We asked Alex Garland to pick one favorite shot from each of his most iconic movies, as well TV show, Devs. The director of Ex Machina, Annihilation, Civil War, and many others breaks down each shot for us and explains what makes each so special to him.
Dredd (2012)
“Lena Headey played this character called Ma-Ma, and there’s someone I’ve worked with on every British film I’ve done called Meesh (Michelle Day). She’s in charge of the set decoration. I often try and mention her in interviews because she does a lot; she reads the script, she thinks about characters, and objects within the film become very acute references to characters, but she also thinks more broadly than that.
In this scene, Ma-Ma is lying in a bath. She’s in the bath because Meesh said, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if she’d just got high? She had a bath, she likes getting high on this drug, It’d be amazing to get high in the bath on this drug’. So, why don’t we put a bath right in the middle of her room, and that’s where she likes to get stoned.’ And I thought that’s genius. It’s a perfect example, in itself, of the kind of things that end up in films, where the director is then asked, “Why did you put the bath there?” And then usually the director says, “Well, I thought,” and pretends it was them. But it was Meesh.
And then, Anthony Dod Mantle, who was shooting it, shot ultra-high speed footage of her just trailing her hand in the bath and seeing the water sparkle. I had never known in the writing if this drug idea going to work. Then when I saw that footage, which was really Meesh and Anthony, and Lena, sort of getting it, and I thought, “Oh yeah, yeah. This is cool. This is going to work.”
Ex Machina (2014)
“Right at the end of the film, Ava has escaped from this compound, and she finds a helicopter pilot and flies away. There’s a shot with the helicopter lifting up and flying down a valley. This was at the end of the shoot, and sometimes you do a shoot where you are blessed and things just go right, and sometimes you have exactly the opposite and you’re cursed in some ways. Ex Machina, we were blessed.
As the helicopter was flying away, the sun was sort of in its magic hour space – which only lasts a very short amount of time – and the light just pings off the side of the helicopter for a moment, and then it flies away down this very beautiful valley. And we knew, because of the turnaround time, that the sun would be gone by the time the helicopter got back. So, that was a one-shot opportunity to get that and it just happened, just felt like a moment where everything had gone more right than one could have possibly hoped for.
It was the end of a really nice shoot with some really good people. It was just a really nice moment, beautiful shot. Rob Hardy, DOP, he’s going to be the DOP on almost all of these shots, that’s him just nailing it.”
Annihilation (2018)
“In Annihilation, there’s a kind of what looks like is going to be a punch-up but turns into a dance sequence. Sometimes the favorite shot is chosen because of what it was like on the day, and sometimes it’s because of how the shot ended up to your surprise. Probably a lot of these for me are connected to what it was like to shoot them, so it’s what I feel about the shot.
In that sequence, Sonoya Mizuno was doing this really interesting thing. She’s a trained dancer, and she was echoing the movements of Natalie Portman, but very slightly being off. It produced something that was just very hypnotic, really hypnotic to watch, takes that you… It sounds a bit cliched, but you sort of forget to say, ‘Cut,’ because you were so locked into the thing.
When that shot was then through the process; Sonoya’s performed it, Rob captured it, then it gets graded and visual effects are applied over Sonoya and the music is attached. That felt like a sort of filmmaking synthesis, of all of these different departments in their A-game. It kind of blew my mind watching that, to be honest.”
Devs (2020)
“I think one of my favorite shots was at the beginning of the episodes, there’s often a kind of montage to a track. There’s a bit of footage of a guy who turned up just for that day to play a homeless person, and I said, “Hey, do you want to just rant at the sky and the world, and just stand up with a can of beer and just eject it out to the sky?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, yeah, I can do that.’ And so, he stood up and did it, and we got a beautiful shot of him doing it, and it felt like we had shot it for real somehow, it had this quality of truth.
After he stops I said, ‘That was really, really good.’ And he said, ‘Well, I’ve got a lot of anger in me.’ And it was just sort of captured. I felt very grateful to that guy. But also, often, there are lots of these found bits of footage in a way. They’re not found, they’re made, but they feel found. But they’re often grabbed quite intuitively, like ‘Let’s get this, let’s get that. That’ll work.’ And I think Devs can feel very kind of coolly constructed, but it was actually way more intuitive than that. And that shot’s a good example of it.”
Men (2022)
“It’s a simple shot, actually, in Men. Jessie Buckley has been walking in the woods and she gets caught in a rainstorm. There are some lovely shots of her just moving through green, but it ends with her coming across an abandoned Victorian railway tunnel. There’s a shot behind her as she walks towards the tunnel, and the blackness of the tunnel entrance starts, sort of crowded with green, and as she gets closer, it expands and expands until she’s just a figure. It’s a beautiful bit of photography, but it’s also narratively right on the money because of the transitional state that sort of quietly, and very, very elegantly, happens within it.”
Civil War (2024)
“There’s a shot of Wagner. He’s screaming in pain because he’s lost one of his best friends and colleagues. That character enjoys conflict, but the reality of the conflict has folded in on him and he’s consumed by it. What that shot was, it was grabbed. It was a quick idea.
We had a lot of hardware, we had a military base in the deep background, and we had a bunch of tanks. Big things kicking up a lot of dust, a lot of troops carrying weapons. And we just thought, ‘Hang on, there’s a thing here. Let’s get him to stand there and tanks are going to roll by behind him, and Wagner, you just scream.’ ‘What do you mean scream?’ ‘Just scream. Just like everything that’s happened, just let it out. The camera’s going to be hanging out over the water, just go for it.’ And he was like, ‘Right, right, got it. Got it.”’And I saw him sort of psyching himself up, having a smoke, and then we shot it.
As soon as the camera was on him and these tanks were rolling by and the dust was kicking up, and the pain on his face, you just instantly thought, ‘Yeah. Oh, my God. That’s… Not only is that in the movie, for sure, it’s like a summation of everything up to this point.’ So again, like that Jessie Buckley shot, it has a broader function and a specific character function of the person in the moment. So, I’d say that one.”
