Civil War director Alex Garland on ChatGPT, 28 Years Later and why Britain is like a 'pet cat'

Alex Garland has directed his last film. America is in its second civil war. In Washington, a three-term president hails his victories while California and Texas have teamed up as the “Western Forces”. Kirsten Dunst and Wagner Moura star in aptly-named Civil War as journalists on a mission to interview the president before his regime tumbles down. 

Dunst and Moura, with Priscilla’s Cailee Spaeny along for the ride, bear witness to close-quarters firefights and on-camera atrocities, refugee camps and homelessness, all shot in shuddering close-up. The film itself induces the kind of sustained jaw-clenching nine out of ten dentists hate.

It’s also controversial. Of course it is: the US is about to go into an election where Donald Trump has promised to be a dictator on day one – don’t worry, day one only – if he wins. Some have said it’s dangerous to release such a film in an election year, while others have latched onto Garland saying left and right are just “ideological arguments about how to run a state” as proof of a suspicious both-sides detachment.

But its heart is more personal: The journalists Garland grew up around. “My dad was a cartoonist on a newspaper, and his friends were journalists. They were around the kitchen table, they were actually even living with us at points,“ he says. Garland’s godfather was a foreign correspondent, as is his brother’s godfather, who he lived with in Manila for six months during his gap year, seeing the lifestyle first hand.

“With a lot of those people, they could be quite complex individuals – they might be sarcastic, or silly, or acerbic, or funny or kind or grumpy, all sorts of things.” he says. “Just like the characters in the film, they could be conflicted or compromised as individuals. But underneath them they had a principle to them, which was about reporting. Unbiased reporting. They were quite fierce about it.“

Here we get onto democracy, and his assertion that journalism has turned its back on unbiased reporting of the facts. “When journalism is less trusted, that causes an instant problem. Not a problem in five years, or 10 years, but immediately. It is concurrent with a lack of trust in journalism. That bothered me,” he says. 

“I said to someone who works in film: ‘Oh I think I’m going to make a film about journalists.’ They said: ‘Don’t do that, everyone hates journalists.’ And I thought, well, then that’s madness. That’s like saying everyone hates doctors. You actually require journalists. So that made me want to do it even more, I think.”

Garland is known for sci-fi – which for many comes with an idea of bold predictions. But as late novelist Ursula K Le Guin put it, science fiction is not predictive, it’s descriptive. Civil War has no aliens, but by that rubric it fits into the rest of Garland’s work: 2014’s Oscar-winning AI thriller Ex Machina, TV gem Devs, Rory Kinnear simulator Men, and trippy eco-horror Annihilation.

“If I look at, say, Ex Machina, there was a lot of conversation and talk about AI and what its potential was and where it could be going and what the implications of that were. So that was just a reaction to a conversation that was happening at that moment,” he says. 

“Devs, a TV show I did, is in a way it’s about… it’s about lots of things. It’s about quantum physics and things like that, but it’s also about the way the bosses of big tech companies are seen as geniuses even though really what they are is entrepreneurs. But because they’re entrepreneurs in the tech field, and the tech field makes billions and billions of dollars, an assumption is made that they’re geniuses. In other words, the sci-fi films are a reaction to some kind of conversation happening at that moment, and this film is exactly the same.”

Garland explains he feels embarrassed when his work is described as “prescient”, and admits – despite being linked closely to the topic of AI in the popular imagination – that he’s never dabbled with ChatGPT. “I’m quite distant from that all that world,” he says. “I don’t even know the form in which one accesses ChatGPT. Is it through your computer? Do you need an app or what? Total mystery.”

Viewers may be expecting Podcast: The Movie, a talky rumination on How We Got Here. Instead, facts are set out, but characters do not spend long scenes arguing about politics. “I was interested in a conversation. Personally, I think there’s tonnes of politics. I could point to it quite clearly, but I’m not going to. Because that’s not the terms on which this functions,” he says.

“My favourite film, personally, I saw last year, the film I loved the most was Anatomy of a Fall. It left so much for me to think about as an audience member. It invited me towards it, instead of telling me everything, and answering things in a particular kind of way, it made me drawn in. I really appreciated it. There’s a really interesting film of this, last year’s The Zone of Interest. It presupposes many things on the part of the audience, and none of them are problematic to presuppose. 

“There are films out there, and if people want them, that will clearly, cleanly pose and answer every single question in a way that nobody is left in any doubt on the position that the film is taking. But not every film has to be like that. It’s just not a requirement of cinema.”

There’s a side effect to this. Watching Civil War, it’s easy to think the chaos tearing through Baltimore and New York and Washington isn’t really about those cities. This is happening all over the world.

“Right now, we’re sitting in London. London, England, Britain, United Kingdom, the whole thing. We have an issue with populist, polarised politics, here and now,” says Garland.

This is worldwide, he says. “Clearly there’s something big happening. There’s a commonality. The commonality is populism and polarisation. And also the absence of the check and balance to that, which I think is a trusted media,” he says. 

“But it’s set in America because America is by far and away the biggest, most powerful country in the world. Although we may have the same problems in Britain, the difference is that – the way I see it is something like this – if the world is a big mattress, Britain’s like your pet cat. If it rolls over on the bed nothing happens. America’s this great big guy, if that rolls over in the bed the whole mattress shifts, so you might as well make it about the mattress shifter as opposed to the pet.”

Civil War is reportedly A24’s biggest-budget production. It’s showing in IMAX. Adverts are on the sides of buses. Taking a join-the-dots approach takes more bravery, perhaps, than with a small-budget indie.

“To be really honest, if I thought too much about those things, I suspect it would paralyse me. I would never get out the gate. I just wouldn’t try.

“Honestly, also? Making a film? Huge privilege. If you get the chance, you might as well do exactly the thing you would love to do because you may never get another chance. In fact, statistically, you won’t get another chance. So, may as well go for it.”

Civil War could be Garland’s last film behind the camera. He says he’s done with “being the person sitting alone in that seat.” Now he’s freed up to write without having to picture himself as a director. The big project on the horizon is 28 Years Later, the long-awaited 28 Days Later threequel, which has recently been confirmed to be in the works, written by Garland and directed by Danny Boyle. Garland confirms a script is written, and the duo are now in ‘prep’, figuring out the logistics of actually shooting the picture.

Commonly thought of as a zombie film, the Cillian Murphy-starring flick in fact centres around a pandemic which has gotten out of hand. Coming back to the project after the world has been through a pandemic, will the film need to be different?

“I hadn’t thought of it, that post-pandemic thing. I don’t know if it will address it or not. Probably not. Or maybe helplessly, unconsciously, I don’t know. In any case, the thing was, Danny really wanted to do it, and I think Danny’s really interesting and I was really happy to join in and be released from the director side of it.”

Civil War is in cinemas from 12 April.

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