It’s refreshing to play a woman who’s not a damsel in distress…
CIVIL WAR STAR KIRSTEN DUNST AND WRITER-DIRECTOR ALEX GARLAND SIT DOWN WITH RACHAEL DAVIS TO DISCUSS THE NEW DYSTOPIAN FILM ABOUT A VERY DISUNITED STATES
“THIS is a warning,” says star Kirsten Dunst of Alex Garland’s Civil War, a near-future dystopian movie set at the climax of a multiparty civil war which involves the entire United States.
The latest film from 28 Days Later writer and Ex Machina director Alex blends survival horror with war for a high-octane thrill ride through a recognisable but dystopian America that’s eating itself alive.
At the heart of the story are war journalists Lee, a photographer played by Spider-Man star Kirsten; Joel, a reporter played by Narcos’ Wagner Moura; and Sammy, a veteran journalist played by Dune’s Stephen McKinley Henderson.
We meet them in a war-torn New York, with Lee and Joel planning to get to Washington DC to secure an interview with the dictatorial president [Nick Offerman] before rebel factions advance on the capital.
Sammy tags along for the ride, aiming for the front line in Charlottesville, Virginia, while the trio is also joined by young aspiring photo-journalist Jessie, played by Priscilla’s Cailee Spaeny, on the treacherous journey down the east coast.
“I just wanted to make journalists the heroes,” explains Alex, 53. “I felt journalists have been under attack in a really complicated way for quite a long time, and people, in many ways, don’t trust them anymore.
“But there are journalists out there doing incredibly good work.
“And the question is not whether they’re doing good work or not, it’s: ‘Why is their good work not getting traction? And why are they being attacked in the way they’re being attacked?’
“So I wanted to put them at the heart of it. I grew up around journalists, my dad worked on a newspaper. I like journalists and I think they’re necessary and important. And that’s it.”
It’s interesting to watch the journalists observe and document the horrors of war, particularly the contrast between the experienced Lee and Joel and fresh recruit Jessie.
Their job requires them to get into the gory details of the conflict, literally dodging bullets to get the right shot and experience the story, but they can’t intervene, only observe, and it’s clear how witnessing so much violence has impacted them.
“We had a two-week rehearsal process, so we watched a lot of documentaries, and a lot of films,” explains Kirsten, 41, of her own preparation.
The star – who is married to Breaking Bad actor Jesse Plemons, who also appears in the film – explains that one of the most effective ways for getting into battlescarred Lee’s headspace was a “Marie Colvin documentary, called Under The Wire”. It tells the story of the war correspondent Marie Colvin, and photographer Paul Conroy, who reported from Syria in 2012. Colvin was killed in the war-torn country when the building she was in was shelled.
“She [was] a journalist, not a photo-journalist, but the way that she enters into a war zone and the way she was with her colleagues... just honouring the people... not anything in terms of accolades, or ‘look at me’, or anything like that,” says Kirsten, who was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for 2021’s The Power of the Dog. “She was very much a woman on the ground that risked her life to tell the truth.”
Kirsten adds: “It’s nice to be part of a bigger film where it’s a woman that has an important real job, and who’s not glamorised in any way, or a damsel in distress in a big movie...
“It’s refreshing, I think. It’ll be refreshing for everyone.”
Even for a writer-director as accomplished in horrors, thrillers and post-apocalyptic stories as Alex, writing this war film meant a delicate balance of entertainment and thrills while not glorifying or romanticising warfare.
The Londoner, who was Oscarnominated for Best Writing, Original Screenplay for Ex Machina, loves to play with genre.
“I am just a genre guy, that’s the space I work in,” he says.
He also enjoys employing the shorthand that comes with genre work. “People get a set of rules quite quickly, because they know the sort of grammar of that genre,” he says.
“So that allows you to move quite quickly. But it does something else as well, which is that every now and then you can then subvert it.
“Because the expectations both work in your favour, as helping propel something, but also to undermine or change something, which could be surprising or shocking.”
One way Alex subverts genres and plays with tension in Civil War is through his use of music, often laying pop or hip hop tracks over violent scenes of warfare.
“The tone of a bit of combat will completely change according to the bit of music you put with it,” he explains. “Apocalypse Now, one of the greatest films ever made, has an opening sequence of napalm sort of blossoming over palm trees with helicopters buzzing around, dissolving to ceiling fans, with The Doors playing over it. And in effect, what that is, is it’s darkly inviting. It pulls you into it in a certain kind of way. And it’s not exactly ‘anti’.
“So then the question was, how to be jarring, how not to be romantic. It was those two tensions.”
Alex also leans on a recurring motif of beauty in horror. There are gorgeous sunny days, beautiful landscape shots, and even a look at the artistry in war photography, and the director says he thinks “it’s a true thing” that there is always light in the darkness.
“There can be terrible events happening, or a terrible moment... You could imagine, let’s say, something absolutely catastrophic happening in your life, and walking out, and at that moment, it’s dawn, and the sky is absolutely stunning.
“You get this strange dissonance of what one’s having to contend with inside, to what the world is showing you at that moment. Sometimes horror is horrifying. And sometimes it has this strange dissonant addition next to it. That’s just the way it is.”
It’s hard not to question whether Civil War might be prescient.
With a US presidential election looming and Donald Trump looking set to face Joe Biden once more, it’s a pertinent time for such a discussion on the big screen.
“You know, there’s discourse all over the world, so it felt real the way we were making the film,” says Kirsten when asked how plausible the picture Civil War paints might be. “This is [saying], don’t take your democracy for granted... I think that this is a warning, kind of, in a way, and an anti-war film, for me.”
I just wanted to make journalists the heroes Director Alex Garland on his motivation for Civil War