are not able to do while also kind of using genre storytelling to get people to watch his work. You know, that is in and of itself a huge skill. Yeah. In addition to that, there's very few people who have the background that he has

that have gotten to this point. You know, we were talking before we started recording about who are the authors who have become directors. And the list is very short. And you had a very keen observation about all of them. This includes people like Michael Crichton and Norman Mailer and Stephen King, people who have, who have, who are, you know, have written books and then filmed adaptations of their books or created original material as directors. And as you said, all of those people are still primarily identified as writers. Garland has shifted away.

He hasn't written a novel in a long time. You know, his last, I guess, sort of big novel was The Tesseract, which is almost 20 years ago at this point. And he's a filmmaker now. He's a writer-director. That's what he's best known as. And I guess a TV writer and producer as well. But the idea of him stepping

away to do what, I don't know. I find it hard to believe. And I think that obviously that sense of control. And if you look at the seams of his career, you can see that he is someone who has kind of always sought control. There's this sort of legendary story about the production of the film Dread, which he wrote, and which Carl Urban, the star of that movie, has talked very, very explicitly about how Garland is more responsible for the direction, the tone, the execution of that story than Pete Travis, the man who directed it. He's been a party to, you mentioned the Danny Boyle thing and the fact that he watched Boyle kind of mangle the beach.

But then they have this incredible collaboration of what I think are Boyle's best movies. I agree. You know, 28 Days Later and Sunshine. I love both of those films. And so you can see him kind of playing the game and learning and being present on set and finding new collaborators and getting better and better and better at this. Men may be his least approachable story, but in many ways, it's his most accomplished film. So the idea of him tapping out after making a big, expensive, Kirsten Dunst set piece movie, that would suck. I just would not be happy about that.

I have a lot of questions about what that movie is about. We'll find out, I guess. But I think that it almost reminds me, maybe because Ex Machina is so fresh in my mind, but it almost reminds me of sort of a touring test of alex garland testing all these ways in which you can tell a story right like um because he veered off wildly from annihilation after his book was viriled wildly from but then when he may never let me go the kazoo shiguro adaptation that one's not like letter letter letter you know exact from the book but it's pretty close very close and he talks about how much he reveres Ishiguro which he should because Ishiguro is a genius but like you know so it's sort of like oh is it this oh oh the beach was mangled so should I do this like you know he didn't direct that film but should I do this like

letter perfect adaptation or maybe I should be the one to change the book maybe that's the better version or maybe i should go back to this like original weird kernel of an idea i had maybe that's what should be you know and it's just like it's an intellectually curious mind that he has where he's not content to sort of settle in and do something so maybe i should do tv maybe that's what i should do know, maybe I should do a long form story over eight episodes of television. And I like that about him. I like, I like that.

You're absolutely right. That there is a sameness to an Alex Garland story, whether it's just the screenplay or whether it comes with these visuals and these sounds that comes with his team. But I like that. They're also extremely different in, in that. He's not content to say i hit it out of the park with ex machina which i think he did and i'm just gonna do that forever

you know yeah he is ambitious which is a word that we use for a lot of creatives and filmmakers these days but he's not a climber you know he's not angling for the she-hulk adaptation you know what i mean like he's not trying to get into the mcu he doesn't want to make a star war you know no he doesn't make a star war he's he is he wants to tell his stories or other people's stories that he is struck by and that's that you're you're so right to identify that you know he's adapted a graphic novel and he's adapted an acclaimed novel and he has written his own novels and he wrote a video game in 2003. I mean, he really has this broad palette of interests,

but tonally he's always hitting the same thing. It's funny, with some directors, when I think about doing episodes like this, I'm like, what really are the kind of themes or the concepts that interest them over their career? And sometimes it can be hard to kind of locate what sort of solidifies someone's work. With Garland, there's like,

I came up with 10 things in a minute. You know, it's just, it's so easy to look at like this kind of sense of looming dread and alienation and confusion between the sexes and desire versus progress and these big, weighty, human,

frailty concepts that emerge out of basically every story that he tells, even if they include monsters or mythological figures. So it would be a huge loss if he stepped away, at least for someone like me. I think my favorite, like if you try to connect men to the beach and everything in between.

The two things that I was thinking I was thinking about mostly one this idea of like a snake in the garden right like that this is paradise and there's there's something rotten here um you know the beach has this like beautiful mythical paradise and then it's just madness and violence and and. And then to that end, I think about the end of 20 Days Later a lot and what he thinks about sort of this thin veneer of society, just this very fragile layer that is keeping us all in polite society. And how easily that can break. And all this again. Primal shit comes out. And often that primal shit. According to him. Is you know.

Masculine driven. Sort of power control play. But that stuff is so. Again his stuff is so weird. Yet the core of it is so. so fundamental to how we think about story that for me, I find just pure joy in everything that he does. Even something like devs, which honestly, at the end of the day, doesn't fully work for me. But no one's doing that. So, I mean, Westworld's trying to do that, but no one's doing it quite like he's doing it.

What an incredible point of reference, though. I already mentioned Michael Crichton, who wrote and directed the adaptation of his book, Westworld. And now we have this Westworld HBO series, which I think you may be covering here at The Ringer. And that's such an interesting object of contemporary IP, because on the one hand, it really does aspire to a similar gravitas,

I think, that Alex Garland's work does. In my opinion, it is just significantly more shallow. And it knows what the right ideas to strive for are, but it doesn't have the same power to realize them. And that could just be a matter of taste. I know that a lot of people like Westworld, but that is a show that is really ambitious and very beautiful,

you know, and very designed in the way that a lot of Garland's work is. But when you're trying to be serious, it isn't easy to not seem kind of weak tea. I would hold Westworld season one maybe up against some other things, but then it's diminishing returns. And it's would hold Westworld season one, maybe up against some other things, but then it's diminishing returns. And it's wild because Westworld season three came out right around the same

time as devs and the overlap and the ideas that they were dealing with there, which is, you know, a God-like creator and an AI that determines your path through the world. And is there anything, is there such a thing as free will? And these like, you know,

very sort of theological ideas like those two seasons of television are so closely linked and so different and similarly if you look at ex machina and the trajectory of evan rachel woods character and westworld like that is very very close and similar you know and so and garland has talked about how he's a bit of a magpie himself when it turns when it comes to you know? And so, and Garland has talked about how he's a bit of a magpie himself when it comes to, you know, picking up stuff from Wicker Man or Evil Dead or whatever. It's not like a winky-winky intentional, you know, homage. But again, he's an intellectually curious person who, you know, like us, consumes and consumes and consumes culture and the way that that works its way in. So, you know, I wouldn't be surprised at all if the original michael creighton westworld inspired ex machina in a million different ways

um and it just sort of loops around but yeah it's he is such a rare entity in that he's got the visuals and the flair and the style but there is such substance at the core of it as well let's just circle back to men very quickly here before we wrap. Can you recommend this movie? It's a Friday night, you know, you're going on a seventh date with someone you're getting to know. Oh, date seven, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Date seven is kind of critical. Not date one, I'll tell you that. Should you go see Men, the new Alex Garland movie? Okay, well, can I ask you a quick question first? What was your... I know you got to see this quite early. What was your screening like for this? There were three other people in the room.

And it was deathly quiet the entire time. I saw it with two other people again in the morning. And they were two nice guys, men, in their 30s, 40s. Did they both look like Rory kinnear they uh looked well one was like a cgi rory kinnear face on a boy's body and the other one had the long vicar wig but um the the truth is is that honestly most film critics look like rory kinnear if we're being 100 honest but we walked out of the theater and it was like uh this deeply awkward like moment for them where they were like one of them was like well that was feminist and i was like and i don't blame them i mean the ending of that movie is like a uh like being in a train wreck you just have to like you're

you're still trying to you know get your surroundings together but i i was just sort of like this is a fascinating group to see this with it's like these two men who were just like you know and the other one was like i just want to go see top gun again i was like i don't blame you like top gun much easier more enjoyable sit than this but i um so would i recommend it i would but i would be, you know, maybe thoughtful about who you, who you go with, make sure you're not dragging anyone to this. That's, you're not,

that's not going to go well, you know? So that's a great point. You know, when I was hearing you talk about kind of what a 24 was trying to put together in terms of like influential voices, screening the film at an Alamo draft house. The last time I remember the studio doing that was for Midsommar.

And I think this movie has a lot in common with midsommar in a lot of ways in terms of the kind of story it's telling about um it's its central female character and empowerment but also using genre and using discomfort and disorientation and i remember chris ryan and i saw midsommar the same thing it was a simulcast it was premier premiering simultaneously in New York and Los Angeles. The rooms were packed. There was a lot of themed snacks in the space. There was a sense of eventizing

a very strange and very uncomfortable movie that is like hugely influenced by European art from the 1960s and 70s. These two movies would be a nice match for a double feature. And I loved Midsommar

and I love the work of Ari Aster. And I think that it's hilarious to me that stuff like this, that people like me discovered watching movies on VHS in basements has become like a kind of cool. Yeah. And I realized that I am in part responsible

for some of this stuff and celebrating this stuff in the way that you do makes you a part of the machine. And I'm self-aware about all those things. But the idea of men being like a quote-unquote cool movie, which is obviously like so born out of a person's conflicted and complex feelings about the nature of humanity,

it's really weird. I love it, but I am also a little bit, I'm struggling with its commodification in the way that I guess only I can. That's so interesting. And I think that I would not love it, but I am also a little bit, I'm struggling with its commodification in the way that I guess only I can. That's so interesting. And I think that I would not put it, I think, I completely agree it would make a great double feature with Ms. Samar. I think there's a lot of DNA in common, but I wouldn't put this in the prestige horror bucket that we would put a lot of other, you know, Ari Aster or whatever great films um there is something else at work here and i guess it's just that unique alex garland thing that or not unique but distinctive that defies uh an easy genre bucket

you know what i mean it's just like he's like is it sci-fi is it horror is it religious allegory what are you watching you're watching an alex garland, I suppose. But yeah, I would recommend it. Sixth date. Maybe not seventh. Sixth date. I don't know. I don't think it's going to be like put anyone in a romantic mood at the end of the day. I guess really quickly, and then I'm excited to listen to your conversation with Alex Garland.

But like, do you feel like the ending, which is the most ambitious swing of the movie, which again, we've been dancing around, do you think it's successful? I do from a technical perspective. And I think it in many ways justifies the movie. I found as I was getting into, there's a sequence near the end of the movie where the vicar and the Jesse Buckley character are in a room together. And there's this deeply uneasy encounter between them that feels like the critical moment until we get to this ending. It's the confrontation of the feelings. And at that moment, I was like, oh, this actually is not working for me right now. This actually feels too on the nose and really overmanaged. And then the movie

transforms again. And when it transforms in that final 15 minutes, whether you think the idea itself is obvious or too obvious or too elusive,

it is a, like a fearless telling of the story. i've never seen anything like it i can't say that about many contemporary movies i've just never seen anything like the last 10 minutes of this movie and i just think that that should be celebrated i and i think if people if people told me i hated it or i thought it was like really up its own ass i would totally understand and i wouldn't i wouldn't you know fight to the death about the importance of this movie but I'm just so impressed

by his his unwillingness to bend you know to like make anything conventional nothing he makes is conventional and so

I really like I respected it and appreciated it for that reason no one's gonna have like an indifferent reaction to this movie and that's

yes I think I think that's what I said I was like I think when I walked out of the, I think that's what I said. I was like, I think when I walked out of the theater and someone said that, well, I was feminist. I was like, uh, you know, they're like, well, I can't, I feel really uncomfortable. I was like, well, that's art, right? Like not to sound like the most douchebag pretentious. Everyone's really happy that Amanda's back, like for a guest on your podcast, but like that's art, you know? And,

and, and again, yeah, it should be celebrated. That's why I'm glad you're here though. I don't, sometimes you have to pursue that. If a filmmaker makes a film like this

to talk about it as if it's Top Gun Maverick would be stupid. We'll talk about Top Gun Maverick when it comes out and we can be like, this rocks

and have a very surface level conversation about something rocking. Anyhow, Joanna, listen, you're on like 18 pods on The Ringer.

You've got Better Call Saul on the Prestige TV pod. You've got The Ringerverse with Mal, House of R. What else is cooking? Anything else you want to point out? Yeah, I don't know if you know, but I know you know, Sean. There's a lot of stuff coming that is genre focused. So The Ringerverse is about to sort of explode with coverage.

And I'll be there. So that's where you can mostly find me trial by content is also really fun we had a great conversation well mallory's actually going to be on uh to talk about ewan mcgregor so that should be definitely a very chill not at all stressful time i'm excited yeah thanks for being here joe now let's go to my conversation with alex garland delighted to have one of my favorites back on the show it's alex garland alex how are you uh i'm good nice to see you likewise Likewise. As I was watching your new film,

Men, I was actually reminded of the first time that we met. And I don't know if you remember this, but you came to our studio in Hollywood. It was actually unusually late at night for doing an interview. It was after seven. And you sat down and you said, nice to see you again. And I said, we've never met. And you said, yes, we have. And you were insist I said we've never met and you said yes we have and you were insistent that we had met before which we had not and I felt a bit like Jesse's character in this film when I was thinking back to that that moment so so tell me like where did where did men come from when did this movie start in your mind that's funny um um this film started round about the time that you pretend we didn't meet um i uh in between uh i think it was between writing this movie sunshine and the next movie, which is called Never Let Me Go, I wrote the first

crack at this script. So it was quite a long time ago. I'm going to guess 15 years, but that might be wrong by a couple of years, plus or minus, I don't know. So the first time I tried to write it was back then, and I just kept going, and I think there were at least one, two, three, I think four. I think there were four previous versions of the script before this one. So it started all the way back then.

And what was the genesis of it? It was such a long time ago, i'd be hard for it to say but i've been living with a version of this script for ages and ages and ages was there a reason that it never came to pass that it took 15 years for it to to come to life yeah probably the reason was the script just wasn't right i i tried to get it financed um uh twice sort of seriously, like really going out there trying to get money for it. Both times it seemed to get pretty close and then stall,

and that is just typical for this industry. But I also, people often, there's a conversation I end up having with people which is really about screenwriting um where somebody will come up asking for advice essentially about it and um uh I always say essentially the same thing which is if you're the question relates to how do you know when to put a script aside and uh because because writing a script is a bit like buying a lottery ticket in some respects you don't know when to give it up there are some people who keep plugging away

trying to get their film made and after seven years or eight years or nine years suddenly they get it made and and they think thank god i kept going and so if you're at the two-year stage or the three or the four or five, how do you know when to stop working on it? Because you might be six months away from it getting financed. It's a sort of unknowable problem and it can kind of gaslight you.

But I always think, just immediately put it aside, if you're going to work as a writer, you're going to rely on the ability to keep writing scripts, whatever happens. Even if you get this one made, you're still going to have to try and write another, otherwise it's not a career, it's just a one-off.

So make the gamble on that thing, the ability to keep doing it. And then you find that the script in your, you know, the sort of notional bottom drawer actually has not evaporated. It's still there. You can rework it in a year's time or three years time or four years time and find that you've got a better way of getting into it. And I think that's what happened with this script. I think I just wasn't cracking it. And I'd write it, go out there, fall over,

come back again. And eventually this time, I got it right enough that I could get it finalized and made. It's really interesting because the film is so ultimately, you know, it's very mythic and deep, but kind of lean, you know, and it's sort of simple in its own unique way. But when you were writing it back then, I what was that 0809 maybe was the idea to direct because you hadn't made a directed a film by that point uh not on the first draft but but thereafter yeah i mean i wrote never let me go and dread with the intention of directing them as i was writing them and then actually started those projects as directors and then would get removed and someone else would take over.

And so not on the first draft, not on the first version, but on the subsequent ones, yeah. But then also writing with the hope of directing doesn't necessarily mean you end up directing it. So, it's funny, I was going to ask you, was part of the impetus for this film to do it now that it has such a small cast and it's in this remote location and it seemed like it would be kind of safer and easier to make during a pandemic. Like a COVID-friendly

film. Yeah, yeah. Was that any of the thinking? That's a little bit. Because if you think about it, let's say it wasn't a cast of two, it was a cast of five, which would look like a less COVID-friendly film. But then imagine what is on the other side of the camera. On set, there's another 40 people holding booms, pulling focus, moving the dolly grip, moving the lights lights around and so on and so forth and then just off that there's another 150 to 200 people catering driving trucks moving stuff about and and actually

the thing in front of the camera you know the difference between two cast and four cast or 10 cast is like less than one percent of the overall number of people there. So it kind of looks COVID friendly, but it's basically the same. Interesting. So the uneasy dynamic between men and women is, I think, a part of all of your stories, but maybe not quite so explicitly as this one. So what was it that had you wanting to barrel into it so aggressively? Do you know, weirdly, weirdly, I think it ties into the last time we spoke.

And I'm not kidding because there was a part of our conversation that, this happens to me sometimes, like something will go on a sort of repeat switch in my head and i have a feeling we spoke about poetry and we did college sort of a kind of college educated sort of embarrassment and and sort of uh uh, anyway, stuff like that. And this is when we spoke about devs a few years ago. When we spoke about devs. Yeah.

And, and there's also, there's, there's a bit of iconography used in the film, which is called a Sheila and the gig, which is, so there's two, there's a green man or a folio head or whatever you want to call it,

which is something, both of these are things you find or can find. And for example, you can find in for example you can find them in various places but say in medieval churches and and the she in the gigs is a woman with her legs open who's kind of using her hands to pull open her vulva and there's something very kind of straightforward about it it's like she's meeting your gaze as she does this. And there's a kind of impassive meeting of the gaze. And what I was thinking about is the way that people who feel sophisticated and certain about what they think about things get embarrassed by simplicity and straightforwardness

and a sort of straightforward addressing of something. And I think that the problems with all the previous scripts was that they were too complicated and they weren't simple enough. And that kind of college-educated smugness or embarrassment is something I've got increasingly bored of and irritated with because it's a way of avoiding simple problems I think but by being sophisticated and that part of our conversation it was like it was caught on a record. It's popped back into my mind like many times over the last couple of years. And the Sheila and the Gig felt like an embodiment of that.

The Sheila and the Gig was not part of those previous narratives that I'd written. So the story got simpler and it got more confrontational and more direct and sort of holding someone's gaze in a more level way. Like, yeah, I know you'll find this gauche or I know you'll find even the song choice at the beginning and the end has that quality. Yeah, yeah, it's a love song. Yeah, the lyrics are very kind of straightforward and you yeah you're probably too sophisticated for it but tough shit because it's playing now and there's nothing you can do about it and um and guess what it's coming back at the end too if that wasn't problematic enough and and so it yeah something I guess it's all that stuff folded into it but i have found myself thinking about that more and more and more as i see my as i see people tie themselves into ever more self-aware

sophisticated knots you know i do i think i had asked you yeah no i think i had asked you a question about the concerns about pretension because because Devs, I thought, was so fearless in putting Steve Reich in front of you or putting these kind of like very careful set is that we find ourselves in this curious moment in our culture where who is telling which stories is a big part of the conversation and who has the right to tell which stories. And so, you know, you are telling a story here, pretty deep story, pretty powerful story, but about a woman who has experienced something profound in the way that she receives her experience with men. And I'm really interested by you making that decision like when you do something like that are you vetting the perspectives with other people is it entirely from inside of you uh that would be one way of putting it but you could put it that it's also about someone's anxiety or sense of horror about maybe themselves and then that's the or or but but but in a way that doesn't matter

because that that would be sort of dodging the question you just asked i mean then in other words there's a different interpretation but but the core of the question remains the same which is who has a right to tell a story and what what is the criteria that might matter in terms of whether one is allowed to tell a story or not. And broadly speaking, my position would be anybody can tell any story. I don't really care. And I understand that some people do, but I don't. Having told the story, you may then be open to certain kinds of criticism, but that will come with having made the decision that you are going to tell the story. But broadly speaking, I would be concerned.

You could go to individual cases quite easily and say, well, in this circumstance, would it not be the case that it would be better if someone did not do this? And I could say, yes, I could see under those circumstances that might be true. But I'm talking about a broader thing and a broader danger of the consequences of being overly conservative, paradoxically overly conservative about who gets to write, for

example, and who doesn't, what story. There may be knock-on consequences that are problematic in other ways, and those ways would concern me. However, there's a whole string of caveats that come with that. So there's a simple starting point, which is basically, look, if as a non-Jewish person I wanted to write about the Holocaust, I would feel okay about doing that. I would not stop myself from writing about the Holocaust

if that's what I really wanted to do. However, then a different obligation kicks in, which is to do it as thoughtfully as you are able to do it so that doesn't mean it's okay to write badly about the holocaust or stupidly about the holocaust you should you should do everything you can to do it as well as you can and as thoughtfully as you can and as sensitively as you can and all that kind of stuff. And also try to listen to other people in the telling of it and in a way check with them. Now, there's no ultimate requirement in writing about the Holocaust to do so in a way that did not offend every Jewish person on the planet

or every non-Jewish person on the planet or every gay person or disabled person or person of Romani descent or whatever it happened to be in respect of the Holocaust. There's no requirement to do that, but there is a requirement to try hard because it's a serious subject matter um and uh so so so in effect that that's kind of what i try to do i suppose when i do this stuff i run it by friends i talk to people i check it i talk a lot with my collaborators i listen to my collaborators um i let them do things that they feel strongly they should do.

And I step back to allow that to happen and all that sort of stuff. But the starting point is that there's a permission. There's a permission to do it. And in a way, there's also permission to get it wrong. Because if you can only do things under the proviso that you get it right, it becomes impossible to do almost anything. Because most of us routinely get things wrong. So we have to be allowed to get things wrong. It's too inhibitive. Does that all track?

It does. does that all track it does it it reminds me that a lot of what we see now in tv and film is very memoiristic because the people only feel that they can write about experiences that they've had and you know this is something that is maybe completely outside of that realm you know most of your work is in a in a world that doesn't exist and yet does and i feel like the relationship to modern technology is such a prevailing theme in a lot of your work. But aside from a cell phone in this movie, this is much more folkloric and biblical and primal. And was the reason to do that motivated by that desire to kind of strip down the self-aware and strip down the concerns of sophistication or just kind of a an end result despite that i think that uh um no i this is probably a british expression but it's just like horses for courses it's that that that was the right thing for this um i i actually

suspect technology does play a part in some of the elements to do with this set of subjects. I don't think technology has had no influence on it. I think it's had an influence on it. But broadly, we're speaking about a set of things that predate the arrival of the Internet and the arrival of the car and the arrival of the combustion engine and the arrival of the wheel probably so i i kind of there's a that you know that the technology stuff is a detail that just didn't didn't really have a part to play but also i'm aware um obviously that there is a contemporary set of discussions and arguments around this subject matter. But I also felt it would be wrong to present it as if it is a contemporary issue, because it's not. It's a really, really old issue.

And also, there have been lots of voices at lots of points in time who have been drawing attention to this issue. And it would be wrong to pretend that they don't exist too. This becomes pure speculation and therefore could have a lot of bullshit attached to it. But I find it interesting, for example, that Sheila McGiggs as a bit of imagery are very old. So what does it tell you about the time when those images were used and created? And they survive in all places. It's so surprising. They survive in churches

through a period of time, which is the Victorian era, when the Victorians were busy covering genitalia, even on the art that they admired most of all, which was like Renaissance art and classical art of statues that were having fig leaves put all over them and so on and so forth. There's just something about the way that bit of imagery survived, which means that somewhere

that this is the bullshit that people unconsciously knew that it was a kind of truth that shouldn't be denied and it would be wrong to pretend it wasn't there or or at least some priests and vicars in some places thought no i need to protect this um from being damaged or removed that it just speaks of something that this conversation has been going on a long time either consciously or unconsciously in some ways i'm trying to wrap my head around something in the film you know i i feel like nature is a huge part of the story the stories stories that you've told to think of the waterfall in, in ex Machina or the beast and annihilation, or we see things that are,

that we can't control. And it just feels like the ultimate testimony to that. The ultimate, like there is something cosmic between people, between the sexes in the world. And we can't, it cannot be solved. There's never equilibrium.

Does that track to you? Well, it's just true. It's just you don't need to say between sexes. You could just say between people, or you could say between everything. There isn't actually a stable equilibrium in some respects anywhere with anything. And that is literally cosmic. And also a good example of one of those thought processes that embarrass some people because it feels sophomoric. But I do think that what you just said is sort of, is just true.

So like the Sheila gig, my instinct is just to go, wow, that's interesting. Let's look at it in the eye. In addition to the Sheila and the Gig and the Green Man, there are some very, very striking images in the story. There's the tunnel

and there's the quiet man in the distance. There's the tree. When you're writing, and if you're writing a story like this or something like Sunshine, are you writing specifically how these things look and how you intend for them to be rendered when you're working on the script? Sometimes, yeah.

Sometimes. And then sometimes having that clear idea can get in the way because someone else has a better idea and I need to be open-minded enough to quickly abandon the thing I was thinking of and go with the other person's better idea. And sometimes it can be very useful because it also very fluid and quick to drop something. You kind of want both concurrently. films can really easily get themselves into a situation where one person or a group of people are just obsessed with jamming around peg into a square hole. And you, you need to be able to step away from that really fast if necessary.

Can you think of a time when you had to do that? When you had to take, get your mind off of some idea you had landed on in a script and say, actually I have to adapt to what's available to me or someone else's idea? I think it happens every day. I mean, I think it happens probably multiple times a day. I can. Yeah, I can.

But it almost feels like confessional and embarrassing to say it. But it would also be honest, I guess. So, for example, I'll use an example from the film we're talking about, but honestly, it could be anything, and it could be multiple times, so many times. Jessie Buckley had an idea at a certain point that the way her character would behave at a certain moment in the film would be to be irritated by something rather than frightened by it. And I would say in a way that is rather predictable and probably rather lazy, or if not lazy, just a bit helpless. And maybe it relates to things like unconscious bias or all of those things that are very hard to avoid

because they're unconscious, so how do you know how to avoid them until someone points it out, right? Is I had assumed this is a horror movie, therefore what this young woman should be doing at this moment is being frightened by this thing. And she said, I think that would just piss me off. And I would love to have been the one

who came up with that thought and that suggestion and to have been that kind of intuitive and that wise and that empathetic and all those sorts of great things. But I wasn't. She was. But as soon as she said it I thought oh fuck yeah that that's exactly what it should be and um and so that that's that's then what it was

uh so I I guess that but honestly I could keep going and keep going there'd be so many the the one bit of credit I'll take is is knowing a good idea when I know you're excited about the idea of interpretation around this film and people taking from it something that isn't necessarily driven specifically by what you imagined, but the choices feel like they are holistic a lot of the time. You know what? But it might be intentional. It just might not have been my intention. One of the things is, a few years ago, I worked on a film that in its creation was an absolute car wreck. And it was a proper mess of different voices and arguments and acrimony and all sorts of stuff like that. And when you look at the finished film, it looks like the product of someone's coherent vision.

I can tell you it wasn't, but it looks like that. So there's all sorts of ways something can look intentional. And when you say that was your response and I'm interested in, me personally, I'm interested in this thing to do with men, which relates to the way people react. You know, part of what you would ascribe as intention might well be, in fact, is likely to be your imagination you drawing a link or making a connection of feeling a resonance that is actually distinct to you I've been in some ways aware of that for a long time in one way or another just by hearing people say well this film is clearly about that, or this film is clearly influenced by that or whatever it happens to be. And thinking,

I've never heard of that thing, or I didn't think of that or whatever it is. And so this particular movie, I thought in a conscious way, I'm going to lean to that. I'm going to be a weird mixture of very confrontational and totally elliptical and see what happens. Okay. Here's something funny about that. Um, friends of mine know I'm, I'm such a fan of your work and I told them that I was going to see this film. And as soon as I saw it, they're all excited. How, how did, how was it? How did it turn out? What's the, what did you think of it and what is it about? And thus far, I've mostly said I don't know. And I don't feel the urge to solve the movie.

And I think that people will try to solve it in a way, or they'll try to insist upon its importance. And do you feel like you were pursuing a movie that people could say, ah, of course, this is what this is about. You know, the open endedness that you're interested in. Is that something you sought out? No, no, it's not. It's not that it's open ended.

It's that it leaves it to other people. I'll give you an explicit example. Here is like just to prove that it's not I'm not just talking total bullshit, but this is something that was intense this was intentional right so so you've got within the film you've got a protagonist and the protagonist is encountering in a village lots of men and the village is populated by men that are all played by the same actor now that's not arbitrary that's deliberate because otherwise it's not coincidence

that the same actor fell into all these different wigs and costumes. It was done on purpose, right? But the film never, ever acknowledges it at any point, and nor does the protagonist. And I've been using this as an example when I've been talking about the film, because I think it's the right one. It's very illustrativerative so there's something which is intentional there are if it's intentional it's inviting an interpretation why did this happen and there are at least two possibilities there's more than two but here are two possibilities about why that might be the case. One is that this woman is seeing all of these men as the same man. So they're different men, but she sees them as all the same. And another one would be all these men are actually the same, but she doesn't recognize that. And they are similarly phrased statements but they're actually very very

different in their implication and the film is not providing any kind of answer about which one of those two is right or wrong and what I'm saying is neither of them are right or wrong that is up to the viewer either whether they even notice it or care about it, or if they care about it, which feels right to them. Do they even make themselves aware of the other possibility? Or is it actually only one possibility? Clearly all men are the same, but she can't see it. Clearly she sees all men as the same,

even though they're different. And like, that isn't dodging a bullet. That's just saying, look, there's a bullet. Um, and I do think that, that sometimes there is a, uh, there's something can be almost asinine about trying to offer answers to things that are not really answerable. And the identification of the question is more interesting than the answer itself. The answer itself is really just a reflection on the person who happens to be answering it at that moment. So it's the existence of the confusion that is the interesting bit. Does that make sense?

It does. Not only does it make sense, I thought of both of those potential interpretations as I thought about the film. And I don't even feel the desire to choose one for myself. In fact, it might be a third one that I think is more interesting. But what I'm asking you is, were you aware of those potential interpretations when you were constructing it? Oh, you, you oh you you yes okay

a hundred a hundred percent aware and what what i was when i was talking about that thing about whether as a non-jewish person i might have the right to write about the holocaust uh the terms under which i would i would personally give myself the right even though a jewish person might say hey no, you don't have the right. But I would still reserve the right for various reasons to do with my belief systems about the way society should work or the way creative processes should work. So I would I'd reserve the right to disagree with something. But I would give myself the right on the basis that I was thoughtful about it. And that is an example of trying to be thoughtful about it.

That said, you just said you came up with a third interpretation. That third interpretation, I may not have thought of, which all that would be illustrative of is the limit of my ability to think of it. You just may have been able to think about it better than I was. Probably not better, but sure. Well, yeah, or maybe better, you know, like, why not? Maybe better. And I kind of, it seems to me that in the nature of a conversation,

that is the terms under which, almost the only terms under which a conversation can really be had you know uh this is what i think this is these are my limits what are your limits what do you think um is it okay that i have these limits uh how can you adjust my limits how can i adjust your that is that is conversation it's not it's not a requirement to arrive at everything, knowing everything always, you know, it's interesting to make a horror film,

this litmus test, I guess, psychological examination of relationships and the world and how, you know, centuries old ideas. Um, I, I have to ask you about the ending. we don't need to explain the ending so

people can see the film but i i haven't had a holding my hand to my chest moment for a long stretch of a film in a long time and it felt like in part a provocation in part like a almost like a filmmaking experiment in a way like almost like a dare and i felt like i understood the ideas but i i wanted i want to hear you talk about kind of coming up with it and is this one of the things that evolved maybe as the script took shape over the years because it's an extremely bold finale i think some some of the bits of imagery and i think it would be reasonable to say that some of the bits of imagery relate to birth right and um uh the birth aspect of it came very late when i was i was worrying so it was it was before pre-production but it was on the sort of eve of pre-production and i i'd spent a lot of time talking about how that sequence might work

and it kept bothering me. I kept thinking this isn't thematically as sort of brave or interesting as it could be. There were various, you know, one of the things about thinking about things carefully is you then have to make sure that it doesn't make you too conservative. And then when you want to go big, you allow yourself the right to go big and with whatever risks that entails. I think that's another sort of important thing that one has to be able to do sometimes. And I felt in some ways all the things that were being tried were too conservative and not

really being honest in a funny kind of way. And something about the nature of birth and some of the sort of weirdly conceptually strange things and themic things and metaphorical things about that felt very right and actually very aggressive in a way I thought the film needed to be aggressive at that moment, I suppose. But also something else interesting happened to me, which was to do with what are people reacting to at that moment what is the thing that is making them say in your case uh hold your chest or uh what sort of whatever the reaction is it might be anger frustration amusement uh rejection it could be any number of different things um like what where is the provocation coming from? There were two things about it that really interested me. One was, what this film did was it used birth

in the same way that alien movies sometimes use deep-sea creatures or insects. And in meetings, if I held up photographs of birth and things like breech births or cesarean sections, or just what you could broadly call more normal, more traditional vaginal births, that people around the meeting would feel very uncomfortable sometimes at the image of a breech birth. Now, that's really weird because the entire planet through its history has been populated by people who arrived either via a caesarean or a vagina, right? That's how we got to walk around.

And the blood and the stretching of skin and the nature of genitals and stuff like that, what on earth is there to feel uncomfortable about at that moment? It's that you could have all sorts of other strong feelings, but to attach it to horror and to question why is that horror just seems interesting to me the other thing about it that interested me a lot personally this is i'm probably saying too much but um is is that the most interesting thing about that sequence in a way is not the thing in front of the protagonist it's how the protagonist reacts to it and and it's quite difficult to get to that over one's own visceral responses to the things that are being seen and that also kind of interests me so so it's partly just the side of me that is a bit aggressive and confrontational and delinquent and sort of things yeah fuck it come on let's just do it we're just chatting about this let's just do it and um

oh dear i'll probably uh uh live to regret it or no no no don't don't don't regret it i i i'm glad to hear you say that i mean look i've seen a lot of films and i i like to watch very extreme films and i like to be provoked and uh i was I was provoked I was I was sensationalized while watching the ending I really thought it was incredibly effective um I thought of a couple of films when I was watching it you know we talked about Stalker a bit during the Annihilation conversation and you know I know that that was a little bit of a I don't know if it was a guide post for you necessarily but something that inspired an idea and i don't know you know i thought of possession i don't know if you've seen the film possession the zeloski film um sam neill

isabella johnny amazing movie if you haven't seen it there are like little strands of it for sure in this movie was there anything that was like guiding you or you know folk horror obviously is a big part of this story too anything that you thought of when you were putting this together um uh i mean i'm obviously uh aware of lots of films i guess so so if you make anything in folk horror it's hard not to think about the wicker man i would say the original wicker man that is um but unless you also want to think about the remake as like a cautionary tale or something but um but but i really mean the original one and uh and i guess there's other moments like uh i mean these are what i would call influences rather than self-conscious nods so so there's a shot where a camera is moving very very fast towards jesse

buckley as she closes a door and it was only on like the second take where I realised that really what we'd done is set up a shot from the evil dead. And that's so there's that kind of thing. But that's not exactly keeping those films aware in your mind. It's more just realising, oh, okay, that's where that came from, or something like that. In general, I may have even said this to you before, but in general, what I think is that filmmaking and film watching is a really, really broad church, and it has space for lots of different tastes and instincts and processes

within that broad church and I've always I've got very little patience for people who who try to make the church less broad right and within the broad church there are some people who what they really feel compelled to do is make films about other films and to make in a way uh the the the urge that they're satisfying is is is sort of a version of saying these are the films i love and i want you to love them too and and there's a kind of shared recognition between the audience and the filmmaker about the films they've opened up or are being introduced to or whatever. Because it's a broad church, I'm super happy that those films exist and that's great, but I'm not personally interested in making them.

I'm sort of sitting on a different pew somewhere else. And I try to make films as much as possible about something observed which is really nothing to do with cinema unless it's acknowledging a trope within cinema maybe or something like that so it wasn't that I had a bunch of films or touchstones in my mind in that way and if I had one in my mind

I'd probably have then tried to steer away from it. That makes it sound like I've been super original, but I'm not saying that. Like I said, I found myself ripping off the Evil Dead halfway through the film and probably countless others without even knowing I was doing it. But certainly consciously, I'm trying to avoid it.

One last question here. We end every episode of this show by asking filmmakers, what's the last great thing they have seen. Have you, have you seen anything good recently? Uh, the last, is it,

is it something that I've seen before and watched again? Is that allowed? Could be anything. Uh, it's come and see. Um, yeah, sure.

Uh, I, um, I rewatched that uh recently um and in fact i'm now just about to contradict myself because i re-watched it in relation to the film i'm making at the moment um i i sort of wanted to check something uh because sometimes films shift in your memory and you add things to them that may or may not have been there or something like that. So I re-watched Come and See and it is a sensationally brilliant bit of filmmaking and it was even better and even more extraordinary and I remembered it. So if anyone hasn't seen it, I would say switch off your phone and do all that kind of thing

and get it on, I don't know, Criterion or wherever it is you're able to get it because it's pretty fucking good. Great recommendation. I think you should watch Possession as well. I think there's something to it. Alex, always wonderful to see you. Congrats on that.

Likewise. Hey, thank you. I hope I get to talk to you again. Thanks to Joanna Robinson. And of course, thank you to Alex. Thanks to our producer, Bobby Wagner, for his work on this episode. Stay tuned to The Big Picture because next week is Top Gun Maverick Week. And to kick things off, we are building the Tom Cruise Hall of Fame. We'll see you then.