ON THE FIXATION THAT BUILT ANNIHILATION
British screenwriter and director bluntly sticks up for brainy sci-fi movies
Early test screenings of sci-fi thriller
Annihilation had some viewers complaining the film was “too intellectual” and “too complicated.”
Alex Garland, the film’s writer/ director, doesn’t hold back in his response.
“I don’t really give a s--t,” he says during a recent Toronto interview.
“I don’t believe in it, as a bit of phrasing, nor do I actually think the film is very intellectual. I think it’s quite intuitive. There’s a requirement to have an open mind, I think, but that in itself is not intellectual.”
Tell that to Paramount Pictures — and Garland certainly did, which explains his evident weariness and frustration, a grey mood that matches his attire.
Reacting to those negative test screenings, studio Paramount opted to release Annihilation theatrically only in Canada and the U.S. this weekend, and later in China, with the Netflix online service covering the rest of the world.
Adds Garland: “Annihilation is not more intellectual, say, than a bit of music that you can subjectively respond to and think that’s a beautiful bit of music or an ugly bit of music . . . I think the use of that word is sort of lazy . . . what it really means is the person watching it — the person making that statement — felt confused. But that’s a different thing.
“And it’s also something that I think belongs to a kind of contempt for moviegoers. I make (movies) as thoughtful as I can.”
He certainly does. Ex Machina, his 2014 feature debut as both writer and director, won multiple awards (including an Oscar) for its spellbinding take on humans interacting with artificial intelligence. The film helped make stars of Alicia Vikander, Domhnall Gleeson, Oscar Isaac and Sonoya Mizuno, the latter two of whom are in Annihilation.
The 47-year-old Briton specializes in elevating sci-fi and horror themes, imparting them with deeper meaning. He wrote the screenplays for 28 Days Later, Sunshine, Never Let Me Go and Dredd, and also authored the novels The Beach and The Tesseract that later became films.
Annihilation was right in his wheelhouse. It’s based on the first novel of the award-winning Southern Reach
Trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer, an author who suffers no fools in his approach to sci-fi, which keeps character description and narrative exposition to a bare minimum.
Garland appreciates that lean approach. He insists he “definitely” didn’t read the other two books in the
Southern Reach Trilogy while writing the screenplay for Annihilation, he didn’t dwell on the story’s all-female protagonists and he believes that sci-fi stories are the “bravest” ones: Word is you resisted reading Au
thority and Acceptance — books two and three of the Southern Reach Trilogy — while writing and directing Annihilation. But weren’t you interested in where the story was headed and perhaps making a franchise out of the trilogy? No, definitely not. In fact, ( Annihila
tion) was specifically not written that way. I did it before the other two books were written . . . I don’t want to work on franchises. I want the story to be the thing that is experienced, not with a built-in ellipsis that suggests that there should be more. Also, life is pretty short and I don’t want to spend time remaking the thing I’ve just done. I’m just not interested. It’s really cool for people who want to do it, but I don’t.
Unusually for a movie and novel like this, the main characters are all women, with Natalie Portman’s Lena leading her investigative team into mysterious Area X towards an energy-radiating lighthouse. Was this part of the reason why you want to make Annihilation?
I’m not really sure, and it’s a tricky question for me to answer that . . . What I would say is that in regard to that aspect of the casting, one of the things that I thought was important was the absence of a discussion about it within the film, and more generally it’s the absence of the argument that’s more interesting than the argument itself.
So, if I then talk about it, I’m undermining the absence of it. It’s a complicated thing. I wasn’t oblivious to it, put it that way. There’s a lot of water imagery in the film, and water is a female symbol, representing the womb and life energy — and there are other female symbols.
There is indeed womb symbology. In fact, there’s both male symbology in the lighthouse and womb symbology in the chamber underneath. You’re literally the first person who’s mentioned that, but you’re right.
You’ve used the expression “my particular fixation” to describe what interests you in storytelling and moviemaking. How would you define this fixation?
I always just know what it is, because it’s the thing that’s in my head, that I can’t stop turning over . . . I will get fixated on a thought or a subject matter and then go as far as I can along the lines dictated by the thought.
What is it that locks me into something? It’s usually a puzzle. In this instance ( Annihilation), it was something to do with self-destruction and there being a kind of counterintuitive aspect to self-destruction. Although some of us are obviously self-destructive, most of us aren’t, and the self-destruction is quite well hidden.
But regardless of whether it’s hidden, if you get to know someone well, you find where those things are, if you choose to look for them — or choose to notice them, actually . . . and once you’ve realized that self-destruction is not just common but constant, in some respects, you have to ask why . . . and that is basically what the film is doing. And it’s presenting an answer; there’s an answer embedded within it. It seems to me the most interesting stories are science fiction.
To me they often are, too. They’re often the bravest stories, I think. They wear their big ideas lightly. They’re not self-conscious about them. They’re not embarrassed about them — and they also don’t piss about. They go for it. And I find it engaging. It’s like talking to an enthusiast rather than someone who’s trying to keep their cards close to their chest.