Director continues moody sci-fi genre

Alex Garland director of Ex Machina
Alex Garland director of Ex Machina

A few years back, I had the opportunity to speak to a director about the difficulty of casting for royalty. It seemed a tricky business, being able to capture the particular confluence of wealth, prestige and to the manner born that would read to a movie audience as suitably removed from the rest of us. The actress in question was Alicia Vikander, a stunningly beautiful young Swede, starring in one of her first major roles (Caroline Mathilde in A Royal Affair), who absolutely radiated that particular and exacting kind of sophistication.

Speaking with writer/director Alex Garland, whose new film Ex Machina stars Vikander as Ava, a very realistic robot with advanced artificial intelligence, created by a man named Nathan Bateman (Oscar Isaac), a half-mad billionaire Internet mogul who brings in one of his high-level programmers, Caleb Smith (Domhnall Gleeson), in order to apply the so-called Turing Test to determine if Ava passes muster as a true AI, I get to ask a similar question: How difficult is it to cast for robotics?

"The hardest thing isn't choosing who is the right actor," he says, "it's whether you can get them to agree to do it. When I saw Alicia in A Royal Affair, I'm thinking she's acting opposite Mads Mikkelsen, and yet, I'm watching her the whole time. And Mads Mikkelsen is an unbelievably charismatic, magnetic actor, but every scene she's in, she's what I'm interested in."

He had a similar appreciation for Isaac, who, with this role and his recent efforts in such disparate works as A Most Violent Year and The Two Faces of January, has suddenly entered the mix of incredibly talented actors who can play either a lead or supporting part with equal depth and honesty.

"I saw him opposite Leonardo DiCaprio in Body of Lies, and I felt he was completely unintimidated. So many actors are intimidated by that guy, but he wasn't at all. He owned the scene with so little screen time, you just notice that."

Garland, a successful screenwriter making his feature directorial debut, is known for his atmospheric sci-fi leanings. Working with director Danny Boyle, Garland wrote the brilliant early zombie prototype thriller 28 Days Later, released in 2002, and five years later, wrote Boyle's criminally underappreciated spooky deep-space drama Sunshine. His new film retains some of those films' existential dread, while focusing on the character interactions of this unusual trio. Nathan is brash and readily dismissive, especially to Caleb, his young would-be protege, who quickly learns his boss isn't quite who he projects himself to be. Prone to snide dismissiveness, Nathan drinks heavily and does his best to control his interactions with everyone -- not for nothing is his domicile/laboratory quite literally in the wilderness of the mountains, only accessible via helicopter -- while foisting his agenda on Caleb, who becomes ever more taken with the beautiful Ava, even as he's putting her through her conversational paces.

In interviews, Garland is forthright and unassuming, ready with an answer without seeming as if he's simply reciting from a script (when asked what else he would be doing if not for film, his response is immediate and uncategorical: "Formula 1 race car driver," I pause to see if he's saying this as a joke, the way a young child might answer "astronaut" if you ask them what they want to be when they grow up, but he's dead serious). He's candid, without a lot of time-wasting egocentricities, a quality you imagine he imparts upon a film set.

The other significant element to his casting process focused on the intelligence of his actors. Nathan and Caleb are both trained scientists and extremely gifted intellectually. While Ava seems more wide-eyed and innocent at first, you quickly discover she's willfully masking her true intentions from everyone else. The result is a resolutely intelligent film in which smart people speak in a manner that seems suitably brainy, not always the easiest thing to convey. Of Isaac, in particular, Garland is effusive in his assessment: "Some actors are good at acting intelligent, but he is truly very smart," he says. "If one of the actors had started talking about the part and talking about science in a way that was just plain wrong, then even if I thought they were a really good actor, I would have thought it probably wouldn't work out."

For a film built around big ideas, it also manages a fair amount of emotional give-and-take because of the characters' personalities involved, which is somewhat surprising given Garland's particular approach to his craft. Unlike many other writers, whose work gets tied irrevocably to their ego and sense of self, Garland approaches a script exactly the way a mechanic appraises a bit of machinery; it either works properly or it doesn't. "It's like understanding how a car engine works," he says, "and you're trying to tune it and it isn't firing right, it's sounding wrong, so you turn a couple of screws and tighten some bolts until you think it sounds better."

Because of this somewhat clinical approach, it enables Garland to coolly fold his cards and live to fight another day in the event that something goes intrinsically wrong with his script that he can't salvage ("I've abandoned many stories after several drafts of a script because I realize there's something deep in the equation that's broken," he says. "I'm very unemotional about dropping stories. Losing a script you've worked on for eight months is no big deal, you've got to come up with another, otherwise, you're not going to have a job, anyway.").

Despite his apparent pragmatism, you get the strong sense he still feels very passionate about the film's central conceit: Human beings are forever going to be pushing forward in technology, testing the limits of what can be conceived of, which is an essential and necessary thing, in his mind, even if we're unprepared for the consequences.

"I love big-tech companies, because they're doing work like NASA did in the '60s," he says, warming to the point. "Always pushing us forward, and it's kind of blue sky. There was no real good reason to go to the moon, except to my way of looking at it, there's every good reason to go, just not a practical one."

Still, as much as he loves the way Big Tech pushes the limits of human discovery, the idea for the film came in part from his unease with the unmitigated power these companies have amassed over us in the process. "Google is unbelievably powerful," he says. "Much, much more powerful than we can even comprehend and the power is going to continue to grow. It has never ever, ever been a good idea for humans to have unmodified, unregulated power. It's just as simple as that."

And as to the question of whether, as films and books have been suggesting for decades, we will ever develop true, self-aware AI (one that, as is so often the case in these stories, turns against us or not), Garland isn't sure, but makes a strong point about the nature of the question in the first place: "If it can happen, it will happen," he says with a shrug. "In those terms, the argument about whether we should do this or not is a pointless one. It's not a question of should/shouldn't. If it's possible, someone somewhere will do it. The question is, how do we deal with it when it comes?"

MovieStyle on 04/24/2015

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