Interview: Alex Garland of “Ex Machina”

Posted on May 1, 2015 at 3:39 pm

Alex Garland is the screenwriter of thought-provoking sci-fi films like “28 Days Later” and “Never Let Me Go.” He wrote and for the first time directed “Ex Machina,” a fascinating story about Caleb, a computer programmer (Domhnall Gleeson), invited to the remote home of Nathan, a reclusive genius (Oscar Isaac), to evaluate a new artificial intelligence persona in the body of a lovely female robot called Ava, with the exquisite face and voice of actress Alicia Vikander. Nathan tells Caleb to perform a “Turing test” but as he and we learn, he is really the one being tested. There’s a reason the Turing test is blind. Ava’s programming and appearance are designed to play into Caleb’s susceptibilities.

I loved talking to Garland about the film.

You must know Domhnall Gleeson pretty well by now. But this was your first time working with Oscar Isaac, right?

It is the third movie we have worked on together. So we’ve known each other backwards. Not only that, the first movie he ever worked on, “28 Days Later,” was with his dad. So out of five movies four of them have been with Gleeson so I know that clan and I know Domhnall really very well. We’re friends. So casting him is different. I just call him up and say, “Look man, there is this thing, I really think it would be good, would you take a look?” The thing about Oscar was I have seen him in stuff like Ridley Scott’s “Body of Lies,” set in the Middle East, and he is acting opposite Leonardo DiCaprio, which can freak people out, and I was thinking, “He is just owning every scene, and what is he doing? How is he owning it?” I can’t see what he’s doing, he is relaxed and he is so natural, an incredibly naturalistic performance but also very magnetic, a sort of gravity suck performance that just pulls you towards it. And so there’s something fascinating about him. Every time I saw him it might be in a bad movie but he’d good.

When you hire an actor it’s like a three years lag in a funny way. Everybody starts talking about these guys before they really hit and everybody knew Oscar was good. That was the word going around, this guy was really good. I knew he was good and then I met him and he was really smart. Again not all good actors are smart. They can project smart, they can act smart but they may not actually be smart. He is really smart and by the end of that meeting I knew he was right for Nathan. And so I got this growing sense of anxiety through the meeting. You start to think, “What if I don’t get him?” I know that there are three other movies trying to get him.

And then you get this crazy thing where you get to know this young man, he’s intelligent, he’s quite slim and he is articulate, he’s quite delicate, he is a guitar player and he says, “I’ll be there in 21/2 months.” and you think, “Yeah, we’ve got this slim young guy,” and he turns up, he’s like a bull, and I don’t know how he did it. And then you get used to this other person because Oscar, the guy you knew, vanished. You can’t find him anymore, he is gone. And instead, there is this powerful muscular, testosterone-driven alpha male and he dominates everything. Often working with him on set was like being in theater where you are watching a performance and I would lose track of all the things I should be watching because I’m completely locked into his performance. Just exactly like being at the theatre with terrific actor on stage. It is incredibly seductive and so you totally forget to say, “Cut.” And I really mean that, it’s not just a set of words that people say. But eventually you get used to it, then the film ends. And you meet Oscar three months later. He was over actually for the premiere of “Inside Llewyn Davis” where he was a completely different person and the bull is gone and the slender young guitar player guy is back again. Everything I just said vanishes. He vanishes part by part.

I didn’t recognize him at first in the trailer, with the shaved head and beard and the thick, muscular body.

It was a result of collaboration and conversation. I liked the idea that Nathan had a beard for various reasons partly because I’ve always being told in previous films when I would write a character with a beard that the studios hate beards, they used to hate beards because it kills international sales or some stupid reason like that. So I knew he had a beard and I knew that I wanted him to be physically powerful because he is a bully on an intellectual level and the implicit violence in him. Oscar arrived with a whole bunch of other things. One thing that Oscar felt that he needed was glasses. It was quite interesting, when he didn’t have classes he looked like a thug but when he wore glasses he was at least an intelligent thug. Somehow we’re taught that glasses make you look smart and it does kind of work. And eventually we settled on the shaved head and beard and he had the muscle mass and the glasses. And then the final thing he did which was really lovely and strange was his Bronx accent which he got from Kubrick because he loved the juxtaposition. Kubrick was is obviously an intelligent man who has this owlish look which Oscar often does if you watch his performance. He has this sort of owlish raised eyebrow look but this Bronx accent that is slightly incongruous.

Tell me about your location — that spectacular Juvet Hotel in Norway.

There’s something that is slightly kind of obscene in a way about this because to say it’s a low-budget film when it’s $15 million, which is obviously a massive amount of money, but in the world of film-making it’s turns out to be a small amount of money. So then what do you got, you’re telling a story about a guy owns the biggest tech company in the world, as rich as anything you can imagine with a property which needs to reflect his level of wealth. How does a low budget film create endless wealth? It is a sort of paradox. We found this beautiful spot in Norway. It wasn’t the just the architecture; it was also the landscape. Some of the mountain landscape was sort of chocolate boxy, a bit like Ansel Adams, too beautiful, too perfect. Norway had a kind of brutal bleak sort of aspect and these big powerful skies and these mountains that could kill you really and not care, with powerful sort of glaciers and rivers and stuff like that.

What do you see as the significance of the Turing test?

The Turing test is perceived as test of sentience but it is not, it is a language test. It’s a test to see if you can pass the Turing test.

Nathan does not abide by Asimov’s rules preventing robots from hurting a human.

He is doing a self-destructive thing. He’s working on successive machines each more successful and capable than the next. He knows that the intention is at some point one of these machines will outsmart him and when that happens it won’t be good for him. He knows that. He knows it won’t be good for him and he knows it probably won’t be good for us.

He’s very Darwinian about it.

He is very Darwinian and actually that was a very important aspect of this, that they are actually part of us, a continuation of us. We tend to see them as parallel. Either they get presented as a rival species or as a creation is like Frankenstein, semi-religious, where it is not your place to mess with God’s work. I was just trying to present it as a parental thing, the creation of a new consciousness, which is what parents do. And also those consciousnesses do rebel from us and do move on and actually what we ask of them is that they live longer than we do and have better lives. Always for me when she turns around and says to Nathan, “What is it like to have made something that hates you?” — it’s an adolescence.

Related Tags:

Meryl Streep Supports Women Screenwriters

Posted on April 28, 2015 at 3:59 pm

Meryl Streep has made a contribution to a lab program for women over 40 who write movies.

The only program of its kind, The Writers Lab evolved in recognition of the absence of the female voice in narrative film, along with the dearth of support for script development. The lab offers 8 promising films by women over 40 a springboard to production.

The Lab will take place September 18-20, 2015 at Wiawaka Center for Women on Lake George. Caroline Kaplan (Time Out of Mind, Personal Velocity), Kirsten Smith (Legally Blond, Ten Things I Hate About You), Jessica Bendinger (Bring It On, Aquamarine), Mary Jane Skalski (Win Win, The Station Agent), Gina Prince-Bythewood (Secret Life of Bees, Beyond the Lights) among others will be serving as mentors, pending scheduling. Mentors advise in one-on-one meetings with additional events to inspire artists to hone their creative vision. The Lab will take place September 18-20, 2015 at Wiawaka Center for Women on Lake George. Caroline Kaplan (Time Out of Mind, Personal Velocity), Kirsten Smith (Legally Blond, Ten Things I Hate About You), Jessica Bendinger (Bring It On, Aquamarine), Mary Jane Skalski (Win Win, The Station Agent), Gina Prince-Bythewood (Secret Life of Bees, Beyond the Lights) among others will be serving as mentors, pending scheduling. Mentors advise in one-on-one meetings with additional events to inspire artists to hone their creative vision.

For submission information or to apply, see the Writer’s Lab.

And here is Ms. Streep talking about why we need more women’s stories.

Related Tags:

Gender and Diversity Writers

Interview: Writer/Director Noah Baumbach of “While We’re Young”

Posted on April 2, 2015 at 3:18 pm

Writer/director Noah Baumbach talked to me about his new film, “While We’re Young,” starring Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts as a middle-aged couple. They befriend a young couple played by Adam Driver and Amanda Seyfried, and the movie has a wise and humorous take on the dreams and delusions of all four of them.

What do you miss about being younger?

I miss going to the doctor and being able to raise somewhat extreme worries about health or something. The doctor used to laugh and say, “You are fine, don’t worry.” Now when I go to the doctor I brought up something and he was like, “Maybe we should get a MRI.” I thought our thing was when I would bring up something and he would say it was nothing. I miss that.

Is there anything you don’t miss about being young, that you are glad you don’t have to do anymore?

I think I feel more myself than I did then. I wouldn’t say I’m relaxed but I feel less urgency in a funny way than I used to. I think in my 20’s I felt like: this is happening so I’ve got to get something done, there is no time, everybody’s doing something, what am I doing? I feel more at ease, maybe that’s not the word, but I feel better in that way.

Why are we so fascinated with the effortless coolness of young people?

It’s like the basis of body switching movies. We think we all could be better 25 year olds now or better 18 year olds now than we could then. It does work that way, so that’s totally understandable.

When do you feel a generational disconnect?

A lot of my friends who are in their 20s or 30s tend to have a kind of old-soul quality, they sort of feel older than their years. It comes up more in those conversations like “Where were you when…?” Like when Clinton was first elected, that’s always striking if they were kids then. My first election that I voted in was Dukakis. And then the reverse which is the movie obviously engages in which is them introducing me to stuff, in some cases stuff that I lived through and they didn’t but they are somehow in the way that they listen to music or whatever I’m able to appreciate it in a different way because it is sort of removed from its context.

Why do you think this film is being described as your most “accessible?”

Well, my last film was black and white. And this time I was trying to make my version of a kind of comedy of marriage and there’s more of tradition of those kinds of movies. And so even though it might be my kind of perverse version of that I still felt like I wanted to follow some sort of template, not that there is a template but at least that I had a responsibility to tell a story with a married couple that goes on various detours and comes back together. They have learned and there is hope.

This is the second time you’ve worked with Ben Stiller. What does he bring to your projects?

When Ben saw “The Squid and the Whale” he got in touch with me and we both sort of quickly connected. I think our sensibilities or backgrounds may be different in some ways but we were both born and grew up with creative parents in New York and we like a lot of the same movies and comedies and things. So we recognized something in each other. “Greenberg” was a great experience and for me. I wrote this thinking of Ben, and thinking of Ben’s voice, and I felt like Ben’s calming voice was an important element in this movie too. Since Greenberg was kind of a different role for him and very different from him this would be a way to kind of use his iconography because more comic iconography in something that was more my territory.

How do you see the young couple that your main characters find so fascinating?

I was having fun with this idea that these young people seem too good to be true in some way. I mean they are ultimately projections for Ben and Naomi. They could be younger versions of themselves or romantic versions of themselves but they are also like surrogate children and I felt like in another movie they would have conjured up ghosts, something that kind of comes at the right time. Because Ben and Naomi don’t know that they need this but they do. So that is how I initially came to them and then as I wrote them it got more real. The thing with Darby is that you kind of discover that she is in some ways as much a victim of the sort of experiences Ben has and they have their scene where they kind of bond in a way. People have reacted differently to Jamie and Darby. Some say, “Do you hate hipsters?” And some say, “That’s such a sympathetic portrait.” I felt like whether you like Jamie or not no human being should bear that kind of responsibility that Ben basically gives him. And Ben really hands him the keys and then gets angry when he doesn’t do what he kind of imagined he is going to do.

Do you think couples fall in love with other couples?

Yes, I think they do and that was one of the things that I had in my head because I thought about that for an earlier movie, a script I started years ago after “Squid.” It is very interesting and understandable and I think the way couples project on one another. In this movie you see it even in a more casual way with the two couples at the beginning of the movie, the couple who had a kid and the couple who hasn’t, and I find that very interesting and funny, moving and understandable. And potentially tragic.

You worked with the legendary Ann Roth, who did the costumes for this film. How do you design clothes for characters who are supposed to be very much of the moment when you have no idea what will be cool by the time the movie comes out?

The thing that Ann and I knew early on was that there we would never would be able to actually document Brooklyn youth culture in terms of wardrobe. I mean we would be chasing it forever. The thing about working with Ann is that she sees the whole movie and she talks about characters. She will have back story for characters that I have not even thought about. I worked with her first on “Margo at the Wedding” and she would start talking about one of the characters and her ideas and I was kind of scared because I didn’t have any answer because I haven’t thought about this stuff. And actors love her for that reason. After a fitting with Ann, an actor will come out having all these ideas and all this understanding of themselves as a character that’s a kind of unique experience. With this Ann and I kind of just made up our own ideas. There is this hair groomer movie I love called La Collectionneuse from the late 60s. The actor Patrick Bauchau kind of looks like Adam, or Adam looks like him in that movie a lot. We actually kind of parted Adam’s hair like his and we dressed him in some cases like him too, the long leather jacket that he has that feels like John Lurie in Stranger Than Paradise. There are just things that feels right to her and she’s a great collaborator too. That’s the thing you want in all collaborators — they see the whole movie, not just their department.

I know she sometimes brings in pieces from other movies. Did she do that here?

Naomi is wearing Jane Fonda’s bag from Klute.

What are some of the great “marriage movies?”

The Awful Truth with Cary Grant and Irene Dunne. I love Holiday, too. Twentieth Century was a great marriage movie because it’s crazier, I guess. To Be or Not to Be also. I miss the kind of movies studios used to make that were mainstream but they were character driven. They would have broad humor but then they would be very moving like Broadcast News or Working Girl or Tootsie. . They are all different kinds of movies but they were all about adults. You know, as a viewer I miss those movies because they are not made really much anymore and I wanted to try to do one.

Related Tags:

Directors Interview Writers

Interview: Amy S. Weber of the Bullying Movie “A Girl Like Her”

Posted on March 29, 2015 at 4:55 pm

Writer/director Amy S. Weber first became interested in the problem of bullying when she was producing educational films for young people in 1996, over about a 10 year period. “I was working with mostly teenagers on real life stories documenting what those experiences were for them. We covered social issues, everything from violence in school to eating disorders, teen suicide, child abuse, family life, and unhealthy relationships, the list goes on and on. And it was through the hundreds of kids that I worked with through today actually, any of the young people that I work with and mentor, there is always this common theme to every one of the issues that plague them. And it came down to low self-esteem. It came down to identifying a lot of the issues that they were having, feeling like they couldn’t be themselves, they didn’t fit, they were afraid to be a target. And as we dove in a little bit deeper it was a common theme that being picked on and bullied, being really a target of someone or possibly just that fear overall, kind of stopped them from being who they were and living as their true selves. So this is definitely been a project in the making for many, many years to bring this, what’s going on in today’s world into the spotlight through this perspective. I really wanted “A Girl Like Her” to stem from their beliefs. They were the inspiration and hopefully it will offer some help.”

In the time she has been working with teenagers, Weber has seen enormous changes in the way that technology and social media add to the pressure. “The days of the schoolyard bully and escaping their wrath once you walk in your front door at home and now you are safe, those days are over. The Internet offers quite the tool for an abuser to also collect an army of people who can anonymously pursue a person’s spirit and that’s kind of how I see it.” She quoted the father of real-life bullying victim Phoebe Prince. “He said that bullying is a word that used to exist when you would run away through the fields or down the street from the guy that was going to beat you up. Now it’s a completely different story. And he described what happened to his daughter. It was basically a relentless pursuit of her spirit, the destruction of a human spirit. Social media and the social applications that young people can use have changed this game in epidemic proportions.”

She sees another problem in the increasingly hostile exchanges teenagers see in the media, celebrities, even politicians making harsh accusations. “If were to really just put denial aside and put our busy lives aside to see all the stress that goes on in our lives as adults in this world in which we have created, we would take a very honest look at what’s happening to our youth today. They are simply holding up a mirror reflecting back to us what we have created in terms of a world. What we show them each and every day, everything they see in the media from so-called leaders, from politicians to church leaders, the people who are in the spotlight, the messages that they share, the violent types of programs that teenagers are exposed to, video games, an overall sense of negativity.”

She said, “If you’re lucky enough that you live among people who are very positive and joyful people, you get to feel that and take that in every day. I have a group of people like that and it is wonderful being around them. But how many people can you can say are truly happy? People who find joy every day and see the silver lining in every situation. But how many people are what you would consider lost, miserable, unhappy? Perhaps we believe that children are supposed to rise above what they are learning on a daily basis, and expect them to be better than us; we expect them to know more than us. That is the thing I think has shocked me the most in all of the work that I’ve done with kids.

Weber worked very closely with the teenagers in the movie to develop the story. And it was very important to her that the bully, a “mean girl” named Avery, would not be demonized. “I wouldn’t call her monster. I would say her behavior is very much like a monster who is so unconscious of what she’s doing to Jessica’s spirit, she doesn’t seem to care. She is so unconscious of it that a daily pursuit of Jessica has become quite entertaining to her and her friends. And there’s this desensitizing that has happened, almost this numbing effect that takes place in Avery where she is, even when confronted, unable to see what she was doing, denial at its finest. She’s a good student, she believes she’s a good daughter, and a good friend. Jessica just bugs her and she’s unapologetic about it. This is just the way she feels and she would like to express herself. Then you start to peel back the layers. We get to know Avery and we created a safe space for Avery to explore herself, take a look at life through a different lens and literally gave her a camera that allows her to look at life through a different lens, and it’s not as it appears. The outer shell of perfection, the popularity, the beautiful girl, the friendships, the status in her school, it’s meaningless because of what she is away from that, the true Avery comes out, the unhappy Avery, the insecure Avery, the scared Avery, the one who isn’t proud of what’s going on in her family life, the broken Avery that we begin to see. So we humanize a monster and when you do that we can’t as an audience be in denial of the fact that she’s in pain. Something is going on inside of her that is creating this projection, a coping mechanism, a mental health component, all of these play a role in this character. It is shocking to the audience that when the transformation begins the audience transforms along with it. That’s what’s so powerful about Avery Keller and the dynamic of her character.”

All of the dialog was improvised by the young performers. She gave them the overview of the scene and then let them create their lines based on “the emotion of what was happening in this moment in their lives. And then we would draw from real life to bring that out into their characters. I wanted them to bring their own experiences and their own emotions and their own words because I wanted it as genuine and as authentic, as real and raw as possible and whatever happens in that scene we would just keep going. I think we captured some of the most powerful moments I’ve ever experienced as a film viewer all my life. But to be on the other side of that camera and to be involved in the scene with these actors as it unfolded was incredible. It was just incredible the raw emotion especially because of the topic and how it has affects so many people.”

Interview: Dan Fogelman, Writer/Director of “Danny Collins”

Posted on March 19, 2015 at 3:55 pm

Dan Fogelman wrote “Cars,” “Tangled,” and “Crazy Stupid Love,” and now for the first time has directed with “Danny Collins,” starring Al Pacino and Annette Bening. Fogelman told me he was wasting time on the internet because he did not know what he wanted to write next when he came across a headline about a musician who did not find out that John Lennon wrote him a letter until 34 years after it was sent.

I had just finished the movie Crazy Stupid Love and I was trying to figure out what to do next. And I was just completely stumped and procrastinating and sitting in front of the blank computer for months on end and looking at the Internet as you do when you are procrastinating and I came across this musician who receives a letter from John Lennon forty years too late. I called him that day. I tracked him down immediately and I told him I heard his story which became the jumping off point of this story the letter, and the receiving of the letter. That’s exactly what happens in the film “Danny Collins.” Literally we wrote out pretty much the same letter. So that is all absolutely true, he was a young musician in the early, early 70s. They said, “We think you are the next big thing”. He said, “I’m terrified of what fame and fortune might do to me,” and cut to 34 years later John Lennon had read that interview had written him a letter offering him advice and he didn’t get letter until the present day. It got sent to him care of the magazine and somebody saw a handwritten letter from Lennon, it got sold to collectors and just never came across his bow until 40 years later. So I couldn’t stop thinking about that, the what-if of the entire situation.

Pacino plays Danny Collins, an aging rock star who can still fill a stadium with his baby boomer fans, who are happy to sing along when he plays his hits. But it feels stale and empty to him, and when he sees the letter from Lennon, he realizes he could have taken a different path and been truer to himself as an artist and a man. Fogelman said,

His life has become everything he feared that it would become. And when I first talked to Al about the character, we talked about the dark place that this guys is in. He is alone, he is very lonely, he is very alone and he is very unhappy with the way his musical career, the direction it has taken. And who he is as a person. He is a drug addict and a drunk and he is dating well beneath his appropriate age range and who he is. And he doesn’t have a family which is a big part of this. He doesn’t have that human connection with people. And so he gets this letter at 65 years old, and that kind of sends him on this course correction.

Lennon’s letter was written to reassure a young musician that success and fame do not have to be corrupting, but in the case of Danny Collins, his concerns about that were justified.

Any form of art is also commerce nowadays. I mean some art becomes popular posthumously but any artist who becomes famous in their own lifetime learns that art starts becoming commerce and vice versa. You are making your living off of it. Your identity is defined by it, your legacy is defined by it, whether it’s music or writing or acting or television or film or journalism. I think when you are defined by your art it is a weird line.

A central image of the story is Collins’ arrival at the very ordinary kind of place he has not seen in decades — a small chain hotel in New Jersey. The design of the hotel had a very specific inspiration.

When I first heard the story of the real guy, Steve Tilston, I knew exactly what I wanted the story to be about. I knew I wanted it to be about family and reconnection. And so I got a couple of images in my head. I said, “Where would be the craziest hotel in the world for Al Pacino to just check into indefinitely?” And I pictured the Woodcliff Lake Hilton which was the hotel in New Jersey that I went to every eighth grade party. I was actually a best man four different times in that hotel. If Al Pacino walked in, they would be ill-equipped to handle him. It would be such a disconnect. We had to shoot the movie in LA but we recreated the Woodcliff Lake Hilton in California and we actually screened it back in that neighborhood and nobody realized that we weren’t actually in New Jersey. New Jersey felt like the most normal place in the world to me because it is where I am from. So the street we had for Bobby Cannavale and Jennifer Garner, with that neighborhood we tried to paint that kind of picture like when I go and visit my friends – the issues they are dealing with, and the kids, that kind of picture.

As Collins, Pacino wears heightened, rock-star attire in the early part of the movie, a striped jacket, scarf and pocket square. And then, as his life becomes more normal, connected, and authentic, his clothing is toned down. He even mentions shopping at Banana Republic.

Danny was a bit of a dandy which I like. When you see Al, in real life, he is kind of vagabond. He has a very cool bohemian look and he is always in black, a sloppiness but it is kind of a put-together sloppiness. That carried over to Danny Collins because for him it is all an act. It is all performance for him to seem really sharp and dandy. He is referred to numerous times in the movies as a ridiculous man and the outfits needed to be able to be both ridiculous in palette but also really precise in the cut and the fit and the accessorizing. And so he always has a scarf and he also has varied vibrant prints and stripes. And we start taking that down as the movie goes on. He is never going to be a guy who walks around in jeans and a T-shirt. By the end, though, he has a black shirt, but he is still wearing it wide open. He has become a fully formed regular human being as much as he is capable of.

Related Tags:

Directors Interview Writers