Words matter. These are the best Alex Garland Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
My approach to directing is to not do very much directing. I’m mainly interested in what the creative group individually and together are thinking.
The first draft of ‘Ex Machina’ is extremely different than the finished film. That would be like 10% of the original draft stayed into the shooting script.
The scripts of ‘The Wire’ are fantastic – the scripts of ‘Breaking Bad,’ the scripts of ‘Mad Men,’ the scripts of ‘The Sopranos,’ the scripts of ‘Battlestar Galactica.’ You could keep going on. They’re incredibly well written.
When you encounter people in life – like a chance encounter at a bar or wherever you happen to be – you make these incredibly quick, quite intricate decisions about people based on very small amounts of coded information. We’re good at that.
I think everything I write is from an atheist perspective. I mean, it’s partly from an atheist perspective because I’m an atheist, and I’m just not really interested in religious-based questions.
If someone says Wes Anderson is an auteur, I’ll believe it 100 percent. Fine. He’s an auteur, but I’m not.
If I was being very honest about it, probably more honest than I should be, ’28 Days Later’ was a reaction to ‘The Beach’ in some ways because I felt it lacked a kind of aggression in it.
When I see ‘Sunshine,’ I see a film that part of me is kind of very proud of and another part of me is very sad about, so it’s a really complicated film for me. And I’ve never been really able to resolve all that in myself.
Look, when AIs come up, they’re not going to be like us. A self-aware, sentient AI is not going to be like a human.
I didn’t like being a name attached to a book.
‘The Beach’ novel, in my mind, was, in some respects, subversive.
I’ve written original material before, where I’ve come up with the idea and the characters myself, and that’s definitely very different to working with someone else’s characters and stories.
It slightly depends on your perspective, sort of how you look at these things, but when I sit down to write a script, I’m not planning to write a script; I’m planning to make a film, and so I only see the script as being just a step there.
Really original material is quite hard to find.
I don’t write on set. I also – in a funny way, I don’t really differentiate between the writing and directing. I think it’s all sort of the same thing.
What I see in science is a lot of imagination referring to things that are fundamental to what we are. Our cells, our history, our future, our place in the universe, our lack of place in the universe. That’s poetry as far as I’m concerned.
I didn’t intend to be a novelist. I didn’t intend to be anything. I thought I’d be a journalist.
When I’m really fixated on a bit of writing, I can easily spend six days without leaving the house and barely leaving my room.
Sequels are generally done in a rush. They’re done with a sense of urgency. The first time, you spend a long time developing to get it over the line. The second time, you don’t. Your expectations are different, and your motivations are different.
