Civil War director Alex Garland is ready to go back to being a full-time writer

Ex Machina and Annihilation director Alex Garland says he has fallen out of love with filmmaking (but not film)

By Mary Kate Carr | April 1, 2024 | 3:54pm

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Civil War director Alex Garland is ready to go back to being a full-time writer

Kirsten Dunst and Alex Garland Photo: Gareth Cattermole

Love it or hate it, Alex Garland has had a pretty remarkable run as a director: just four features, Ex Machina, Annihilation, Men, and Civil War, all of them buzzy, thought-provoking, and stylish, and most of them critically acclaimed. With the bombastic and already divisive Civil War, one would think Garland was just getting started as an auteur. Instead, “I’m not planning to direct again in the foreseeable future,” he announces in a new interview with The Guardian.

Garland’s desire to quit doesn’t stem from financial pressure, he explains, but “from the fact that you’re asking people to trust something that, on the face of it, doesn’t look very trustworthy.” The director’s burden of responsibility “literally keeps me awake at night,” Garland says, giving an example of Alicia Vikander and Sonoya Mizuno trusting that the nudity in Ex Machina was “going to be dealt with thoughtfully and respectfully … [when] cinema leans towards not doing that.”

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Garland has fallen out of love with filmmaking, not film; he will still co-direct the upcoming Warfare, but apparently, that’s different from being the one guy in charge. He will continue to write, including a sequel to Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later. It just sounds like he’s uninterested in being The Guy, the one who has to boss everyone around, who has to do the “management job,” who then has to go out in front of the movie and sell it to the press. Filmmaking “exists in a life and also in a broader context. I have to interact, in a way—without being rude—like this …” he says to Guardian reporter Ellen E. Jones.

And the truth is Garland—a writer at heart—just doesn’t like interacting that much. He previously told The New York Times that he doesn’t “particularly enjoy” directing and that he has to “force” himself to do it, because “It’s incredibly sociable, because you are with a large group of people the whole time—and, in my case, having to do a lot of role play. At the end of the day, you feel a bit fraudulent and exhausted.” Doing all that directing is “incredibly performative” for him, and “I’m tired of feeling like a fraud,” he said. “I’ve got so many other reasons to feel like a fraud, I don’t need to add to it in a structural way with my job.”

Some on Twitter have lamented that Kirsten Dunst, a veteran of having her director sabotage her films (see: Lars von Trier’s Hitler empathy), is experiencing the same with Civil War. After all, wouldn’t the director of a movie saying he fell out of love with filmmaking be detrimental to his film’s chances?

But in fairness to Garland, he gave that NYT interview about quitting directing while Civil War was in production back in 2022. This is not a new position for him. “I’m not really a film director, I’m a writer who directs out of convenience,” he said at the time. “But I have been thinking that after the film I’m directing at the moment”—that was Civil War—“I should stop and go back to just writing. That might be part of the reversing away from the world—it’s time to get away from it, I think. I’m not temperamentally suited to being a film director.”