ALEX GARLAND MY LIFE IN PICTURES

From authoring The Beach to scripting 28 Days Later to directing Ex Machina, Alex Garland is behind some of the most unique British films of the 21st century. Now as he prepares to unleash freaky folk horror MEN, he tours Total Film through his wholly imaginative career.

MEN 2022

Garland's latest sees Jessie Buckley take a restorative break to a village occupied entirely by... unsettling variations on Rory Kinnear.

"The starting point was [the myth of] The Green Man. This is about the fourth or fifth version of the script I had written. But the first time I wrote a Green Man-based script was between writing Sunshine and Never Let Me Go. So I'd been rewriting scripts based around that imagery since then. There are all sorts of genre tags you could stick on Men, but one of them would be sort of psychedelic folk horror. Or you could just say folk horror, because usually folk horror implies psychedelics for some reason I've never completely understood. I think it's because of the connection with magic. But it's got to have a streak of weirdness running through it! Making it was extremely difficult. I certainly don't mean just for me... but for a really large group of people, particularly including camera, prosthetics, visual effects [departments] and actors. Partly because you have to have actors doing some really quite extreme things, in quite extreme conditions, with very little of what will end up on screen around them. In the end, it really weighs most heavily on the visual effects team. I remember making Ex Machina with a visual effects supervisor called Andrew Whitehurst. We had a conversation saying, essentially, this film won't work unless the visual effects for Ava, the robot, work. I had the same conversation with David Simpson and his team on Men. Because there's no real point in bullshitting. It's a bit like an actor... when the camera is on them, it doesn't matter what everyone else is doing. They then at that moment have to deliver. And they may have three takes and fifteen minutes in which to do that, and then that moment will be gone forever. And that's what David Simpson and his team had to deal with on Men."