Photo: Press
This year's other hugely anticipated science fiction film starring Oscar Isaac, Ex Machina couldn't be more different from Star Wars VII. This bold and brilliant British sci-fi is the work of Alex Garland, the writer behind The Beach, 28 Days Later and Sunshine.
A disturbing examination of identity in the technology age - anyone who enjoys Black Mirror will find much to savour here - Ex Machina focuses on the relationship between a beautiful robot, a naive coder and a strange technology pioneer. It is also blessed with a truly unsettling score and soundtrack. To mark the release, Gigwise sat down with Garland to talk about working with Portishead’s Geoff Barrow, using Savages 'Husbands' and why you need to hear Can’s 'Future Days'.
What did you enjoy about working with Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury on the soundtrack?
Alex Garland: I’d worked with them before on Dredd, which was the film that preceded this. For various reasons that didn’t work out - it was a complicated situation. But they’re amazing guys and I went back to them immediately for Ex Machina.
There’s lots of reasons for why: one is that they are very talented and really quite leftfield composers. Another is they’re not steeped in film grammar: they haven’t been taught, in a bad way, all the natural beats and rhythms of film composing. A clumsy example would be: a [traditional] composer might think "It’s a car chase - I’m not going to write anything there because it’s going to get drowned out by revving engine noise". They don’t think that way at all. They approach it fresh and that’s fantastic from my point of view - it makes it more surprising, more interesting.
There’s something else as well - they have an incredibly high quality control level. I think they’re kind of amazing. What they do is they keep you honest, they are pretty fierce. Film is full of compromise and people pushing you towards compromise. And if you’ve got Geoff standing here, you don’t want to compromise. He’s a tough guy. And I loved worked with him.
You've said that Chris Cunningham's video for Bjork's 'All Is Love' was part of your inspiration...
Not exactly an inspiration: it was more that there’s been a bunch of preexisting robots on film of one sort or another. You don’t just want to replicate what’s been before because you don’t want the first time you see this machine to be thinking "Oh that looks like C3PO". That really happened - it didn’t matter that she had a female form.
The completely separate thing about Chris Cunningham is that he’s been ripped off a lot, often in a way that is uncredited and unacknowledged. So partly I didn’t want to copy what he’d done for creative reasons but also out of sense of respect. So we were looking to do things slightly different. All that sculpted white plastic in that amazing video, masks and that black and white imagery: we had to steer away from that. The interesting thing is the minute that you had the sculpted white plastic, you immediately thought of that Bjork video.
The credits of the film are accompanied by Savages 'Husbands'. What do you like about them?
What happens is that a song gets attached to a film in a private way. Sometimes I’ve sneaked them in at different moments - in this instance that particular track ‘Husbands’ had a relevance to me and to do with the film. On the very first day arriving back in the edit suite, I put that track into the film and actually scored it over the opening - it used to be that the film started with that Savages track and it played that track pretty much in its entirety over a montage.
And then for a whole bunch of complicated reasons, the handover from this modernist punk track to what Geoff and Ben were doing created this weird grinding of gears on a sonic level. Very reluctantly I had to take this Savages track out of the opening - which was a pity because it gave this huge burst of adrenaline in a sense. Actually you could tell it was the right thing to do for the film. It gave Geoff and Ben the space that was required to set the tone in the way they were doing over the film as a whole. But we all wanted to hang onto it - so we put it over the credits.
Oscar Isaac once told me that he'd absolutely love to see The Smiths reform. Who would you love to see live?
I’m a big fan of Can. One of the things me and Geoff bonded over when we first met was our love of Can. I first came across Can when I was 18 and a guy I knew had a very bad recording on a tape. This was pre-internet and I had no idea what this track was. It was called 'Future Days' and it just blew me away. I could hardly believe what I was hearing.
Later when I wrote this book The Beach I listened to that on a loop pretty much - the whole book is written to that track on a loop. In those days you had CD players with A-B, where you wanted to start and end the track, so I’d press it so it would loop back on itself. In a very OCD way I’d have Can going round and round through my head.
But you couldn’t find anything out about them so it made them even stranger. Who is that vocalist? What is that voice? What is this weird music and where did it come from? I didn’t know where to go for information. It took me 15 years to start piecing together information about Can. I never lost a fascination with them. If I could do anything, I’d drop acid and I’d go and see Can.
Ex Machina is out nationwide now.
