Sci-fi film takes rocky path to screen
In “Annihilation,” the new science-fiction film starring Natalie Portman and Jennifer Jason Leigh that opened Friday, humanity finds itself fighting against a stealth alien invasion. But the real struggle took place off-screen as the producers and the studio, Paramount, clashed over how to distribute an almost surreal film, based on the Jeff VanderMeer bestseller, that doesn’t play to the expectations of a mainstream, multiplex audience.
In one corner was producer David Ellison who, after the film fared poorly in test screenings, labeled it “too intellectual” and “too complicated” and reportedly wanted changes. In the other was producer Scott Rudin who wholeheartedly backed director Alex Garland, the man who took
the indie world by storm four years ago with the cult sci-fi hit “Ex Machina.”
But “Ex Machina” only cost $15 million to make while the effects-heavy “Annihilation” cost $55 million and Paramount, skittish after coming off a year of trying to force such box-office poison as “Ghost in the Shell,” “Baywatch,” “Monster Trucks,” and “Transformers: The Last Knight” down America’s throat, was getting nervous.
So, in its Solomon-like studio wisdom, Paramount split the difference. Rudin and Garland got to make the movie they wanted but international rights outside of the U.S., Canada and China were sold to Netflix in December so some money could be recouped if the film tanks in theaters.
All of this seems to have made Garland weary of the entire process. “This movie isn’t too smart,” he said by phone. “I think it’s kind of strange and it’s sort of challenging … I get the feeling that ‘too intellectual’ is used as a shorthand for not mainstream enough. But, on some level, it’s just like, ‘whatever’.”
Ultimately, Garland, 47, says the behind-the-scenes politics don’t matter too much as he was allowed to make the film according to his vision.
The plot, in which a group of scientists is sent into Area X - part of the country where an anomaly seems to have taken root and is spreading at first comes across as typical, boiler-plate science fiction. Where the book and the film take this idea is what makes them different.
At the urging of one of the producers of “Ex Machina,” Garland says he had read “Annihilation,” the first in VanderMeer’s “Southern Reach” trilogy, and was immediately impressed. Unlike more predictable alien-takeover stories, “Annihilation” is more concerned with mood than monsters though, as seen in the film, there are moments of visceral fear. He was enthralled by the book’s portrait of a shape-shifting landscape and a growing sense of dread.
“It was very original and had an incredibly strong atmosphere,” Garland said. “At the same time, in the back of my head, I was having a conversation with myself in how do you adapt this because it isn’t a no-brainer adaptation where you can cut and paste the story line … I thought the thing that is the most affecting me about the book is the atmosphere and it became a challenge as to how you adapt the atmosphere.”
One of the elements that makes “Annihilation” unique is that each of the scientists is a woman. It’s very unusual to have an all-female crew as the focus of a big-budget science-fiction film. But Garland says he doesn’t want to make a big deal out of that as it wasn’t a major point for VanderMeer.
“I had just worked on a film, ‘Ex Machina,’ that had a very specific argument and set of thoughts about gender and objectification and that kind of thing,” he said. “What interested me in (‘Annihilation’) was actually the absence of the argument.”
However, Garland is taking heat for casting Portman and Leigh as his lead characters. While the cast is filled with people of color - including Oscar Isaac, Tessa Thompson, Gina Rodriguez, Sonya Miznuo, Benedict Wong and David Gyasi - Portman’s character is of Asian descent in the book trilogy while Leigh’s is half-Native American.
A couple of days after I interviewed Garland, representatives for American Indians in Film and Television and Media Action Network for Asian Americans accused Garland of “whitewashing.” Even Portman came out and called the casting “problematic.”
Garland has defended himself in the press by saying the ethnic descriptions don’t appear in the books until the second novel and he had only read the first.
“This is an awkward problem for me, because I think whitewashing is a serious and real issue, and I fully support the groups drawing attention to it,” Garland said in a statement. “But the characters in the novel I read and adapted were not given names or ethnicities. … There was no studio pressure to cast white. The casting choices were entirely mine. As a middle-aged white man, I can believe I might at times be guilty of unconscious racism, in the way that, potentially, we all are. But there was nothing cynical or conspiratorial about the way I cast this movie.”
Garland’s next project will also take him to television as he’s developing an eight-part series set in San Francisco for FX about technology.
“It’s a tech thriller, I guess you’d say,” he said of the series expected to debut in 2019. “Specifically, it’s about big data and real extreme processing power and the implication of those two things. … It’s got a lot of science in it and it’s got a lot of philosophy in it. … So it’s slightly more in the mode of ‘Ex Machina’.”
That he’s working on a project for TV might seem a little surprising considering that Garland has been bemoaning publicly that much of the world won’t be able to see “Annihilation” on the big screen. However, Garland clarifies that he has nothing against streaming or television in general.
“The best drama I saw last year was not on the big screen. It was on the small screen. It was ‘The Handmaid’s Tale,’ which blew me away,” he said. “It’s not really about the medium. It’s more the intention. If you were going to make a film knowing it was for the small screen, you would make it differently. You’d do the effects differently, you’d do the sound design differently. My frustrations lie more in that area.
“I just feel pleased and lucky, really, that we got a chance to make [(Annihilation’) and that we managed to get the version we intended to be the one that exists. That doesn’t always happen.”