By David Baldwin
Oscar-nominated Writer/Director Alex Garland is best known for his critically acclaimed sci-fi/horror films Ex Machina and Annihilation. This weekend, he takes on an entirely different beast with CIVIL WAR, a relentlessly paced, breakneck thriller involving a group of journalists traveling across the war-torn countryside of the former United States in hopes of interviewing the third term President before he surrenders to invading factions. The cast includes Kirsten Dunst, Cailee Spaeny, Wagner Moura, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Jesse Plemons and Nick Offerman.
We had the chance to chat virtually with Garland about the film and his process. Here’s what we learned:
Can you speak about the importance of sound design in CIVIL WAR? Did you always intend for the film to be shown in IMAX?
Garland: I never dreamed we’d be able to show this in IMAX. And I was really pleased, and the people I worked with were extremely pleased, that that’s where we ended up. It’s a great environment to show a film. It’s not just the screen, it’s as you said, the sound system.
In terms of the evolution of [the sound design], I think what I should really say first and foremost is that I work and have worked for more than two decades with a really great sound designer [named] Glenn [Freemantle]. I’ve never not worked with him actually. And a lot of what you hear is not my work, it’s his work and it’s his thoughtfulness and it’s his understanding of the tone of the film. What I do is I cut the Film with an editor and then Glenn will take it away for a few weeks [after] we have a discussion, we talk about some of the ideas. In CIVIL WAR, a lot of that was about reality and it was about a mixture of silence and attack…Then Glenn takes it away and he just works on it and really what happens is I arrive a few weeks later to see what he’s done. Then we go through another process which is modulating and trying out little experiments and stuff. But the bulk of that is him working with his team in quite an autonomous way. So I just want to give the credit where it’s due.
Sound is extremely important. People kind of know [that] because if you watch a Horror film and it’s creeping you out and you’re at home, mute it, and suddenly it’s just not scary anymore. You take away the sound design and you take away the score and suddenly it all seems kind of empty. It might even become instantly a bit silly. It becomes the opposite of frightening almost immediately. So sound is hugely, hugely important in cinema.
Your previous films live in the science fiction/horror genres but CIVIL WAR does not. What made you decide to write this film?
Garland: The genre flows from the subject matter. The genre I saw this as was a war movie, but it could have been a Sci-Fi movie. I could have set it for example on a distant planet, and it would be [an] allegory…But it didn’t feel right because part of the currency of this film is about how much of this is real? How much of the dangers that are being offered up, how much are they real dangers? What would it take to get there? What are the behaviour patterns and thought patterns that could actually lead either America or my own country [the United Kingdom] or other countries around the world into this space?
Your films centre around strong female protagonists. Why do you gravitate towards a female point-of-view versus male?
Garland: In some ways I don’t really differentiate that much between a female point-of-view or a male point-of-view, which means I don’t ask – in some ways – too many questions of it. But I think it’s less political than it might seem. It doesn’t really contain a statement of any sort. I’m in my mid-’50s and I grew up watching films through the ’70s and ’80s and into the ’90s…a lot of them I absolutely love but in almost every movie, it would be a male lead. That’s just how films worked back then. And what that means is when I sit down to write a film, on some level I find it internally just slightly more boring if it’s a male lead because I feel like I’ve inhabited those stories so much. I find it just slightly more interesting [to write a female lead]…It’s like a 49 percent, 51 percent thing. It’s not a huge sort of urge. It doesn’t have an agenda. It’s got more to do with familiarity actually I think.
Is SPOILER dead at the end of the Movie?
Garland:*nods* [They are] brown bread as we would say in the UK, yep. *chuckles*
Elevation Pictures release CIVIL WAR in theatres on Friday, April 12, 2024.
Review here.
(Photo credit: Mr. Will Wong)
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