Alex Garland reveals the inspiration behind 'reactive' thriller Civil War

Congratulations on the film. First off. I think my ears are still ringing. I saw it in the IMAX last week and I think it’s. And they played it loud. They played it loud. You’ll be pleased to know I I am pleased. It’s it’s good if it’s loud. Yeah. But first and foremost you are a writer. So I think I’m more interested in what was the Germany idea. Is it something you’ve had for a long time or was it quite reactive to? It’s probably different. Different aspects of it go back sort of longer and shorter amounts of time but but basically yes, what you said it’s reactive. I I tend to, I mean basically I’m a genre writer so I work within some genre or another sci-fi, horror, thriller, whatever it is. And but then I’m always using something really just something I’m interested in that’s happening at that moment. Which could be to do with technology or just just something that is occurring at that time that for some reason sort of provokes a set of you know, thoughts and responses and then turning that into a story. So this is just like all the others, really reactive is the right word I think. Yeah. Was there ever a moment in the thought process for it where you thought maybe have it in the UK or is it always AUS focus story. I did actually think about it in the UK some points because because in some respects it’s a story about. I mean, there’s one part of the story which is about journalism and the the function of journalism and the nature of journalism, just things to do with journalism. And that could absolutely apply in the UK or the US or many, many other countries. It’s also a story about polarisation and populism and that could absolutely also apply here. But my my sort of, I think the way I, I look at it is something like if the planet Earth is a big mattress, if the UK rolls over on the mattress, it’s like if you have a baby sleeping next to you and it rolls over and you don’t really notice. If America rolls over, the whole mattress sort of shifts and we we look to, I want to say we, I mean pretty much the world looks to America sees what’s happening, understands things about American politics sometimes that we don’t even understand about our own country. So it it made sense in in all sorts of different ways to set it there. And as much as this is a cautionary tale, what we’ve recent headlines and two wars ongoing, is this a future that you can foresee or is it something you feel a bit more hopeful about putting out a cautionary tale like this? I don’t know. I mean, look, you can foresee all futures in a way. I mean, it sort of depends on a sequence of events. I would say though to not sort of be evasive, there is some anger in the film quite a lot and there’s some concern. So in that respects it could be a cautionary tale and did the there’s a lot of imagery within this that did evoke a lot of particularly like 20 day, 28 days later has that cut did working on this has that informed your thoughts about revisiting that world. So I’m curious like what what imagery I was thinking, particularly the opening in New York, the empty streets there and like an abandoned winter Wonderland that those sort of images that felt quite post apocalyptic. It’s interesting, I mean I could say some stuff about where 28 days came from in a way, but all I’ll say is that the imagery is really drawn from either observed things or found things or so. So lived or observed or found or news footage and documentary footage. And that’s the grammar of the thing. For example, the the Christmas decorations you mentioned, they were not production designed. They were found. They were. We were driving through Atlanta looking for locations and we just fat. We came across them abandoned by the side of the road. Someone had put on a kind of Christmas fair. Christmas had been months and months ago. The person that put it on went bankrupt and just left their stuff there, to the annoyance of the farmer who then had all this crap strewn around his fields and we said we’ll use that and and pay for its disposal. So you know, let us take that on. It is a happy accident. But it’s also directly relates to what I was saying, which is that everything in there has a real world, is either real world or has a real world parallel. And I think one of the things about the real world is that it’s in a way, it’s stranger and more surreal than people typically think it is. And things that may look very constructed were actually just found. Thank you very much for your time, Alex. I think this is a film that people are going to be talking about for years to come. So. Oh, congratulations. That’s that’s very kind. Thank you very much. Cheers.