“Ex Machina” and “Annihilation” director Alex Garland may be giving up directing… for a while anyway.
In a recent interview with ScreenDaily (via The Playlist), he revealed his just wrapped filming next project “Civil War” will “definitely be [his] last film as a director for at least a while.”
Talking about why he’s done with directing, for now, the decision seems to come from some soul searching he’s done recently and a desire to return to his writing roots:
“I’ve got a quite complicated but serious internal dialogue about what I’m going to do next. Years ago, I started out as a novelist and then stopped writing novels and started working in film.
And I have been feeling quite strongly that I should stop directing films and I should write for other people with the intention of trying to execute the film they want to make, rather than trying to force through the film I want to make, which is what used to happen in the old days.
It could be in part a product that I ended post-production on ‘Men’ literally 48 hours before principal photography of ‘Civil War,’ so maybe that was just exhausting. But I wonder whether it’s time to step back.”
The filmmaker is coming off his divisive horror film “Men” which scored mixed reviews and fizzled at the box-office – a contrast to his first two film directorial efforts which were widely praised and his well-received FX series “Devs”.
Before that, Garland was an acclaimed screenwriter and director Danny Boyle’s go-to man for the scripts for Boyle’s genre films like “Sunshine” and “28 Days Later” along with the adaptation of Garland’s own novel “The Beach”.
Garland also penned and had a major hand in steering the well-regarded “Dredd,” he wrote the film adaptation of the acclaimed novel “Never Let Me go,” and worked on the well-regarded video games “Enslaved: Odyssey to the West” and “DmC: Devil May Cry”.
“Civil War” is dubbed a “contemporary war movie” and stars Kirsten Dunst, Wagner Moura, Stephen McKinley Henderson, and Cailee Spaeny. A24 is expected to release “Civil War” sometime next year.
