Alex Garland’s Annihilation wasn’t a box office hit but, for a number of reasons, it’s certainly one of the most intriguing releases of 2018.
It reportedly cost upwards of $40 million to make and grossed $32.7 million domestically and $10.2 million in China – that’s a worldwide total of $42.9 million. Annihilation was deprived of a big screen debut elsewhere and was instead released digitally on Netflix.
As the critically divisive film hits the domestic home entertainment market, I caught up with Garland via telephone from London, England, to talk about the cinematic curio and why the refreshingly candid two-time director remains amazed that people give him money to make movies.
Simon Thompson: Every movie is a learning curve. What was the biggest lesson that you learned from Annihilation?
Alex Garland: I think the biggest lesson was dogged persistence, sticking with it, to just keep going.
ST: A lot of this was shot in the UK. What were the reasons behind that? Was it more about locations or talent or budgets and tax breaks?
AG: It was a mixture of stuff but the most fundamental reason was that the team of people who made it, their lives are in the UK. If it were shot in another country the team of people would be different and some of the people who worked on this are people I have worked with for over 20 years. We always worked together as a group and we function as a group so anywhere else wouldn’t have that. Sure, tax breaks also came into it and you can get a bit more done for your money. We also thought there would be something interesting about directing the UK as this strange American landscape because something about it would always be slightly wrong and the wrongness was something we were aiming for. Who knows if we were right about that but that’s what we thought.
ST: There was a comment you made in an interview with The Guardian around the release of Ex Machina, your directorial debut, regarding you requiring somebody else to give you a lot of money to make a movie and that being a big risk. Do you still feel the same way?
AG: Yes, absolutely if for no other reason than the films I make are not very commercial. That has almost always been the case during my whole working life apart from a few exceptions. As a result, they are always taking risks when they work with me because they might lose their money. I just always have to make the case for people giving me the money to do what I do.
ST: Bearing in mind what you have just said, why do people keep coming to you with projects and giving you the money to do this?
AG: I have literally no idea. I am honestly constantly surprised by it. When Annihilation got greenlit, you could have knocked me down with a feather. I was really, really, genuinely, deeply surprised.
ST: It’s been 16 years since you did your first major screenplay and now you’ve got two movies you’ve directed under your belt. What has changed most about the industry since you started? Annihilation was released in theaters and on Netflix in different territories around the same time and that would never have happened a few years ago.
AG: So much has changed in so many different ways. I think that when I started there was a very strong concept of film stars who would, in some ways, be a good insurance policy for financiers. It meant that movies had a kind of floor as to what they would expect to see in the box office and, hopefully, a high ceiling. All of that has really changed. I think there are still some film stars like that although there aren’t very many of them. Also, audiences are now much more varied and open when it comes to what will draw them to a film and what won’t so it’s a less reliable system. I think the risks that film companies are taking are more extreme than they used to be because they don’t have those same insurance policies. There’s also been the massive change with regards to television now increasingly being the home of adult drama.
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