The Beach author Alex Garland on Parasite, Devs and why audiences are smarter than studios think
Author and director Alex Garland says Parasite’s recent Oscars sweep is proof we’re being “patronised” by studio bosses forcing feeding us superhero movies. So is Garland’s first foray into TV with a techno-thriller the antidote we need?
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UK director Alex Garland thinks Parasite’s recent sweep of the Oscars is proof positive that audiences are smarter than studios give them credit for.
Ahead of the release of his new sci-fi series, the cerebral, mind-bending Devs, Garland says that film and TV viewers are being “patronised” by a studio system that’s propped up by superhero movies and action blockbusters and over-reliant on focus groups to the point that new and original ideas struggle to get a look-in.
“There were a lot of people out there who dug Parasite and if you proposed Parasite within a focus group, nobody would say ‘yeah, that’s a good idea, go ahead and make it’.
“And it’s partly the job of the people making the films or television programs to not pre-anticipate what the audience will want but to make something that comes from the heart and hope it chimes with people and hope that it corresponds with their heart.
“People are more sophisticated and more nuanced than we are giving them credit for and somehow the idea never quite gets the traction that it should do.
“You get a wonderful film like Parasite, which very deservedly swept the Oscars and then you get the f---king President of America laying into it and complaining about it almost like he has decided to embody the stupidity of focus groups. It’s incredible, absolutely unbelievable.
“So I believe in the audiences and I am more sceptical about the focus groups.”
Garland first shot to fame as a writer when his 1996 debut novel The Beach not only became a bestseller, but also a pop-culture touchstone for Generation X.
Somewhat overwhelmed by its popularity – it was also made into a film starring Leonardo DiCaprio – and the cooler reaction to his follow-up novel, The Tesseract, Garland moved into writing for film.
He proved to be a natural for the medium, penning smart scripts for Danny Boyle’s zombie hit 28 Days Later, the acclaimed adaptation of Never Let Me Go and the cult comic book action-thriller Dredd.
Garland then stepped behind the camera himself and his debut feature, the compelling, claustrophobic artificial-intelligence drama Ex Machina, made many critics’ top ten lists in 2014, and his screenplay earned an Oscar nomination.
Despite its rave reviews, Ex Machina and its follow-up Annihilation both struggled to gain wide cinema releases, with the main complaint seeming to be that they were both too smart and ambitious in their subject matter to find a mainstream audience.
Garland happily agrees that his work is “not all that accessible”.
Indeed he demands a level of participation from the audience that actively engages in the complex topics he is drawn to.
“If they want a passive experience, then it just won’t work because they will only get half a story because the other half of the story is provided by the audience and their engagement in the ideas,” he says.
“And if they don’t bring that to the party then nothing is going to happen. So it’s a specific kind of audience who want to do that. They want to step into it and be a participant in it.”
After pondering the weighty questions of artificial intelligence and what it means to be human in Ex Machina and the human race’s propensity for self-destruction in Annihilation, Garland is aiming even higher in Devs, his first foray into television.
In the eight-part techno-thriller about a giant tech company and its groundbreaking technology dreamt up by a mysterious computer genius, Garland tackles the implications of voluntarily sharing our most personal data with big data companies we know little about and the big question of whether human beings truly have free will or whether our lives are already laid out for us by previously existing causes.
Garland says he’s deeply troubled by the proliferation of tech companies that are “as rich and powerful as nation states but they have absolutely no checks and balances and no meaningful oversight”.
“Worse than that, for me they have a very culty aspect about them,” he says. “They offer you products, and the product contains within it an idea that your life will be improved – so there is some kind of key being unlocked by it.
“The leaders take on slightly Messianic qualities and the product launches become like church meetings – there is something evangelical about them and all of that gives me the creeps and I think it’s worth examining and worth being suspicious of.”
Having been singed by his cinema experiences, Garland says that moving into TV has been an overwhelmingly positive experience. Not only did the US pay-TV giant FX back his vision to the hilt, it enabled him to tell a story that he simply didn’t know how to tell in a two-hour film. While he acknowledges there are plenty of classic sci-fi films, the extended format of a TV series gave him the luxury to dig a little deeper and indulge his vivid imagination.
“One of the things that sci-fi on television can do is to hold up an idea which is like a crystal,” he says. “And as the seasons go on, or the episodes go on, you can turn the crystal and see it from all these different angles and I think cinema typically has to choose one.
“And sci-fi loves ideas – it’s really an idea based medium so what you get is the ability to expand on an idea and develop it and mutate it.”
While Garland has imagined some nightmare scenarios resulting from technology running wild, he says he’s ultimately a fan of science and believes it still holds the key to the future of humanity.
“The thing that makes scientists different from most of the rest of us is that if a scientist has a belief or a theory that they believe in very strongly and then someone disproves the theory, they will then abandon it,” he says. “Whereas typically the rest of us, when we get confronted with contradictory evidence, what we do is ignore the evidence. So there is a kind of rigour and decency and honesty in science that I like very much and you could say it just embodies rational thought and if anything is going to dig us out of the trouble we are in, I would say it’s rational thought.”
Devs, tonight, 8.30pm, Fox Showcase.
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