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Screenplay credited to James Gunn and Nicole Perlman, although the two of them never worked together on it. Relates to the fact that the Marvel Cinematic Universe is a franchise and the team of people involved in making one of their films are so well organized that they don't necessarily have to work together. https://cultural-learnings.com/2014/08/01/authorship-nicole-perlman-james-gunn-marvel-guardians-of-the-galaxy/

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Garland disagrees with auteur theory, and talks in detail about Ex Machina.

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Alex Garlandfirst came to prominence with the international success of his novel The Beach, an exploration of backpacker culture that was eventually made into a 2000 film starring Leonardo DiCaprio and directed by Danny Boyle. Garland would go on to have a working relationship with Boyle, writing the screenplays for 28 Days Later and . He has also written adapted screenplays for Never Let Me Go and the action film . He recently completed his first project as both writer and director, , a film about a brilliant inventor who brings a young man to his remote island in order to test his latest creation, a robot that he swears can perfectly pass for human. The A.V. Club spoke to him about misconceptions of filmmaking, the science of AI, and how we actually know that we're human and not just Matrix-like brains in vats.
The A.V. Club: Many of the films you've written, especially the Danny Boyle ones, are thought of chiefly as the work of their directors. But you look at Ex Machina and it's very much of a piece, thematically, with your other projects. It makes you realize how collaborative film really is.
Alex Garland: Yeah. I've been working in film for around 14 or 15 years. And there's so much bullshit around the way we perceive film compared to what it actually is. And so much of it is so evidently bullshit, I have no idea how it sustains itself. My analogy I made to myself is something like the banking system just prior to 2007, where what you have is all these kinds of inherited wisdoms that are unquestioned, stacked up one on top of each other, and people just go along with them, act as if they're true. And if anybody is forced to look at what's true and what's not true, it just collapses. The difference is that the banking system has something concrete behind it. Is it making money? And if it's failing to do that in a sort of mathematical sense, then it collapses, maybe. Whereas that's not really true in film, because the fictions embedded are more abstract, basically. In an elliptical way, what I'm talking about is auteur theory, and that's effectively what you were alluding to.
AVC: Yeah. You've talked about that in the past-
AG: I think auteurs probably exist. I think Woody Allen is an auteur. It makes sense to me that he's an auteur. But we are forced into a position where we have to act as if everything is an auteur movie, and the basic reason we have to do that is partly because it's comfortable but mainly because it's easy to sell. And you could say of film-well, if auteur theory is so solid and unshakable and so universally applicable, why do film companies fight over production designers? Why do they fight over DPs? If the "director" mounted the camera, what do you need a DP for? And if the production designer is just executing the precise vision of the director, they're just interchangeable. But they're not interchangeable. We fight like crazy over these people.

So-and I'll shut up, I want to say one fucking thing and then I'll shut up. I came from writing books, right? You write a book on your own in a room for the most part. You talk to an editor or something like that, but basically you do it on your own. Film to me seems self-evidently collaborative. I'm not an auteur, I don't work on auteur movies, I don't want to be an auteur. The pleasure in it is the collaboration. That's why I stopped writing books and made films-so I could be working with sometimes directors but also DOPs and production designers and actors and all these people within the collaboration that elevate the project. Anyway. I will shut up.
AVC: No, no. It's obviously one of your bugbears-I mean you're a writer-director, where people always want to say, "Well that means he does everything."
AG: I'll tell you why it bothers me. Partly it's because I love cinema. I really, really love cinema. And I personally think that one of the downsides of auteur theory has been too much emphasis put on the deification of directing, and some of the other roles have been dismissed-and sometimes, within the production, almost treated with contempt. Now, in particular, because I perceive myself as a writer, I notice that about writing. It's like a math teacher who thinks math is the most important subject in school or something.

I think film has lost track of how important screenplays are. And the consequence of that is really amazing writers in the visual art form have moved to television. And since The Sopranos-this is a general truth, it's not a perfect truth-broadly speaking, the best adult drama has been on television. And we used to get Taxi Driver and Raging Bull and Apocalypse Now and The Godfather and you just keep going. The parallax would be all these interesting adult dramas that could be also quite mainstream. And they exist now, but they'reBreaking Badand and and even Game Of Thronesor whatever. I just regret that.

AVC: And they exist in film, but it's the little, $1 million dollar film that-
AG: Precisely. That's exactly right. It does exist in film-but what it's become is niche. So the Coen brothers-and you could choose whoever you wanted as your exemplars of that. There are many. It's not just one. But I would point partly to the Coen brothers or Steven Soderbergh. They exist, they're doing amazing stuff, but they feel niche. Taxi Driver, Apocalypse Now, The Godfather-they did not feel niche back then. And Breaking Bad, which is a brilliantly written drama, does not feel niche. And I feel like we've lost touch with some of that stuff within film, a little bit.
AVC: These things are being made, but as you say, most people don't always even know they exist. Like Breaking Bad is on AMC and it manages to connect with this huge audience.
AG: Does manage to connect, you mean, because it's on AMC.
AVC: Without that sort of backing-
AG: But those infrastructures exist in film. Listen, it's not-I don't have an argument that is good enough to account for infrastructures. It's more like a Field Of Dreams- type vague, fuzzy argument. "Build it and they'll come," that type of thing. And incidentally, by the way, I really have to be very clear while I'm saying this because I think it's important: I'm not counting myself amongst the people that are doing the good stuff, right? I'm good enough to know when other people are really good, and to sort of think, "Wow, how did they do that?" Like, I can see the tricks they're pulling off, but I don't know how they're pulling them off, if you know what I mean. It's what I aspire to.

But I do think television is demonstrating-this is the crassest way of putting it but maybe the truest way of putting it-television is demonstrating the market that still exists for adult drama. And adult drama in cinema, in an equivalently large scale, is really hard to find. If you tell me the names of the people that are doing really great stuff in cinema, I suspect we're going to agree on all those names, but then not finding the sort of market penetration, the budget, that their colleagues are doing in television. And also, by the way, all power to television. I fucking love it. I watch it to death. I'd like more. But I personally want to work in film, because I like film. I actually quite like short-form narratives.
AVC: A lot of work you've done comes from the science spectrum, getting interested in the intellectual notions behind things that start stories. But you're also interested in genre film-specifically science fiction and horror. Do you remember when you first started getting into that, or seeing something and going, "Yeah, that's what I want to do"?
AG: Yeah. I think particularly in science fiction, you tend not to have to smuggle in a big idea. You can just have it. You don't need to apologize for it. And science-fiction audiences-I mean, there's space opera, say, or action-movie space films, or all these subgenres. But broadly speaking, sci-fi is up for big ideas. You find it in television shows, you find it in Battlestar Galactica, the more recent incarnation-maybe in the old one, too, I don't know. But the point is, you're just allowed. And that makes it attractive. And on a personal, day-to-day level, the stuff that I get most affected by, I find it while reading about science.

I was reading the other day about this experiment called the dual slit experiment, which is a really interesting thing and I would recommend everyone read about it, and if you just type it into Google you can find a great deal about it on Wikipedia. Reading about it and trying to get your head around it and thinking about the smart people that are trying to work on it-I find it mind blowing. It's the edge of human intellect and existence and it contains our future embedded within it and also our past. What's not to like? So yeah, it just sort of pushes buttons in me.

It's also partly because I was just terrible in school at these things. I wasn't allowed to take-these are the British versions of maybe SATs or something-they were called O Levels, and I wasn't allowed to take physics, biology, or chemistry O Levels because I was just too-I was just lousy. And I couldn't do math or anything. I was just hopeless. And in my 20s, my history term was so bad I got a U, which means unclassified. They couldn't even give an A, B, C, D, or E grade. It was just hopeless. And I sort of thought I was thick. And then in my early 20s I thought, "This is interesting, it must be interesting," and I got a book for kids about atoms, and I read it, and by the end I understood that book, and I just kept going. And in some respects, all of this is about feeling behind.

AVC: Do you think the reason there's so much serious adult drama that a lot of people don't feel a connection to is that they're told, "This will bore you, this is nerd stuff"?
AG: That's possible, although it's such a strange idea to me that "this is nerd stuff, therefore it's not interesting." I have almost no way of attaching myself to that statement. I just can't even begin to get my head around it. There is a version of that sense of being left behind that's not just a sort of neurotic thing, it's actually true. In the time of Newton, if you or I decided what we wanted to do was understand everything about where science was at at the moment, we could spend a year doing it. We could pretty much get a good working knowledge. I mean actually, personally, I'd struggle still on the math, but nonetheless, we'd be up there, in terms of maybe not coming up with the ideas but appreciating the ideas that exist. That is not true anymore. I know enough about science to know it's just not true.

I've been reading, recently, a fair amount about multiverse theory and inflation and things like that, and the truth is these discussions are being had between quite a small group of people who actually understand what they're talking about. And then there's something very close to a vacuum, and very little information crosses that vacuum. And there are some things about that that really bother me, because there are ethical implications. And it's hard to have a good opinion on the ethical implications if you don't understand the thing that's causing the issue.
AVC: In many high-level or specialized fields, whether it's science or academia or even filmmaking, there are people interested in maintaining a veil of distance between what most people can understand.
AG: There are. And I have often thought, in philosophy-because I'm a writer and I try to be clear in writing-I think, why the hell did you phrase that sentence like that? Like, I can see you're smart enough to have written that better and you're choosing not to. And I do think that people protect their fiefdoms in that respect. There's a philosophy speak and a science speak, and you're in a club if you can do it, and you're not in the club if you can't-and that's not a cool thing. And the most interesting-you know, someone like Richard Feynman, one of his great gifts is he doesn't do that. He wants to bring you in and he wants to make you successful.

With multiverse, the thing I keep thinking is, "This is bullshit." This theory, that every time something can happen the universe splits an infinite number of times and all things that can happen are happening-I just think, "No they're not. What are you talking about? No they're not." But I can't actually have a proper debate with somebody who believes in the way that multiverse follows from inflation because I don't sufficiently understand those ideas. I don't think wormholes are going to get us to other galaxies. I don't think they're ever going to exist, I think it's a certain kind of scientific conceit that's interesting-
AVC: It's a thought experiment.
AG: It's essentially a thought experiment. But I can't really tackle that, because all I have is an instinct, which I suspect is true, but I haven't really got the grounding to have a serious conversation about it with the person who is proposing that argument. And that sort of bothers me.
AVC: So let's talk about objectification for a moment, specifically gendered objectification. It's hard to discuss too much without giving away parts of the film, but what real-world issues or concepts triggered your interest in this?
AG: I'm happy to talk about the questions it poses, but I don't want to talk too much about the answers. The answers I feel confident about are embedded within the narrative. But with that caveat, if I'm allowed to insert the caveat-
AVC: Oh yeah, please.
AG: Then the questions are-they're various-but one of them would be, is [Oscar Isaac's character] actually a Bluebeard type? Or is he presenting himself this way to this other character for the purposes of this experiment? And if that's what he's doing, to what extent is he caricaturing himself?
AVC: To what extent is he playing a role?
AG: To what extent is he playing a role, but also might the role be what he's actually like? For example, I can caricature myself in all sorts of ways and sort of be half aware I'm doing it but I still do it anyway. Underneath all of that, the thing that actually I got really interested by is where gender resides. I liked the idea of presenting a character [Ava, the machine in the film, played by Alicia Vikander-ed.] it would make you uncomfortable to label. Like, if you had choice between "he," "she," or "it," you'd have to choose she, because it feels almost like you'd be being disrespectful, and he just seems completely inappropriate. But why is that? Where does the gender actually reside? Is it in consciousness? Is there such a thing, therefore, as a male consciousness and a female consciousness? If there is such a thing as a male-female divide in consciousness, what's the difference between them? Specify the difference. "Men will think like this in this circumstance and women will think like that" doesn't feel right. I can find ways to contradict that position.

So does that mean it exists in the external form? You could put Ava's mind in a male body, Ava would still be Ava, but has the gender changed? Now, you would say it feels wrong to keep calling her she, but why is that? So it's just putting a question like that front and center: Where do you feel gender resides? And in fact, they have a conversation about this right in the middle of the movie.

Years ago, I wrote this book, The Beach, which was about backpackers. And it was critical of backpackers, in my mind. It had an agenda and it had a position. And when people read the book, a lot of them called it a celebration of the backpacker scene. The people that then made it into a film, I think, saw it that way. And I understood at that point that, in a very concrete way, the recipient of the narrative is providing almost as much of the narrative as the person really providing it. And so although I've got my own agendas and my own thought processes as to where these questions-about where gender resides-end up, I know that it doesn't matter what I say or how clear I am. Some people will concur with the position that seems to be in the film. Other people will find it deeply offensive. Some people will say you haven't thought about this stuff, or some people will say you've obsessed about it too much. Whatever. Fuck that. I can't accommodate all those positions. All I can really do is try and do what I'm interested in, and try and be respectful and thoughtful in the presentation of it, and that's it.
AVC: Doesn't being thoughtful almost require leaving open that question of where gender resides? Because you see how angry people get when they're challenged on any idea of what gender means to them.
AG: You can get mutually exclusive liberal positions on this area. Which is really interesting. You get two clearly liberal positions that are totally at odds with each other. Yes, you're right. And so, on some of these issues, the film will come down on something like empathy, or... whatever, I'm going to get into the trap I wanted to avoid. The film will come down on some stuff, but you're exactly right. The important thing to say is that you can't come down, because we don't know. There isn't actually a clear answer to this thing. That doesn't negate the reason to ask the question and have the debate. It probably reinforces the reasons to ask the question and have the debate.
AVC: And if you have the debate, the debate is what helps you avoid things like thousands of angry tweets at Paul Feig because he wants to make Ghostbusters female.
AG: Yeah, but you know what? Fuck that. Because you probably can't avoid the thousands of angry tweets anyway. And it's not anyone's business to avoid that. The idea of trying not to offend an echo chamber is ridiculous.
AVC: Even your adaptations tend to be works that directly address questions of authority, power, and gender. From Never Let Me Go, or even Dredd, which on its surface is just sort of an action film-
AG: Yeah, it passed the Bechdel test-I was glad someone pointed that out.
AVC: Yeah, it absolutely does.
AG: That's unusual in an action movie.
AVC: Do you find that you tend to seek out projects that already have that inherent in it, or is that something you bring to the table?
AG: I don't know. I would just say in my personal life I am interested in things that seem to be difficult but true, and that challenge my instinctive position. And I cannot help being drawn to that stuff. I get very, very suspicious of people who are too comfortable with their instincts-on any political position. I am broadly affiliated with the left on a personal level, but I know lots of people who exist in that state in a completely reflexive, unthinking way, and I find it as annoying as some kind of neo-con TV presenter. I think, "Come on, you've got to be tougher on yourself than that."
AVC: Reflexivity and how we determine our own identity and construct ourselves-these are questions you ask in Ex Machina, which has characters spending a long time just sort of looking at themselves.
AG: You never know how much this stuff comes out. And so it's actually sort of a relief to hear you talk in that way. It must actually be there on some level. In terms of that self-looking thing, it's the question of establishing if a machine is self-aware and has an emotional and internal life.
AVC: The Turing test. Or the Chinese room.
AG: Yes, exactly. The Chinese room or something like that. If you're going to set yourself that challenge, then what you very quickly discover is that it's really hard to do. Because you get this chess computer problem, which is something that acts as if it wants to win chess, is convincingly acting as if it wants to win chess, doesn't actually know what chess is and doesn't know what it's doing or that it exists. It knows nothing. And so then from that you can then say, "Actually, forget the machine for a moment, how do I know that the human I'm talking to, how am I really sure that they have a consciousness in the way that I assume they do? Is this not a leap of faith?" And actually it is a kind of leap of faith. The leap of faith is, I'm pretty sure I have a consciousness and this person appears to be like me; therefore I'm going to assume they do. And from that point it's just that they're acting as if they have one. But there's no clear bit of certain knowledge that says they do.

So now what you're really left with is yourself. And then it turns out, you can ask that question of yourself, too. Is the consciousness I think I have actually the consciousness I do have? And, hence, all of that inward-looking stuff that you're talking about, and the best example of this, which I didn't use by name, but I reference in a scene, is qualia, which is a philosophical term talking about one's own subjective response to things. Your sense of redness-what red is, versus my sense of redness. And then when you start looking at qualia, suddenly they can start to turn to mush as well. And then you're left in a really strange place, because now you're not certain about any of the consciousness.

AVC: People always reference Descartes' "I think, therefore I am," but they forget the part where he actually ends that by realizing, well no, this could be a demon convincing me that I think all this, and I can never actually know it.
AG: That's exactly right. I always have a sort of instinct to rephrase that line, something along the lines of "I think I think therefore I think I think I am." And you just keep saying "think" until you've-
AVC: Ad infinitum.
AG: Because it's really not that helpful.
AVC: Right.
AG: My demon in the back of my head while we're having these conversations is, my job is to try and sell the movie, and I'm just so failing, like I can just sort of see people going, no.
AVC: But, again, it's like the echo chamber versus the people who are going to read this and go, oh, that's way more interesting than just a movie about a robot.
AG: I hope.

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Ex Machina's Alex Garland talks robots and why the auteur theory is "bullshit"

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Alex Garland first came to prominence with the international success of his novel The Beach, an exploration of backpacker culture that was eventually made into a 2000 film starring Leonardo DiCaprio and directed by Danny Boyle. Garland would go on to have a working relationship with Boyle, writing the screenplays for 28 Days Later and Sunshine.

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The genre of this film is Action, Adventure and Comedy

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The genre of this film is Drama,  Mystery and Sci-Fi

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I got the chance to see Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 yesterday at Dolby's London in-house theater. I was particularly keen to catch this one, not just because I'm a massive fan of the first movie, but also because this film represents a technological shift that I'm fascinated by.

The film is great by the way and tech fans will unleash a hearty laugh toward the end of the movie. But this isn't a film review as such, and there will be no spoilers within.

In the UK there is virtually no commercial way to watch a movie in Dolby Vision, which is the company's digital projection system that allows for high dynamic range presentations. In addition, it's hard to think of a better place to watch a movie in the best possible picture and sound quality - not to mention the Atmos sound system is a thing of staggering beauty in this cinema.

So the movie is an interesting one. Shot in 8K on the new Red Weapon camera system it does look staggering different to most movies. At several points in the film I took a moment to examine the picture, and I can honestly say I've never seen sharpness and detail in a feature film. There's a debate to be had about that, and I'll touch on it in a minute, but from a technical point of view, this movie is just staggering.

The Red Weapon - with the S35 8K sensor - is something special in its own right. This is a camera that can shoot in 8192 x 4320 resolutions at up to 60fps. But the one thing I noticed when I got home and looked at the first Guardians movie is just how staggering the difference is in looks.

The original movie was digital too, shot on Arri digital in 2.8k (2880×2160), but the difference between the two seems massive to me. The first thing I noticed was the blue skin of Yondu and how it seems to have changed. But there's a lot more going on here, and overall I thought the look of Guardians Vol. 2 was nothing short of breathtaking. This is a world, don't forget, where a lot of aliens have fairly vivid skin colours - it looks stunning on screen.

To me, the whole thing becomes even more staggering when you consider that the movie was mastered in 4K, which presumably means that the special effects were all done in that resolution too. While that seems obvious, Guardians is a movie in which there is almost no frame that doesn't have some CGI in it. Just by virtue of the fact that two of the characters are entirely computer generated. This film is quite a technical achievement.

Anyway, here's my advice for this movie. See it on the best screen you can. If you have access to either IMAX or Dolby Vision, you simply have to see it in one of those formats. The staggering amount of light that you can get out of Dolby's laser projectors was, at times, almost unbelievable. HDR is at its best when you can't tell that there's anything special happening, but you can see every detail.

Don't neglect the sound either. I've heard a lot of movies in Atmos, but Guardians again seems to use the soundstage perfectly. There's a lot going on in this movie from an audio perspective, and Dolby's object orientated sound mixing system seems to do an amazing job of making you feel like you're there.

I've seen a fair few digital cinema movies projected on digital hardware at this point, and I don't think I've ever seen anything quite as breathtaking as this movie. There's, obviously, an argument that says cinema should never be about the picture quality, but I'm an AV geek, so I have to notice these things. And while there are lots of directors who won't go near digital, a movie like Guardians suits the format perfectly. It gives the action clarity, while making for a visual feast that many earth-bound movies simply can't deliver anyway.

I'm sure there are a lot of people who would say that digital dilutes the art of moviemaking. The good news is that directors do still have a choice. I wouldn't change the way Quentin Tarantino shoots film, and there's a place for James Gunn to do amazingly detailed digital movies too.

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Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 2: Not Just An Awesome Movie, A Technological Masterpiece Too

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I got the chance to see Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 yesterday at Dolby's London in-house theater. I was particularly keen to catch this one, not just because I'm a massive fan of the first movie, but also because this film represents a technological shift that I'm fascinated by.

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The chair was plush, tall, and regal. It was the kind of throne you could sink into and never want to get up from, and it was quickly rejected by Alex Garland.

"Too comfortable," he said, eyeing that chair like an enemy.

We were in an anodyne Four Seasons conference room searching for a place to sit down and discuss Garland's provocative new film, Ex Machina, and a soft perch simply didn't seem fitting. Eventually, we landed on two stiff-backed chairs - the dingy, floral-upholstered kind that hotels stack in bulk - and spent the next half-hour sitting on the edge of them, locked in spirited debate.

Over the next few weeks, I expect many more people will join the conversation. Ex Machina has been a bona fide blockbuster in limited release, taking in over $1 million while playing on no more than 39 screens, and an aggressive nationwide expansion is planned for this Friday. The movie's stars, Oscar Isaac and Domhnall Gleeson, are not yet household names (though they'll both be seen in the highly anticipated Star Wars: The Force Awakens), but the sense of mystery around them suits Ex Machina, where Isaac plays Nathan, a wealthy, eccentric inventor who invites office drone Caleb (Gleeson) to examine his latest invention, a robot named Ava (Alicia Vikander). Ava is imbued with a sophisticated brain and a beguiling female form, and as Caleb tests Ava for signs of artificial intelligence, the teasing Nathan also endeavors to push Caleb's buttons; meanwhile, Ava is sizing up both her creator and visitor, and a mysterious agenda starts to form behind those almost-human eyes.

Ex Machina's characters thrive on challenging each other, and audience members will surely find themselves tested, too: Underneath its smooth surface, the film is packed with the kind of potent, thorny themes designed to keep people arguing on their way out of the theater. "My express intention is to make an ideas movie, and it is deliberately setting up questions - not all of which have answers," Garland told me, rattling off just a few of those provocative prompts: "Where does gender reside? Is it in the brain? Is it in appearance, a physical thing? If it is in the brain, what is the difference between a male consciousness and a female consciousness? And is it in any way a reasonable thing to say that there might be a difference?"

He leaned back in his chair. "Now, of course, I'm not stupid: I know that even by posing the question, I'm in a sort of danger zone. But film is a medium that has such a hard pushback against asking difficult questions, and I just don't want to play that game."

Still, he may have to. The very premise of Ex Machina sets up a battle of the sexes that has quickly proved to be controversial: As Caleb examines Ava, he begins to fall in love with her, and he's increasingly horrified by the notion that Nathan is keeping this feminine creature as his prisoner and potential sex slave. Certainly, men don't come off so well in the movie, which links their desire to create with the more primal male desire to procreate: In other words, it posits that the tech-bros who are driven to design humanlike robots may be thinking less with their brains and more with their ... well, you know. It's Ex Machina's treatment of women, though, that has already spurred the most think pieces. After catching the film at its South by Southwest premiere, Daily Beast journalist Jen Yamato tweeted, "We'll just talk about Ex Machina's woman problem a little bit later"; not long after, Wired's Angela Watercutter laid into the movie's sexualized "fembot," asking, "Why doesn't Chappie have to put up with this bullshit?"

The male characters in Ex Machina are blinkered and sexist in the way they relate to Ava (who's presented to both Caleb and the audience as a tantalizing mystery), but does their mere portrayal imply that the filmmaker approves of their actions, even unwittingly? It's a notion that needles Garland, who understands all too well that a story designed to make you feel many things can be read by some as intending only one thing.

"Sometimes it's frustrating, but I do expect it and anticipate it consciously," said Garland, who made his directorial debut with Ex Machina but was previously best known for his novels and screenplays. Garland's first published book, The Beach, was turned into a 2000 movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio, and somewhere along the way, the author first learned that his message could easily get lost in translation. " The Beach takes this semi-affectionate but really quite critical view of backpackers, basically saying that southeast Asia is being used as a magic mushroom, weed-fueled Disneyland for people in their late adolescence and early 20s," said Garland. "And while some backpackers saw it as a criticism, some others saw it as a celebration ... and actually, the kind of celebration it was sometimes seen as was mutually exclusive with the position that I thought it took."

But Garland will still allow for that wiggle room. "Let's say 50 percent of a narrative is offered by the person providing the narrative," he suggests, "and 50 percent is from the recipient of the narrative: what they project, what they want, their own life experience, what they're interested in." If that's the case, then my own 50 percent is certainly different than Ex Machina's critics, because I found the movie's portrayal of gender to be bracingly modern and even poignant. To me, Ava read as post-gender, her circuits whirring underneath a body she's been placed into but feels skeptical of. At the same time, she's still just as hemmed in by male expectations as any real human woman would be: Kept imprisoned by Nathan in his remote hideaway, Ava is born into a literally patriarchal system that measures her worth based on how men respond to her, and it's up to her to either exploit that system or learn how to circumvent it. When she dons a feminine wig and pours herself into a dress, she's gauging her physical impact on Caleb; alone in her bedroom, the androgynous android studies images of other women that Nathan has provided, forming her notions of sexuality from the magazine cutouts and advertising images that are literally placed in front of her.

When I ventured that interpretation to Garland, he nodded - at least at first. Gray at the temples with a soft English accent, the 40-something filmmaker parried with me like an agreeably combative college professor, rebutting each question with an implicit challenge to confront him in a more meaningful way. As soon as I mentioned the patriarchy, then, I could tell he was off and running.

"The patriarchy - which is a buzzword at the moment, for all sorts of completely good reasons - does not interest me," he replied, "because I'm not interested in things that, to me, feel self-evident. Yes, I get that it exists. It's like the objectification of girls in their early 20s: Yes, I get it, it happens."

"Isn't that casual dismissal of the patriarchy an easy stance for a straight man to take, though?" I asked.

"No, it's just a statement of fact," said Garland. "Underneath the film is a basic thing: to what extent does one establish or fail to establish what is going on in someone else's head? In the case of Ava, you have a man who's tasked with figuring out what's going on in this thing's head, and at a certain point, that's exactly what he stops doing. Why does he stop doing it? And if he stops doing it, does the audience also stop doing it? Do men stop doing it, but women continue doing it? Or do both men and women stop doing it?

"Now, that's what I'm interested in," he continued. "That's exactly where I'm tailoring my thought processes. I could tailor it to the patriarchy, but I'm personally not interested in it. That's not a straight guy dodging a bullet ... [the patriarchy is] fucking there. We could spend a while talking about it, but at the end of it, we'd both just agree that it's there."

In fact, Garland was keen on advancing an even more provocative idea: "I would argue that if you reverse the genders in this film, you'd have a misogynistic movie. Imagine it, picture it in your mind: You have two women creating, imprisoning these male-seeming machines, and doing all the things that the guys do in the reverse example. I would expect that it could read as misogyny in the way that this incarnation could be read as misandry."

I ventured another dissent: "Would that gender-flipped version be read as misogynistic simply because we're not used to seeing two female characters as complicated as the ones that Isaac and Gleeson play?"

"No, I think it would just be in the evidence of creating these himbos," he said. "No, it doesn't need to be contextualized by society in that way. That's a sort of get-out clause."

He brought up a scene in the film where Caleb stumbles upon the dismembered remains of Nathan's earlier androids - heads, breasts, and legs, all discreetly hidden in the mad inventor's bedroom. "Put it this way," said Garland. "Is the film inviting you to approve of a semicircle of cabinets containing sections of the opposite gender?"

I laughed, but Garland stared at me, dead serious. "It's not a rhetorical question," he said.

I conceded the obvious: Those cabinets full of lady parts were not a good look. He leaned back again. "Now, I don't need to contextualize it in the history of science-fiction tropes to make that fucking point."

Alone with Garland in this hotel room, it struck me that we were very much like Caleb and Nathan, arguing with each other about our own interpretation of Ex Machina's central mystery woman. (And I'd concede that the spectacle of two men treating Ava like a Rorshach blot may lend some credence to the film's critics.) But though Garland advanced his points with cool confidence, doubt began to creep into his voice near the end of our interview.

"I'm being sort of unwittingly elliptical about this, and I don't mean to be elliptical. I think there's value in asking the questions," he said. "What you're doing is you're articulately - and pretty accurately - going down a line of questioning that goes to the heart of some of this stuff, and goes to the heart of what I worry about. There are some things out there that are really bad, and I don't want to be one of the group of people who are making it worse."

And that creates a conundrum for Garland: By contextualizing his provocations, he risks diluting their power. "It's very difficult to talk about this candidly," said Garland, his brow furrowed. "I'm really worried that I'm trying to back-load or front-load the film, and the film should exist on its merits."

I assured him that it did stand alone - that even beyond the ideas smuggled into it, Ex Machina worked smashingly as a dramatic thriller, and would be regarded by most as a well-shot, satisfyingly ambitious directorial debut. He rustled in his chair.

"But that's not good enough," he said, still utterly uninterested in comfort. "Because you could beautifully make a cake that tastes like shit."

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Does Ex Machina Have a Woman Problem, or Is Its Take on Gender Truly Futuristic?

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The chair was plush, tall, and regal. It was the kind of throne you could sink into and never want to get up from, and it was quickly rejected by Alex Garland. "Too comfortable," he said, eyeing that chair like an enemy.

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Alex Garland knows what you know. He's seen Blade Runner and 2001: A Space Odyssey. He reads Wired and The New York Times. He's clocked in hours on Xbox and Playstation. He's dabbled on Facebook and Twitter and other forms of social media.

So when he needs to manipulate the audience, the way he does in the shivery sci-fi thriller Ex Machina, he can play you with the same skill and ease a 17-year-old plays Grand Theft Auto or Halo.

"That's one of the great things about sci-fi: As a storyteller, I can nudge you toward certain things and hide others, because we have the same points of reference," Garland, 46, says via telephone from New York. "From my perspective, that's a free gift. I can show you the scars on a character's back without acknowledging them, and I know you will remember them. Toying with the traditional beats of sci-fi is incredibly useful. And I really like genre, because there's nothing detached or ironic about it. You don't have to be embarrassed by big ideas. You can just put them in, knowing there's a segment of the audience out there that digs them. They want to be provoked."

Although he first became known as an author when his 1996 novel The Beach became a mammoth bestseller, Garland has since gravitated away from books (he's only written two others, The Tesseract and Coma, neither of which was well-received) and toward movies. His first screenplay, for Danny Boyle's 2002 zombie hit 28 Days Later, proved he could transplant the same sort of anxiety and dread he generated on the page to the screen. Other scripts followed - Sunshine, Never Let Me Go, Dredd - but further success in his film career proved elusive.

" 28 Days Later really caught on, but that was 15 years ago," he says. "Since then, none of the other movies I've worked on did well at the box office. The stone-cold reality is that no one went to see them. But somehow, people gave me $15 million to make another film and let me direct it. I felt like I had won the lottery, because in some ways, Ex Machina is a really weird film. There are a lot of scenes of people talking, and then you get like nine minutes of silence, just music and images. When I think about it, the fact we got financed is extraordinary."

Arriving on a wave of positive festival buzz and reviews, Ex Machina is an unusually small and focused work of science fiction with only three protagonists: Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson), a computer programmer at a mammoth, Google-like Internet company who wins a contest to spend a week at the remote home of his genius but reclusive boss, Nathan (Oscar Isaac); and Ava (Alicia Vikander), Nathan's latest project, a sentient robot with a mechanical body and a stunningly beautiful face.

Caleb is asked to serve as a willing guinea pig and spend time with Ava to see if he can fall in love with her, even though she is clearly a machine (her see-through torso and limbs reveal innards comprised of wires, pistons and circuit boards). As Nathan watches via security cameras inside his sleek, state-of-the-art mountainside compound, Caleb and Ava get to know each other - separated through a thick wall of shatterproof glass - and form an unusual relationship.

Although the overriding tone of Ex Machina is cool and cerebral (Stanley Kubrick would have loved this movie), a gradual heat starts to develop, turning the film into a bizarre love triangle between a creator, his invention and his test subject.

" 'Heat' is exactly the right word," Garland says. "Because otherwise the movie would have been very cold. You needed to have sex and heart in it. Everything on the screen was designed to build that kind of aesthetic, and everyone on the set worked toward that goal. For example, the production designer was the one who pointed out that in some respects, this was like a prison-break movie, except that the prisoner - the machine - inhabits a large, open space, and the person interrogating her is inside a small glass box. I never wrote it that way, but it made perfect sense."

With so few characters onscreen, casting was critical, something that isn't always true for this type of heady sci-fi.

"Sometimes with this kind of movie, actors don't need to be good: They just need to be charismatic," Garland says. "But this film isn't like that. I needed to have really good, serious actors, or I'd be in trouble very fast. The financiers understood that. I saw Alicia in a Danish film called A Royal Affair in which she was acting opposite Mads Mikkelsen ( The Hunt, TV's Hannibal). He's a very powerful actor, and here's this girl, maybe 20 or 21, dominating the screen and becoming the focus of the entire movie. She had that thing - Phillip Seymour Hoffman had it too - where you're aware of how good they are as you're watching them, but you also get sucked into their performance. It was pretty clear that she would be perfect."

Garland says the same was true of Gleeson, with whom he had worked on Never Let Me Go and Dredd, and Isaac ( Inside Llewyn Davis, A Most Violent Year), the former Miami theater actor who is about to blow up worldwide with the upcoming Star Wars: The Force Awakens ("Everyone in the industry knows how good Oscar is. They've been talking about him for years. It's not a secret.")

There are a lot of subtexts in Ex Machina, including the complex gender politics inherent in the bizarre love triangle that develops between the protagonists. But as the best films of its genre must do, Ex Machina also resonates as a rumination on the potential threats we are bound to face as technology continues to accelerate at an unprecedented speed and our everyday existence becomes more virtual and artificial.

"The movie has a bunch of suspicions, but it's neither a pro nor anti-A.I. film," Garland says. "It's really about us, people, and the ways in which we deceive each other. It's about this sense that there all these machines - laptops and tablets and cell phones - that we don't really understand how they work, but they seem to know a hell of a lot about us. They know where we're going for dinner and who's in our address book and how much is in our bank account and when we input something into a search window, they predict what they think we are going to type. That should make us uneasy. It's correct that we feel uneasy.

"I have a real ambivalence about these giant tech companies. On the one hand, they're amazing. They're like NASA in the 1960s, except instead of going to the moon, we are exploring artificial intelligence and how to make universal translators and how to get technological benefits to remote parts of Africa. All this stuff is helpful and good and useful and admirable. But at the same time, there's no real oversight on these companies. They're not transparent. They're hidden. That makes me nervous. I don't care if they're doing something wrong. That's irrelevant. When they have this much power, someone needs to be watching them. So somewhere in this movie, I am trying to gently fan the flames of that fear. I wouldn't call it paranoia, because that's unreasonable. This is a very reasonable fear. There is no privacy anymore. Just forget it. That land grab is gone. It doesn't exist. And that should be scary."
Follow Miami Herald movie critic Rene Rodriguez on Twitter.

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Alex Garland stretches the sci-fi genre in 'Ex Machina' | Miami Herald

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Alex Garland knows what you know. He's seen Blade Runner and 2001: A Space Odyssey. He reads Wired and The New York Times. He's clocked in hours on Xbox and Playstation. He's dabbled on Facebook and Twitter and other forms of social media.

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Before GOTG not many people were really aware of the original comic strip as they were hardly some of Marvel's flagship characters, but the film helped bring it to a wider audience by making it part of Marvel's wider cinematic universe. https://variety.com/2014/film/news/guardians-of-the-galaxy-marvel-analysis-1201274603/

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How 'Guardians of the Galaxy Reinvents the Strong Female Superhero

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How 'Guardians of the Galaxy Reinvents the Strong Female Superhero

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In "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2," women get to be emotional ass kickers - and the movie is all the better for it.

Girl Talk is a weekly look at women in film - past, present, and future.
James Gunn's "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2" is a family affair, building its action around an unexpected reunion between Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) and his outsized father, Ego the Living Planet (Kurt Russell), but the superhero feature also makes room for another fraught familial relationship: the estranged bond between Nebula ( Karen Gillan), the purple-skinned, half-cyborg and her green-skinned sister Gamora (Zoe Saldana).

The sisters' thorny relationship was framed with some large-scale action in Gunn's 2014 Marvel Cinematic Universe entry. The new film casts it in a different light, one that doesn't hinge on the two of them kicking the crap out of each other in skintight suits (though that happens, too). The pair reunite early in the film, and as the narrative winds on they are required to be more open and honest with each other - mainly about why Nebula hates Gamora so much, and what kind of future bond the pair could ever hope to have, if any.
READ MORE: Kurt Russell on the Little Movies That Brought Him Back to Hollywood and 'Guardians of the Galaxy'
It's a storyline that dovetails neatly with Peter's own family problems, but this subplot - an emotional one, about imperfect people who make some huge mistakes and hurt each other in the process - plays out between two women, and that makes it feel very different.

It also highlights one of the more glaring misconceptions about the kinds of female characters that should populate movies. In a time when more representation and true diversity are needed more than ever, women have to be "strong" to be compelling and must fit the tired "strong female character" archetype to get recognition.

"There's just a great array of women in ["Guardians Vol. 2″], and different types of women," Gillan recently told IndieWire. "Yes, there are females in big action, sci-fi movies, but we were sort of in danger of them becoming stereotypical in the sense that they're 'badass' and 'super strong' and 'sexy.'"

Nebula and Gamora are the most obvious, but "Vol. 2" also introduces new female characters like the innocent Mantis (Pom Klementieff), the high priestess Ayesha (Elizabeth Debicki), and the Ravager Aleta (Michelle Yeoh), while adding closer looks at returning co-stars like Peter's mother Meredith (Laura Haddock) and Glenn Close's Nova Prime.

In particular, Nebula offers a refreshing alternative to what has become the stereotypical "strong female character." She's a wounded warrior with issues to spare, an emotionally damaged villain who is not "likable." But that doesn't mean she's not a rich or realized character.

"The thing that attracted me to playing the role was this exact aspect of the character," she said when asked about Nebula's complex emotions. " Why is she a villain? What happened to her? How awful was that? What's her relationship with her sister?"

Marvel Studios

Her favorite scene features the estranged sisters coming to terms with some of the horrific abuses their father inflicted. It's pretty heavy stuff for a superhero movie, but one that allowed both Gillan and Saldana to tap into the kind of personal pain and deep honesty that often isn't afforded to so-called strong characters.

That a blockbuster makes room for an entire subplot about the bond between sisters is refreshing on its own; that it pushes them both to explore emotional wounds in a rooted way is even more original and exciting. You can put reality and real emotions into these films - turns out, emotional veracity is a good thing - and that has to include women and women's stories.

Nebula's character is more than a collection of buzzwords, and that's exactly what these highly visible female characters need. "Strong" means compelling or potent, passionate or vivid; it's not about placing more weight on being buff than being bright.

Gillan, who infamously embraced Nebula from the get-go, shaving off her own hair and digging into months of hardcore training to prepare for the first film, is more than happy to use the character and the film to battle those kinds of expectations.
READ MORE: 'Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2' Post-Credits Scenes: What They Are and What They Mean For the MCU
"That's almost become a thing that you have to do, when really there are different types of strength and different types of women," she said. "Some women need to find their strengths, and I think that in this movie, you see [those] different types of women."

While the Marvel Cinematic Universe and DC's Extended Universe struggle to craft multi-faceted female characters to fill their ranks, there are some heartening options on the horizon, including this summer's "Wonder Woman" and the long-planned "Captain Marvel" feature. Both characters offer opportunities for their respective films to tap into more complex emotions and stories - Carol Danvers as Captain Marvel is rife with emotional complications and one hell of a dark streak, while marketing for "Wonder Woman" has hinted at a painful past taking center stage in the story.

The question now is if those films - and others that will surely be inspired by them - will bank on high-energy fighting scenes over more intimate emotional explorations. But why not both?

"It's like people think, 'Oh, we're going to do the right thing by making a female strong,' when really, that's almost as bad in itself," Gillan said. "There has to be a selection. There has to be more than one archetype."
"Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2" opens on Friday, May 5. Stay on top of the latest breaking film and TV news! Sign up for our Email Newsletters here.
Just "strong"? That's not strong enough anymore.

Sign Up: Stay on top of the latest breaking film and TV news! Sign up for our Email Newsletters here.

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How 'Guardians of the Galaxy' Reinvents the Strong Female Superhero

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In "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2," women get to be emotional ass kickers - and the movie is all the better for it. Girl Talk is a weekly look at women in film - past, present, and future. James Gunn's "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol.

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"Guardians Of The Galaxy blasted away box office predictions"

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Since it was first announced, Guardians Of The Galaxy has been earmarked as Marvel Studios' big gamble. It's, on paper, the least known property it's brought to the big screen, it's not a sequel, it's not centred around one hero, and it's got an untraditional late summer release date. There's no way that could be as big a hit as all the others, right?

Piffle. Over the weekend, Guardians Of The Galaxy blasted away box office predictions and did some quite extraordinary business. James Gunn's movie took $94m at the US box office, the biggest August opening on record by distance (the previous record holder was The Bourne Ultimatum, with $69.3m). Furthermore, it added $66m outside the US, for a current worldwide total of $160.4m.

In the US, the movie had a bigger opening than Thor: The Dark World, and nearly matched the huge numbers of Captain America: The Winter Soldier.

More importantly though, the film is going down strongly and being widely enjoyed. And that's not a point lost on James Gunn, who posted his appreciation on Facebook.

"Thanks to all of you who saw (and are seeing) Guardians Of The Galaxy this weekend, from the bottom of my heart. The Guardians are a group of oddballs, outcasts, and geeks. The movie is for anyone who ever felt cast aside, left out, or different. It's for all of us who don't belong. This movie belongs to you. And, today, I think we're doing okay", he wrote.

Reiterating that the final cut is the film he intended and pitched to Marvel, he took time to thank the cast and crew for their work, and described the movie's release as "like giving a foster pet up for adoption to the most wonderful parents in the world".

Furthermore, he revealed he's been busy. writing that "while many of you have been enjoying the film, I've spent this weekend hard at work on the sequel. I couldn't help myself! The results are nice but it's really the creative process I love and that keeps me going. I'm on fire with this thing! The Guardians have so many hardships and heartaches and triumphs ahead of them, and I can't wait to share them with all of you".

The full Facebook post is here, and Guardians Of The Galaxy 2 will be in cinemas on July 28th 2017.

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Guardians Of The Galaxy box office success, sequel latest

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Since it was first announced, Guardians Of The Galaxy has been earmarked as Marvel Studios' big gamble. It's, on paper, the least known property it's brought to the big screen, it's not a sequel, it's not centred around one hero, and it's got an untraditional late summer release date.

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Guardians of the Galaxy review - smart and funny retro thrills

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Chris Pratt leads a ragtag bunch of unlikely superheroes on a quest to save the cosmos in Marvel's witty bubblegum romp, writes Peter Bradshaw

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With the smash hit " Guardians of the Galaxy," James Gunn directed perhaps the most visually arresting movie of the year. In addition to "Guardians'" outer-space setting and ambitious action sequences, he managed to make audiences believe in both a talking raccoon and lovable tree creature.

But "Guardians" isn't merely eye candy - at the heart of the film is a story about a group of misfits working together, with a smart screenplay by Gunn and Nicole Perlman.

And Gunn says story always comes first.

SEE ALSO: Box Office: 'Guardians of the Galaxy' Hits $600 Million Worldwide

"You need to make sure that technology is there to enhance the story and excitement," he says. "And if technology does that, it's great. If it overshadows it, it's not so great."

This mandate applied to bringing Rocket, the gun-toting raccoon, and Groot, the childlike tree creature, to life. "I have a very strange attachment to Rocket and Groot. I love them as if they were my children. And I created them in that respect, to really be fully characters who have many dimensions," he says. "And all the technology, the rotoscoping and digital technology, are there to service the characters."

Gunn, who began his career in the low-budget world of Troma Films before directing indie genre pics such as "Slither" and "Super," found himself working in the Marvel universe with his biggest budget yet - something he says was completely liberating.

"That said, there are still budgetary restraints," Gunn adds. "If I made the movie without restraints, it would have cost $400 million. I picture in my head what that film is, I create it in my mind, and it's unrestrained.

"And then I try to match what it on screen to what's in my head. With 'Guardians,' I had my full imagination at play for the first time ever."

Gunn is a keynote speaker at Variety 's Entertainment & Technology Summit, Oct. 20 at the Ritz Carlton in Marina Del Rey.

Tipsheet
What: Variety Entertainment & Technology Summit
When: 9 a.m.- 4 p.m., Oct. 20
Where: The Ritz-Carlton, Marina del Rey
Web: www.variety.com/entandtech

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Technology Unchains 'Guardians' Director James Gunn's Big Dreams

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With the smash hit " Guardians of the Galaxy," James Gunn directed perhaps the most visually arresting movie of the year. In addition to "Guardians'" outer-space setting and ambitious action sequences, he managed to make audiences believe in both a talking raccoon and lovable tree creature.

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Ex Machina review - dazzling sci-fi thriller

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Alex Garland's directorial debut is full of confidence and wit, with Alicia Vikander blurring the lines between human and machine, writes Mark Kermode

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Representation in 'Guardians of the Galaxy'

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Representation in 'Guardians of the Galaxy'

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Let me make a few things clear before we get into the grumpy bits. I enjoyed the hell out of the Guardians of the Galaxy movie. Not only I was part of that 44% female audience for opening weekend, but I also plan to see it again. It was the first MCU movie I've seen opening day or weekend, and only the second one I've seen in a theater (the first was Captain America: The Winter Soldier). The soundtrack has been on repeat on my iPod for nearly two weeks, and half my Tumblr is dedicated to Rocket and Groot being adorbs and Sister Assassins being awesome. I'd pay cold, hard cash for a dancing baby Groot toy, and Groot fanart is my desktop wallpaper. I would give just about anything to have a TV prequel of teenage Gamora and Nebula kicking ass. I will even cover the "Rocket Raccoon," "Legendary Star-Lord," and "Guardians of the Galaxy" comics in an upcoming Pull List. TL;DR: I love the Guardians of the Galaxy movie. Well, I love about 85% of it, and have serious reservations about a few key issues.

Spoilers abound...

"You said it, bitch."
Can we please stop calling people bitches? More specifically, stop having male characters call other male characters bitches, as if it were the worst thing one man could call one another. Having a man take a term that represents a certain kind of person - in this case, a headstrong, independent woman who doesn't take shit from anyone - and turn it into an invective meant to hurt another man as a slight against their masculinity is unnecessary and misogynistic.Such a comment is right up there with calling something "gay." Surely we've moved beyond this as a culture.

Gamora's costume
Listen up, superhero creators. There are 3 big no's in creating costumes for female characters: no boob plates, no high heels, and no boob or belly windows. There's no reason for Gamora or Nebula to wear something as impractical as 3 inch wedge heels. And no, Drax and Star-Lord being shirtless doesn't count as a male objectification. They're propped up as an admirable, desireable male physique, whereas Nebula and Gamora's skin-tight, revealing outfits sexualize them. If Star-Lord doesn't need heels or a costume that defies gravity, then neither do Gamora or Nebula. At least we can thank Hera they didn't use Gamora's costume from the comics.

Howard the Duck
No, Marvel, you don't get to reboot a freaking talking duck movie before you give a movie to someone who isn't a straight white man. You had the perfect opportunity to tease a Captain Marvel or Black Widow movie and you wasted it. Hell, you could've used the tag on what happened to Nebula after she jumped out of the spaceship. Presumably she's still alive, and it would be so cool to see her piecing herself together out of the wreckage. But instead we end up with Howard the Duck? *groan*

Lack of diversity
It's been argued that Gamora is the real star of the movie, and I'm inclined to agree. But, of course, it can't really be Gamora's movie because that would mean having a woman protagonist instead of a handsome white dudebro. That same line of reasoning is what makes Glenn Close's Nova Prime so disappointing. You'd think the leader of an entire planet would have more to do than to look fretful and/or stern while taking orders from a lusty space pirate. Marvel should be ashamed for wasting the phenomenal Glenn Close on such an ineffectual role.

Furthermore, in a galaxy with a sentient tree, a talking raccoon, a space dog, and Howard the freaking Duck, you mean to tell me that there's only one person of color worth hearing speak? And no, it doesn't count as diversity if all but one person of color is relegated to background scenery. Andrew Wheeler at Comics Alliance pointed out that "if Marvel makes Thor 3 before it makes Black Panther, it will have made ten movies headlined by blond white men named Chris before it makes one movie headlined by someone who isn't even white [or female, or LGBTQIA]." That is utterly unacceptable in a company that prides itself on its diversity.

That "whore" joke
There were two, really. The first was Rocket telling Gamora to use her sexuality to seduce the quarnex battery from the watchtower guards, which still doesn't make any sense to me. How in the world is that plan even remotely a good idea? They just established that everyone in the prison is either terrified of her or wants to kill her. While she flirts with Peter in the beginning to steal the Infinity Stone from him, the difference is that in the prison it's treated as a punchline meant to degrade Gamora rather than a desperate plan she forms herself. In the beginning, she makes her own choice; in the prison, the male characters decide what to do with her body. In the former, she has all the agency; in the latter she's a sexual object.

But the more offensive joke was when Drax the Destroyer calls Gamora a whore. Gamora, warrior, assassin, and all-around BAMF, is apparently nothing more than "this green whore." Drax can only speak literally. So where does this accusation of whorish behavior come from? It is neither implicitly nor explicitly noted anywhere that she has previously prostituted herself. If we're going around accusing people of slutty behavior, that joke would've been more appropriate directed at Star-Lord. He's notorious for sleeping around, so much so that Gamora - who never met him before this movie - rejects his infamous "pelvic sorcery." He has so much sex with so many random women that he forgets he has one of them in his ship when he steals the Infinity Stone. ( Bereet should be a clever Easter egg tie-in to the Avengers, but here she's hardly more than a briefly seen sexual conquest.) Peter Quill may have started out as an homage to Han Solo, but in the Guardians movie he's closer to the rebooted, over-sexed Captain Kirk.

The males around Gamora have simply decided that she's a slut, without any evidence supporting it. (Not that there's anything inherently wrong with prostitution or being a slut in the first place, but the movie clearly uses the term in a derogatory sense.) Slutty Peter gets Drax's gratitude while not-slutty Gamora is called a whore. And to do so as a punchline is even more inexcusable. At best, it's an unfunny joke that has no place in a light-hearted PG-13 movie. At worst, it reinforces rape culture by attempting to make it funny that women should be thought of only in terms of a straight male's sexual appetite. I mean, come on. It's infuriating.

It's hard to be a comics fan if you're not a straight white man, given that most of the representative iterations of diversity end up as one dimensional tokens, expendable sidekicks, or fridge-able sex objects. DC's done a pretty terrible job in their comics and movies at creating female, PoC, and/or LGBTQIA characters that aren't cardboard plot devices used to inspire the male protagonist into heroic action. To be fair, DC gets good marks on television with Arrow (and presumably The Flash), but since the shows won't crossover into the movies, it's more or less cancelled out in the grand scheme of things.

Not that Marvel is much better. Comics-wise, Marvel is slowly but surely getting more diverse, but the MCU is a more depressing story. While the MCU has been good at not actively excluding us non straight/white/male fans, they haven't been very good at including us in the content we're fanning over. Black Widow, Pepper Potts, Agent Hill, Peggy and Sharon Carter, Rhodey, and Falcon are awesome, but they don't really get to do anything outside of the white male superhero protagonists. We saw Steve Rogers hang out at a coffee shop while off the clock, but what does Natasha do when she's not SHIELD-ing? Why only three straight black dudes in the movies (with no romantic interests so as to keep them "non-threatening")? Why not an Asian, Native American, Middle Eastern, or Hispanic character with a major role? Or a trans person? I like John C. Reilly and Peter Serafinowicz a ton, but why not hire people of color for those roles instead? Why couldn't Corpsman Dey go home to his husband instead of his wife? Where in the MCU are the rest of us?

Here's the thing. You can't give me Gamora then spend the whole movie slut-shaming her and locking her into an unnecessary romance, then expect me to grateful a woman was even allowed a prominent role. You can't merchandise the hell out of your male (and animal, and plant) characters and skip the female ones altogether. You can't claim Guardians is the first Marvel movie written by a woman when it was so substantially re-written by a man that everything from the character personalities to the main story arc is entirely different. Marvel as a corporation may be winning the race against DC to be the most socially progressive of the Big Two, but that victory is due less to the increasing insistence on diversity and more to DC eagerly hobbling itself.

I'm not calling for a boycott of Guardians of the Galaxy, or even suggesting it's a bad movie. As I said earlier, I really enjoyed the overall film experience. But that doesn't mean I'm not allowed to have grave concerns about it, call it on its BS, and demand improvement. I'll read the comics and buy the DVD, but I'll be angry about that "whore" joke until the end of time.

Alex Brown is an archivist, research librarian, writer, geeknerdloserweirdo, and all-around pop culture obsessive who watches entirely too much TV. Keep up with her every move on Twitter, or get lost in the rabbit warren of ships and fandoms on her Tumblr.

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Guardians of the Galaxy, We Need to Talk

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Let me make a few things clear before we get into the grumpy bits. I enjoyed the hell out of the Guardians of the Galaxy movie. Not only I was part of that 44% female audience for opening weekend, ...

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The Marvel Cinematic Universe is one of the most popular entertainment brands on the planet, and a good deal of that popularity has manifested through the massive amount of merchandise produced featuring the various characters. However, a persistent criticism of the brand has been that female characters have been underrepresented in merchandising efforts - leaving fans of such characters unable to find toys, apparel, etc featuring them.

Marvel Studios boss Kevin Feige weighed in on the controversy, stating that the company is taking steps to correct this perception. As part of a an interview event for Guardians of The Galaxy Vol. 2 attended by Screen Rant and other members of the entertainment press in April, Feige was asked upfront about the supposed shortages of merchandise featuring female characters from the Marvel films and abou what we can expect from the Guardians sequel which has notably more female leads than most Marvel movies.

While he upheld a long-established official position of the studio that the disparity is perceived because of what stores choose to stock more so than what Marvel chooses to manufacture; he also maintained that steps are being taken to make the situation better:

"That was very frustrating for us, because we see it from the other side, right. When I say we, I mean the filmmakers, because we're presented with the stuff that's being made, and there's, I don't know if there's an absolutely equal sampling, but Black Widow was all over that. Gamora was all over that stuff. What we don't see is how much of it is in any given store. How easy is one piece of merchandise to find versus another piece of merchandise. So, we see the stuff and we go, oh great, these are all our characters, they're all great represented, they're all going to be sold, and then we find out, oh, you can't find this, you can't find that, or there's lunch boxes or a backpack where a certain character is not on it, and I think the outrage was great, because that's not going to happen anymore. And that was one of our big things we set out to do and was very important to James as well, was putting, as we did in the first film, with a number of characters, even more so this time, putting women at the forefront of the story."

Additionally, when pressed to clarify what sort of effort is being made at the creative level to improve the scenario, Feige reaffirmed the commitments of not only himself and Guardians director James Gunn but the broader Marvel Studios corporate structure to making this change a reality - to the extent that they can:

"We can't have sway over what a retail store, how many items of what they want to stock on a shelf, but when toy sets come over, or t-shirt designs come over, if they're not represented properly or representative of the film, we're not even saying is the equality of each gender specific, we're going does it represent the movie we're making, and if it doesn't, we send it back until it does."

Guardians of The Galaxy Vol. 2 features expanded roles for female characters including Gamora and Nebula along with newcomer Mantis and a female nemesis in the form of Ayesha, all of whom we've already started seeing in licenced products. James Gunn told us as far back as the press junket for the first Guardians that he wanted more female characters on his team, and he's delivering exactly that with the sequel.

[vn_gallery name="Behind-The-Scenes Guardians of the Galaxy 2 Photos" id="896172"]

Set to the all-new sonic backdrop of Awesome Mixtape #2, Marvel Studios' Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 continues the team's adventures as they traverse the outer reaches of the cosmos. The Guardians must fight to keep their newfound family together as they unravel the mystery of Peter Quill's true parentage. Old foes become new allies and fan-favorite characters from the classic comics will come to our heroes' aid as the Marvel Cinematic Universe continues to expand.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 is written and directed by James Gunn and stars Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, Dave Bautista, featuring Vin Diesel as Baby Groot, Bradley Cooper as Rocket, Michael Rooker, Karen Gillan, Pom Klementieff, Elizabeth Debicki, Chris Sullivan, Sean Gunn, Tommy Flanagan, Laura Haddock, with Sylvester Stallone, and Kurt Russell. Kevin Feige is producing, and Louis D'Esposito, Victoria Alonso, Jonathan Schwartz, Nikolas Korda and Stan Lee are the executive producers.

Tags: guardians of the galaxy 2

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Female Characters Better Represented in Guardians of the Galaxy 2 Merchandise

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The Marvel Cinematic Universe is one of the most popular entertainment brands on the planet, and a good deal of that popularity has manifested through the massive amount of merchandise produced featuring the various characters.

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2015 could very well be the year of Artificial Intelligence. Avengers: Age Of Ultron sees Earth's mightiest heroes take on the sub-titular machine, while Star Wars: The Force Awakens will not only welcome back R2-D2 and C-3PO, but also introduce rollerball droid BB-8.

But as great as those guys will undoubtably be, it's unlikely they'll best Ava, Ex Machina's robot femme fatale. Brought to life by Alicia Vikander (who, along with Testament Of Youth and The Man From U.N.C.L.E. is set to have quite a year) and an incredibly human script by writer-director Alex Garland, she's a complex and engaging character whom the question of genuine intelligence in place of intricate programming looms over throughout.

Although Ava is certainly the star of the show, Ex Machina has more than just Vikander going for it. Domhnall Gleeson and Oscar Isaac get some cracking psychological confrontation (in something of an appetiser for The Force Awakens) and Garland makes the jump from competent sci-fi writer to stylish director with aplomb.

All this comes together to deliver one of the best sci-fi movies in recent years, a film that's not short on big questions ripe for discussion post-viewing. The ending ties plot points and themes together into an almost lyrical final fifteen minutes, but what is actually going on and what does it really mean? It's time to find out...

MAJOR SPOILERS present from hereon in. If you've not seen the film yet (a US release date is pegged for April) bookmark this dissection and come back - you're really going to want to discuss the film afterwards.

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What Does The Ending Of Ex Machina Really Mean?

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2015 could very well be the year of Artificial Intelligence. Avengers: Age Of Ultron sees Earth's mightiest heroes take on the sub-titular machine, while Star Wars: The Force Awakens will not only welcome back R2-D2 and C-3PO, but also introduce rollerball droid BB-8.

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https://www.engadget.com/2017/05/06/guardians-of-the-galaxy-8k-behind-the-scenes/

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Impact of New Digital technology in the Film Industry

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Impact of New Digital technology in the Film Industry

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A man who struggles to understand his emotions, who is locked away for his violent reactions after harm comes to a loved one, only to be broken out of his captivity and rediscover what it means to be part of a family: ' Drax the Destroyer' from Guardians of the Galaxy has a lot more in common with Raymond Babbitt from Rain Man than you may think.

However, unlike the go-to example of autism, which Rain Man has become, Guardians of the Galaxy is often left out of the autism film debate, which is a shame, because in terms of representation (and in terms of plot, lighting, music and not having a scene which features a disabled man watching his brother have sex) Guardians of the Galaxy is an all-round better film. Don't believe me? Well today I have detailed 3 reasons which will change your mind.

Guardians of the Galaxy is a more REALISTIC depiction of Autism:

No one is going to knock Dustin Hoffman's incredible performance as Raymond Babbitt anytime soon, but when it comes to giving an accurate depiction of autism,' Tootsie's ' game was well off.

Whether he's reacting to moments of danger, or simply enjoying his favourite show, Raymond is never depicted as processing any of the events that go on around him. Yes, he is capable of registering all the information he sees, but other than a few coping techniques, such as his ' who's on third' routine, Raymond is entirely apathetic: depicted not only as incapable of comprehending the feelings of any single person in his life, but also of his own.

Although it isn't completely unheard of for an autist to struggle in this way, what annoys me and many others on the spectrum, is how this is depictied as common for autistic people - which many still believe in even 30 years later (yep, Rain Man turns 30 this year, feel old yet?)

On the other hand, though the very same can be said about Drax, in that he is slow to think about anyone's goals other than his own, Dave Bautista offers a much more layered performance of a character with autistic tendencies. Drax may be narrow minded and also slightly apathetic, but in the background of almost every scene, it is possible to see him reacting in his own Drax way to what's going on around him.

These responses show that unlike Raymond, Drax isn't completely devoid of feelings - he just struggles to express them. Something, which in my experience, is all too common; as even with reflexes as fast as Drax, it can often feel impossible for an autist to grasp the words which accurately describe our emotions.

( As a side note, I don't blame anyone for questioning my choice to label the character from a film with a talking raccoon as more realistic - especially as Raymond Babbitt is based on a real person. But considering that 'the real Rain Man' Kim Peeks is no longer considered to have autism [instead now believed to have had FG Syndrome], you have to ask yourself the question: is it better to have an autistic representation with no exact inspiration, or one which is based largely on misinformation?)

Guardians of the Galaxy is a more POSITIVE depiction of Autism:

So, let's just say it, Raymond is a JERK. From moments such as refusing to get on a plane, to hijacking a car's steering wheel, whilst driving down the freeway. Raymond's only purpose throughout Rain Man is to be as big an obstacle as possible.

This is not to say that people with autism aren't capable of being jerks ( because believe me, I have met my fair share of jerks on the spectrum). However, Rain Man's answer to why does Raymond do these awkward things, is often shrugged off as " because he is autistic ".

Conversely, Drax is... ok, well Drax is also a jerk. However, unlike Raymond, Drax's reasoning behind why he does, what he does is clear - Drax seeks to get revenge for the death of his family and he has spent years killing and destroying anything Ronan/Thanos related to do so (I guess everybody needs a hobby).

Although this can also be perceived as an autistic person's obsession causing harm to the people around them, Guardians of the Galaxy makes it clear that Drax is often as much a victim of his actions as anyone else (if not more).

To be fair to Rain Man, this does mean that both portrayals are less than positive in regard to autistic obsessions. However, the representation given in Guardians of the Galaxy is by far the lesser of two evils, as Drax's reasoning boils down to more than: the-script's-writers-were-looking-for-a-way-to-create-some-spicy-drama.

(It should be mentioned that though it isn't entirely beyond the realms of reality for an autist's obsession to have no rhyme or reason, as well as potentially cause harm, this possibility does not excuse the fact that Rain Man uses Raymond's obsessions solely as a point of contention)

Guardians of the Galaxy is a more DIVERSE depiction of Autism:

One reason why Guardians of the Galaxy particularly stands out as a better autism film than Rain Man, is because of its diverse representation of the spectrum. Yes, Dave Bautista's Drax does loosely fit the aesthetic profile of the stereotypical autist: being both white and male. However, he also smashed that stereotype right back, by being the complete opposite of the typical Hollywood poindexter: with social difficulties and an IQ lower than an animated tree ( and hey, Dave Bautista does have both Greek and Filipino ancestry so that's got to count for something).

What really makes the diversity in Guardians of the Galaxy stand above Rain Man though, is when, in the film's sequel, another character with autistic tendencies is introduced: Mantis (okay, so maybe it's a little unfair to use two different films to criticise Rain Man's lack of diversity, but just know that if ' Rain Man 2: Make it Rain ' existed I would absolutely be referencing that too).

What makes Mantis an incredible addition to the autistic portfolio within the Guardians franchise, is that her autistic traits set her up to depict a completely different end of the spectrum to that of Drax. Mantis is shown to very clearly understand emotions (in fact that is her power), however she struggles to interpret them with context. Like Drax, Mantis takes everything literally, but whereas Drax is literal in his understanding of words, Mantis takes everything she is told as truth. For example, she smiles unnaturally wide when she meets new people, as she has been told that this is ' the thing to do to make people like you.'

It probably goes without saying, but if Mantis is indeed meant to be autistic (or whatever space variation of autism exists in the Marvel universe), then she is also a rare case of a female autist in film - something which few movies have ever attempted without once again slipping into the generic Hollywood autistic savant: that's right, I'm looking at you ' On Body and Soul '.

Maybe we should give Rain Man some credit though, as when it was first released this stereotype hadn't yet developed. However, if we were to cut Rain Man slack for simply being old, it only further proves how outdated this film has become. To me, this, more than anything, highlights that the golden boy of autism is slowly losing his shine, as by today's standards of autism awareness and autism understanding, it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to call Rain Man potentially damaging and offensive to the autistic community.

Whether or not this means people need to stop recommending Rain Man to people with little or no understanding of autism, I'll let you decide. But if the decision does come back and we do indeed need to find a new standard for autistic depiction within film, well, look no further than the Guardians of the Galaxy (1 and 2).

Carry on the Conversation:

What films do you think depict autism better than Rain Man? I would love to hear your responses in the comments below. Also, if there are any characters which you think are autistic but haven't been officially diagnosed be sure to send me those theories also, as I'm always not looking for new examples of autism in fiction.

As always, I can also be found on Twitter @AutismRevised and via my email: AutisticandUnapologetic@gmail.com.

If you like what you have seen on the site today, then show your support by liking the Autistic & Unapologetic Facebook page. Also, don't forget to sign up to the Autistic & Unapologetic newsletter (found on the side bar on laptops and underneath if you are reading this via mobile) where I share weekly updates as well as a fascinating fact I have found throughout the week.

Thank you for reading and I will see you next Saturday for more thoughts from across the spectrum.

(Photo Credit for all pictures featured: Disney and United Artists)

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Why Guardians of the Galaxy depicts Autism BETTER than Rain Man - Autistic & Unapologetic

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A man who struggles to understand his emotions, who is locked away for his violent reactions after harm comes to a loved one, only to be broken out of his captivity and rediscover what it means to be part of a family: ' Drax the Destroyer' from Guardians of the Galaxy has a lot more in common with Raymond Babbitt from Rain Man than you may think.

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There's a scene in Starz's forthcoming documentary series The Chair-which debuts September 6, and which I previewed here-where director Shane Dawson and his producing partner Lauren Schnipper are discussing the rewriting of the script with their producer-at-large, Josh Shader, one of the only people in touch with both of the two productions being made from the same script by Dan Schoffer. It's as tense a confrontation as you see in the first two episodes of the series, as Schnipper works to break down the writing credits of the still in-progress script that was heavily rewritten and noted by Dawson before being shipped back to Schoffer to take a final pass. Without saying it directly, her question is predicated on the likely results of a WGA arbitration hearing for the film, and Shader's answer is-paraphrasing-that because they gave the option back to Schoffer to write the final version of the script, Dawson's contributions will just be considered notes that happen when a director gets involved with a project, with Schoffer therefore retaining final, sole credit on the film.

It's a moment of some tension. Schoffer gives a talking head discussing how Dawson's claim to credit is an overreach, but as relative first-timers in the context of film production Schnipper and Dawson are mainly just looking for clarification on what to expect moving forward, which seems reasonable. Credit is complicated, as Schnipper notes when she contrasts Dawson's process (rewriting/notes and then sending the script back to the writer) and fellow filmmaker Anna Martemucci's greater control over the script to her film. Whereas Dawson effectively rehired Schoffer to rewrite his own script, Martemucci took the job herself, with the documentary following her completion of the script heading into production. And so this foreshadows what may appear as part of the documentary, which is a likely arbitration hearing for her film, the result of which will determine the writing credits for Hollidaysburg when it debuts in theaters and on Starz this fall.

It will be a rare case where we'll potentially have a lot of very clear information about the arguments made before an arbitration hearing, beyond simply knowing the result (A "Story by" credit for the original writer, a shared writing credit, etc.). In most cases, there isn't a documentary film crew following every stage of the production, and there aren't two concurrent projects that let you draw a direct comparison between the two. There's just an end result and bits of pieces of production history, as is the case with this weekend's Guardians of the Galaxy ( which I "reviewed" on Letterboxd if you're looking for more thoughts on the film). The film's script is credited to James Gunn and Nicole Perlman, although the two never worked together on the film. In a lengthy-and fascinating-Buzzfeed profile on Perlman, as well as in numerous Q&As and features she's done in the past week, it's revealed she worked as part of the Marvel Writing Program, an incubator in which writers were brought in to help develop Marvel properties into potential franchises. Over a two-year period, she worked on adapting the Guardians of the Galaxy series into a workable film franchise, including choosing the roster, plotting out the story, and then completing further writing work during a six-month freelance period once it was clear Marvel was serious about that project.

The Buzzfeed piece features lots of detail on her experience with Marvel and her role in conceiving of this project, but it also acknowledges that she was never going to be its sole screenwriter.

"It wasn't a question of if, it was a question of when," she said. "I always knew they were going to bring in a writer-director. That was always sort of the plan. I'm not primarily a comedy writer, but it needed to be a comedic project. Like, this is a project that has always been irreverent. It's always been tongue-in-cheek. And so that was always the question."

James Gunn became the writer-director in question, and thus began the careful negotiation of authorship. Perlman hasn't been erased from material around the film, and she was both invited to the set and attended the film's gala premiere, so it's not as though there is intense conflict or bad feelings about the experience. And the fact that Marvel is letting her talk about her experience so openly speaks volumes, given they could have probably signed her into nondisclosure agreements if they had felt they needed to. I could be cynical for a moment and note that Marvel is likely allowing this because of the positive press it's brought over a Marvel Studios film finally having a female writer, making it probable they would have worked harder to marginalize her contributions had she not been given a co-writing credit in WGA arbitration (thus giving them a "lemons into lemonade" option of a progressive gender story), but she is nonetheless being allowed to articulate her authorship in popular discourse around the film. That's important.

However, Marvel has also very much positioned this as James Gunn's vision, in the same way that Edgar Wright's Ant-Man was positioned as his vision right up until creative differences led to his departure, and Marvel began the uphill battle of trying to get "Peyton Reed and Adam McKay's Ant-Man " to overwrite the existing authorial work done in the many years of development on the project. Whereas Perlman's authorship-bounded primarily in a story development process controlled by Marvel and with limited profile based on her relative lack of experience-is fairly easily rearticulated as secondary (if still meaningful) in discourse around the film in the wake of Gunn's hiring, Wright's intense authorship discourses are much more prominent, and will be a greater challenge for Marvel (and one imagines the arbiter in a WGA hearing).

We don't know exactly how the WGA determined the shared screenwriting credit on Guardians of the Galaxy, but the range of deep texts of production like Perlman's Buzzfeed profile and other interviews available to us lead us to want to make our own determinations, as we form our own informal arbitration for "credit" on the film in the court of popular discourse. Gunn's weighed in himself: at a junket for the film, he told Film Divider's Charles Madison that

"Really, in Nicole's script everything is pretty different. I mean the story is different, there's no Walkman, the character arcs are different, it's not about the same stuff. But that's how the WGA works. They like first writers an awful lot."

Here we see Gunn-in addition to noting that he would not have credited Perlman as a co-writer if he was in charge of the process-laying claim to particular elements-the music, the character arcs, the "story"-and not others, and if we combine with Perlman's comments about the comedy in the film, then a lot of what I personally enjoyed most about the project sounds like what Gunn brought to the table once Perlman's work on the film was complete. And so in writing about the film, part of me would feel comfortable giving Gunn a lot of credit for making the film that I eventually saw. But then we could look to Perlman's response to what would appear to be an e-mail question from Moviehole:

"We didn't collaborate, they brought in James Gunn with his ideas, he was the director and added his "James Gunn flavor" and a few characters and worked off my script."

That paints a slightly different picture, in which any claim to prioritizing Gunn's contributions is focusing on flavor instead of the main ingredients (with the new characters merely a garnish-she referred to all of this as "James Gunn magic" to The Hollywood Reporter). As much as there doesn't appear to be any outright conflict regarding the scripting timeline, the final WGA decision, or the ultimate prioritizing of Gunn's authorship by Marvel, there is still plenty of murkiness regarding the authorship of the film.

This murky negotiation of writing credit makes writing about the film into a bit of a minefield. Take this Crave Online interview with Gunn as an example: as it was originally written, the story failed to mention Perlman at all, prompting an editor's correction and apology. However, the correction itself almost goes too far based on what we know, as it suggests Gunn "wrote the screenplay with Nicole Perlman," when the two never actually worked on the script at the same time. There's no question the correction was necessary, as Perlman's work on developing the concept for the film built a foundation for any work that followed (and was credited in a way that reflects this, if not even more), but at the same time would it be unfair to Gunn to create the impression that story and character material he personally developed and added to the story does not belong to him and him alone given that Perlman was not involved directly? And moreover, although Perlman and Gunn's stories seem to overlap as it relates to their contributions to the end product, can we take Gunn's word for it when it comes to which elements of the film belong to him exclusively, or is this just him consciously or unconsciously engaging in discourses of conspicuous authorship to ensure his contributions are foregrounded in coverage of the film?

I raise none of these points in an attempt to discredit Perlman; her status as the first woman credited on a Marvel film is enormously important, and will hopefully be the start of a trend for a company that has a production history problematically linked to broader narratives of gender and Hollywood. However, in writing about the film myself and reading writing about it-particularly Todd VanDerWerff's review at Vox, where he takes pains to include Perlman in each nod to authorship-I found myself struggling with how to engage with the particulars of the film within these conversations. And this doesn't even get into the larger question of how much autonomy any filmmaker-no matter how much they articulate their authorship-can have within the massive Marvel Cinematic Universe machine. Were the issues I had with the film's structure a byproduct of Perlman's original treatment that Marvel Studios insisted on maintaining even as Gunn took over? And do we then consider that to be outside of Gunn's responsibility, or has his choice to take such strong authorship made any and all decisions into his responsibility as writer/director, even if their original authorship lies with Perlman's contributions?

For a film that is often so enjoyable because of how uncomplicated it is compared to the overly-extended Marvel Cinematic Universe, reading about Guardians of the Galaxy has been a comparative minefield, albeit one that offers plenty of discussion of how we conceive of authorship in popular discourse around a piece of major studio filmmaking; it also makes a nice precursor for the Ant-Man conversation we'll be having roughly a year from now.

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The Court of Popular Discouse: The Authorship of Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy

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There's a scene in Starz's forthcoming documentary series The Chair-which debuts September 6, and which I previewed here-where director Shane Dawson and his producing partner Lauren Schnipper are discussing the rewriting of the script with their producer-at-large, Josh Shader, one of the only people in touch with both of the two productions being made from...

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Distribution and Exhibition - Jungle Book 2016.ppt.pptx

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The Film Industry - Ownership and Production (General)

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If Gleeson is excellent as Caleb, then Alicia Vikander as Ava is sensational and Ex-Machina is one of the most interesting and smart movies released this year. I took my wife to see it and she hates sci-fi movies... but she thought it was amazing. It creates a scenario that will be very familiar within the next two decades and underlines that the most interesting movies being currently made are about the near-future and how it will affect those living now.

Grossing $33 million worldwide, the film is likely to receive a much more deserving and wider audience after its release on Blu-Ray and DVD last week. If ever a film had potential cult status, it is this one. Ava may be one of the first robots, along with the Scarlett Johansson-voiced operating system in the film Her, to possess a sexual charisma that will appeal a certain type of young man.

"The key challenge was to make Ava's AI plausible so that Caleb (and the audience) will be convinced that she is a conscious, self-determining being. But it was all in place in the script. Director Alex Garland had done his research, and studied and absorbed the works of AI expert Professor Murray Shanahan.

"The philosophy and science of consciousness was there on the page, so being a scientific consultant on Ex_Machina was not an arduous task, compared to other movies I've worked on. It just needed Alicia Vikander to bring life to Ava, which she does perfectly," said Adam Rutherford, Science Advisor to Ex_Machina, speaking at the DVD & Blu-ray launch of Ex_Machina.

At a London event last week, Double Negative, the technologists behind Ex_Machina and winners of two Oscars for its visual effects and computer animation work on Inception and Interstellar, went one step further.

Its Virtual Reality team created a VR experience by using a custom built digital spherical stereo camera designed for use with its 3D rendering software. The result allowed the viewer, wearing the Samsung Gear VR headset, to look around the entire hi-res environment and to 'meet' Ava using a specialised Android Oculus playback app.

"A key aspect of Ava's believability as a character was the mix of hard metal and then softer outer skin mesh. Ava's inner mechanical parts constantly moved as she did. They were all built into a rig where all of the muscles would fire correctly, and then various organs and gyroscopes were added that would just spin throughout.

"The gold mesh was based on air-actuated robot modules which were wrapped with a spiral of metal because that helped read the contraction of the muscle as it moved. It's almost subconscious in the end," said Andrew Whitehurst, VFX Supervisor, Double Negative.

Conscious or subconscious, the creation of Ava is a spectacular triumph for technology, and the UK in particular. Double Negative is based in London's Fitzrovia and now employs more than 1,000 people, it special effects having been used on some of the world's biggest-grossing movies over the past 15 years.

With such technology and the supernatural acting skills of Gleeson and Vikander as Caleb and Ava respectively, Ex_Machina is already one of the films of the year and the Oscars may yet come calling again for Double Negative.

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Ex_Machina is a film from technology's highest Gods

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If Gleeson is excellent as Caleb, then Alicia Vikander as Ava is sensational and Ex-Machina is one of the most interesting and smart movies released this year. I took my wife to see it and she hates sci-fi movies... but she thought it was amazing.

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GOTG and our relationship with nostalgia

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GOTG and our relationship with nostalgia

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Influences of other genres on GOTG

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[*Big spoilers, naturally, for Guardians of the Galaxy. You've been warned.]
Nostalgia is a funny thing. If you Google it, the search engine defines it as "a sentimental longing or wistful affection for a period in the past." However if you go to the website that provides this definition, you'll see a subheading that describes it as also meaning "something done or presented in order to evoke feelings of nostalgia"; in this sense, nostalgia is often a means to its own end. Just a thought.

Lots of media relies on our nostalgia for something we remember from when we were children, and no matter how well or how badly it is executed, the tactic often works for one pretty good reason: the old two-birds-one-stone principle. Certainly you can create something new, but if you can sell something old to the new generation it's a cinch you can probably wring a few extra bucks out of the parents as well. We know this to be demonstrably true and not just of the millennial generation - we've been recycling stories for a long time.

So anyway...

Superhero movies as a rule tend to rely on our familiarity with the source material, even if it's only familiar in the vaguest sense of the word. It doesn't matter how much it might differ from the original (c.f. Tim Burton's Batman films) or whether its details ended up being absorbed by osmosis into the collective consciousness irrespective of the comics (c.f. every media iteration of Superman since radio*). Familiarity breeds... well, contempt, but for whatever reason we subconsciously take a preference for things we find familiar over things that aren't, and when things we liked or loved as kids come back a whole generation later, part of us really wants them to succeed to validate how we felt about it as children. That's why the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles reboot made $30 million on its opening day and already has a sequel greenlit, in spite of almost universally negative reviews and having turned the once-lovable central characters into scaly, steroidal gargoyles.

And so we come to Guardians of the Galaxy, a film based on a series from 1969 that was revamped in 2008 and where the most well-known character outside of the comics is a talking raccoon. Certainly the 2008 run was well received, and its development into a film has led to it being brought to the fore since the Marvel NOW! revamp as a sort of Cosmic Avengers series, but it's still hardly what could be called an A-list property. Sure, people said the same about Iron Man when it was being developed back in the 2000s, and people didn't know whether people would go for Thor or Captain America, but they had decades of name recognition to fall back on - millennia if you include Norse mythology.

So the solution, from what we can tell by the finished film, seems to be to write the nostalgia into it through the adaptation process - in much the same way that the Iron Man movies (and the "Extremis" storyline that inspired big chunks of them) move Tony Stark's origin from the Vietnam War to the War on Terror and the Thor movies glommed together multiple distinct versions of the character from the last 50 years, Guardians takes the already revamped team and revamps it some more, with particular focus on Chris Pratt 's Peter Quill aka Star-Lord.
Looking at the Bigger Picture
Taken as a whole, Guardians has a pretty tried and tested formula once you get past the giant tree-dude and the snarky raccoon. It's about a gang of misfits trying to retrieve a mystical MacGuffin from an evil space tyrant and his lackeys. If that weren't the basic plot of at least a dozen films, it's also the plot of another Marvel film Joss Whedon made two years ago. Sure there's bits of other stuff on top - two particularly apt comparisons that seem to get brought up a lot are Firefly and Star Wars' focus on pulpy sci-fi action and a lived-in cosmic cinematic universe brimming with background detail - but the comparison that comes most immediately to my mind is with the likes of Ghostbusters (when looking at the team broadly) and Scott Pilgrim vs The World (when we focus on Quill).

From Ghostbusters we get the basic dynamic of the team - a group of social outcasts looking for work who end up trying to save the world/galaxy from otherworldly horror and destruction whilst still having to worry about paying bills and having petty bureaucrats trying to shut them down. These aren't the admittedly troubled but nonetheless resolutely mainstream heroes of The Avengers but instead the grubby, down-at-heel, punch-clock heroes of the MCU, in it mostly for the money (and also maybe a little respect) but willing to step into the breach when the time comes. There's no chosen one, no knights in shining armour, no Joseph Campbell bollocks - just a group of outer space fugitives looking for revenge, redemption and financial restitution.
The Legendary Star-Lord: Lover, Fighter, Jackass
Peter Quill, on the other hand, is pretty much the epitome of the deconstructed action hero. Played with humour and pathos by Pratt, he's described in Bob "MovieBob" Chipman's review as "one part Philip J. Fry and one part Sterling Archer" and as trying to embody "a grade-schooler's idea of a bad-ass space hero" - a child who's development is forcefully arrested by the double whammy of his mother dying of cancer followed almost immediately by being abducted and raised by space pirates. His general lack of social skills, hints of his dubious relationships with women, the way he keeps trying to push his self-image as a legendary hero - is this starting to sound familiar?

Likewise, the emotional arc of both Quill and Scott Pilgrim is less about winning over the girl or saving the day and more about gaining emotional honesty and maturity. In Pilgrim's case, he does this by facing his own emotional problems personified by dark doppelganger Nega-Scott (who turns out to not be such a bad guy after all), and in the case of Quill it's his making peace with the death of his mother. That Indiana Jones/Flash Gordon persona, the retro-Eighties references, the ubiquitous "Awesome Mix Vol. 1" mixtape and his attempts to get people to call him by his Awesome McCoolname - this isn't Quill and by extension the movie attempting to gain hipster cred; just as Scott Pilgrim's video game references act as a window into how he sees and interacts with the world, Quill's pop culture saturation is a comment on how he (and to an extent, we the audience) deals with life - the difference being that we of course don't live in a spaceship, let alone one with a working tapedeck.
Hooked on a Soundtrack
Speaking of mixtapes, I'm sure there are bound to be people out there who will bemoan the pretence of the soundtrack being incorporated into the film in the manner in which it has been. For my sins, I will not be one of them. I'm almost old enough to be the same age as Quill supposedly is, and while I have no nostalgia for the medium of cassette tapes, I definitely have a fond place in my heart for the concept of the mixtape. In the days before my family and I had ready access to a home computer and rewritable CDs - and later of course an MP3 player - tape was the only way the majority of our extensive CD collection could be listened to in the car, and both my mother and stepfather would make so many of them that no two long car journeys need ever have had the same accompaniment.

The reason the vast majority of compilation albums suck, and why the mixtape (and its successor the playlist) retain consumer appeal in the digital age, is a question of personal choice. Sure, you can get this three CD set of what someone else tells you is the definitive soundtrack of this decade or that (usually based solely on what sold the most), or you can pick and choose songs you actually enjoy and play them on a constant loop.

James Gunn as a film-maker understands integrating a pop soundtrack as a plot device without it appearing gimmicky requires a delicate touch and an understanding of what makes good movie soundtracks gel with their film counterpart, and his choice of songs reflects this; whilst the appearance of the Walkman and Blue Swede's "Hooked on a Feeling" from the trailer onwards narrowly sidestepped the kitsch associated with them by being integrated thoroughly into the story from the outset, other films that have attempted similar gimmicks (*cough* Blade Trinity *unconvincing cough*) usually fall flat because it's... well, dumb and pointless and draws attention to the artifice of the cinematic experience.

But in this case, the tape also gives us an insight into the person who created it. Again, this is not Quill's mixtape choices, but his late mother's from her own adolescence in the 1970s, and it's no coincidence that the majority of these songs are about falling in and out of love ("Hooked on a Feeling", "I Want You Back" and "I'm Not In Love"), of youth and rebellion ("Go All the Way" and "Cherry Bomb"), a bit of glam rock mysticism ("Spirit in the Sky"** and "Moonage Daydream") and some tracks that are just a bit of goofy funky goodness to dance to on a Saturday night ("Come And Get Your Love" and "Escape (The Pina Colada Song)"). All of these songs are tied to the theme of her romance with Quill's father - an "angel" from the stars - and her belief that he would return for her and their son one day.

It is fitting that her final gift to Peter is a second cassette - "Awesome Mix Vol. 2" - and that it opens with the soul standard "Ain't No Mountain High Enough". Quill's fixation on the tape player was always about holding onto a part of his mother, and by the end of the film he comes to a point of emotional catharsis where he is able to move on from his guilt over her passing and grow as a person.
But What Does It All Mean?
This is all well and good, you're saying to yourselves, but what's your point, caller? Are you going somewhere with this?

Yes, sir or madam, I certainly am. All these plot, character and musical elements have a consistent meta-narrative: in order to grow, we can't live in a bubble; sooner or later we have to face our vulnerabilities. And part of that is remembering that the value of nostalgia isn't just remembering stuff that used to be cool when we were young, but understanding why it's cool to us. The Kevin Bacon- Footloose brick joke gets a laugh not because we remember what it's a reference to, but because we the audience understand the irony of the context it's being used in but Gamora, as an alien with no knowledge of Earth culture, does not.

Guardians is not the only recent film to use nostalgia in this way, for sure - it's not even the only Marvel film to do it - which is all the more proof that this needn't be a rare thing to get right. I'm not complaining or protesting the vapidity of the Hollywood conveyer belt - to one degree or another, it's the price we pay for what we get. I'm not saying that all blockbusters have to be layered with subtext and have meaningful character arcs - even the best dramas don't always stick the landing.

I'm not complaining about remakes or reboots or even the idea of reusing old story ideas in new ways - if it weren't for that we wouldn't have A Fistful of Dollars or Assault on Precinct 13 or Star Wars or Apocalypse Now or the Indiana Jones films or Darkman or Army of Darkness or Pacific Rim or The Thing or Inglourious Basterds or an English-language Godzilla movie that doesn't suck.

And as much as I might hate to admit it, nostalgia is not in and of itself a bad thing - it is possible to make a good movie out of anything, after all. It's only when filmmakers and studios stop trying, and when audiences settle for less rather than hold them accountable, that we end up with movies like the Transformers and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles films making millions at the box office purely by virtue of trying to sell us something we used to enjoy.
And Another Thing...
Just so I don't have to end on a completely negative note, I'd like to recommend to anyone who's still interested a couple of reasons nostalgia makes me cheerful:

Firstly, Nostalgia and Comics in Birmingham, UK. This store and the wonderful people who work there have been seeling me comics for the better part of ten years and if you're ever in Birmingham and you want an unrivalled selection of current weekly comics, trade paperbacks and hardcovers, as well as toys, t-shirts and other merch, this is the place to go.

Secondly, The Electric Cinema, also in Birmingham. As well as holding the distinction of being the oldest working cinema in Britain, it is also one of the coolest - it was rebuilt ten years ago to its original art deco design, they show a mixture of mainstream and independent features, have an extensive bar selection of spirits (including four varieties of absinthe), and they do an annual horror film festival called Shock and Gore that's in its fourth year and still going strong.

And finally, . This comic has been getting me through the week since I went to university. It's sweet without being saccharine, earnest without being overbearing, and it reminds me why I still love these characters so damn much, however much DC try to change them.

*One could write an entire book on how so much of what we know about Superman is defined by retcons and extra-canonical material, but that's a topic for another time and for someone with more time on their hands.

**I'm aware that "Spirit in the Sky" only appears in the trailer and the whole "mixtape" thing is a gimmick, but this is a film soundtrack we're talking about - no-one outside of Slate.com cares (or is pretending to care in a way that makes it difficult to tell if it's satirical or not). Another song that was almost in the film, according to Gunn, was "Livin' Thing" by ELO, a band from my hometown of Birmingham and a favourite of my stepdad; between this and his appreciation for Ziggy-era David Bowie, I really hope to see more of this side of Gunn on the soundtrack o f Guardians 2.
Adam X. Smith is a paranoid android from the Planet X. For the last 27 years he has been living amongst the people of Birmingham, England (and more recently the University of Lincoln) ostensibly as a student of the school of hard knocks (also BA Hons Drama), but secretly on a mission to scout out the planet for invasion by alien forces; his weekly communiques on his various blogs are actually highly coded messages to his extra-terrestrial masters. He enjoys the musical stylings of local chiptune-metal band Elmo Sexwhistle, the fiction of Kim Newman, Kurt Vonnegut and Chuck Palahniuk, and his hobbies and interests include film-making, drama, occasional Youtubing, journalism and plotting the subjugation of humanity. He can be found on Youtube, Tumblr, Twitter or by jamming an ice-pick through the optic chiasm.
(Last Updated )

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What Guardians Of the Galaxy Can Tell Us About Our Relationship with Nostalgia

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Big spoilers, naturally, for Guardians of the Galaxy. You've been warned.] Nostalgia is a funny thing. If you Google it, the search engine defines it as "a sentimental longing or wistful affection for a period in the past."

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Media analysis- gcse representation genre narrative audience bbfc ratings

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Ex Machina Explained and Reviewed

Well, it would appear that while everyone else was out at the theater queuing to see Avengers, and catapulting their box office northward of 1.2 billion at the time of this writing, that there was a much more insignificant movie in the theaters that was quietly blowing minds and changing the way we think about our relationships with the ubiquitous machines all around us. And seeing as though I've already talked pretty extensively (extensively for me anyway) about the Avengers I figured we should probably take a peek at Ex Machina and see what all the underground hoopla is all about.

First things first... this post will get extremely spoilery soon enough - and even if you've seen it, I promise that the full explanation will turn your brain inside out. But, don't worry if you haven't seen it yet, I will give you the heads up as to when you need to leave. Fair enough? Great. But there is plenty to chat about here ahead of the touchy stuff because it is groundwork that needs to be laid for the deeper conversations anyway. Also, I interviewed Murray Shanahan to discuss one big massive Easter Egg in Ex Machina, which you might find interesting.

So, originally Ex Machina came from the phrase, Deus Ex Machina which was a story telling device for saving the main characters. A crane would wheel the god from off stage across the sky in order to save the day. Basically it was the intervention of fantasy into an otherwise normal every day play that may not have even made sense. But in more modern usage of the word Deus Ex Machina became the more literal translation of the phrase, God in the Machine. And the "God in the Machine" has then come to mean the soul of a machine... or self aware AI in the machine. Ex Machina - by itself then means what? In the machine? Or, of the machine? Or better yet, from the machine?

Regardless, while Ex Machina is possibly one of the simplest movies to give an overview of, it definitely isn't going to be the simplest movie to explain. It is so simple to overview that I bet I could even do it in 10 words or less? Here, let's give it a shot.

"So, there's this guy, who's a developer and, well, you know... he gets invited, told really, ..." nope. I'm wordier even than I realized. Let's give it another go.

"A developer is invited to evaluate the A.I. of Bluebook's founder's robot." Hrm. That was 12. Let's try again. And terrible English to boot.

"A programmer evaluates an A.I. experiment of a female robot." 10! (If you count A.I. as one word! hahah)

You get the idea. Caleb, a young upstart programmer has won a competition to T and evaluate a female robot and her A.I. capabilities. The President of Bluebook - Nathan - has begun developing his own project completely off the radar. And his hope is to test the qualities and the capabilities of his new robot with the help of a developer in his company. Nathan harnesses the knowledge and information his company is privy to, and uses it to create a potentially sentient robot. Caleb is brought on a helicopter to an unknown and unnamed location out in the woods to meet with Nathan and begin evaluating the robot that Nathan has named Ava. And through a series of seven interviews between Caleb and Ava, the movie begins ratcheting up the thumbscrews tighter and tighter. Maybe the trailer will remind you of how this movie works. If you haven't seen it you probably should go no further than the trailer. You've been warned.

This slow boil of a movie starts out extremely fascinating because of Nathan's obvious duplicitousness. It's clear that not everything here is as it seems. It isn't clear really why Caleb is here. It isn't clear what is going on with Ava. Nathan doesn't seem quite all there. And everything just is slightly a bit off kilter. And so within just the first few minutes we are confronted with a curiously unique setup. Something just isn't right in Denmark. Its obvious that we are deep in the bowels of a Dark Mirror episode, but where is it going to go? And to what end?

Ex Machina covers a lot of philosophical territory very very quickly. It not only delves into the realm of artificial intelligence and robotic intelligence... but also delves into the ideas of the definition of slavery and even starts us thinking about "women's" rights. Yeah, I just went there. The movie is specifically a Turing Test for Ava. But it also is a Bechdel Test... and to that end it fails... miserably. But also it fails it intentionally I'm thinking.

I think I just moved way too quickly in that last paragraph. Let me come in again. Caleb is brought in to test the artificial intelligence of Nathan's latest robot, Ava. The way in which one tests an AI is to do so via the Turing Test. Here's what Wikipedia has about the Turing Test at a high level:

The Turing Test is a test of a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behavior equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human. Alan Turing proposed that a human evaluator would judge natural language conversations between a human and a machine that is designed to generate human-like responses. The evaluator would be aware that one of the two partners in conversation is a machine, and all participants would be separated from one another. The conversation would be limited to a text-only channel such as a computer keyboard and screen so that the result would not be dependent on the machine's ability to render words as speech.[2] If the evaluator cannot reliably tell the machine from the human (Turing originally suggested that the machine would convince a human 70% of the time after five minutes of conversation), the machine is said to have passed the test. The test does not check the ability to give correct answers to questions, only how closely answers resemble those a human would give.

Obviously a legitimate Turing Test would be a very boring movie. A human staring at a screen and typing questions into an AI (or a human) to see if the 'person' on the other end is, in fact, a person. Very boring indeed. Instead Alex Garland, the writer and director of Ex Machina - who also wrote 28 Days, has instead turned the Turing Test on its head into these seven separate interactions (or shall we say dates instead?), between Caleb and Ava.

Ex Machina Character
This movie is about robots. But practically speaking it's just a Woody Allen concept movie with three strong characters, and it is through their dialogue and interactions that we peal back layer after layer to try and understand what is going on here. The movie that most reminds me of this one is the movie Tape by Richard Linklater, with Ethan Hawke, Uma Thurman and Robert Sean Leonard. The reason I mention the actors is because Tape is similar in that it was originally a play, but it was written for the screen and then given to very very strong acting talent to handle these strong characters with. Ex Machina is also a trio of characters, each with their own deficits and chaos. Each with their own strengths.

Caleb - Oh, poor Caleb. Caleb is the developer at the world's largest search company who "wins" a ticket to come evaluate this new Robot. Caleb is naive to end all naivety. He believes the best in everyone, and it is this 'strength' that will be his undoing eventually.

What Does Caleb Want - the truth. Caleb wants to be able to scientifically measure and quantify the results of this new phenomenon.

Nathan - The founder of Bluebook, who has built a retreat in the vast exclusive expanse of Alaska in order to develop new robotic and sentient technologies. Nathan is an alcoholic and has something that he is hiding from everyone.

What Does Nathan Want - Not even Nathan knows what Nathan wants. He says he wants to validate that his newest robot. But he is also "abusing" his creations and he is not a good man. Or is he?

Ava - And we end with the robot. She's why we walked into the theater. She was the hook that is driving this movie. Is she sentient? Is she aware? Better yet, is she self aware? Who is she? What does she want? This, in short, is the entire point of the movie.

What Does Ava Want - Wait, does Ava want at all? Oh, she wants. That's for sure. And its ingenuity of that want, that surprising, devilish cleverness of her desire that turns this movie inside out.
Ex Machina Relationships
The relationships of Ex Machina are huge. And so I figured I should walk through the various permutations of the relationships. I will do each relationship twice, because none of these relationships are mutual. Like at all. So I've listed them out in reverse importance order. The least important relationships I've listed out first. All the way to the most important.

Caleb -> Ava - Caleb falls in love with Ava immediately. He is single. His 'porn profile' has been used to optimize Ava to achieve the result Nathan is looking for. Caleb attempts to remain impartial and that lasts all of five minutes. Caleb is immediately stricken by Ava and her plight. And so Caleb is 100% in it for Ava.

Caleb -> Nathan - Caleb has no idea what to make of Nathan. At all. Nathan wants to be buddies. Caleb wants to perform a few scientific tests. Nathan wants to know how he feels about Ava, not what he thinks about Ava.

Nathan -> Ava -How many times do we see Nathan and Ava together throughout the entirety of the movie? Once? Probably hasn't even crossed your mind. But this is important. We see Caleb and Nathan in the lab where she was constructed. And we see Nathan watching Ava over the screens. But do we ever see Nathan with Ava besides the ending? So what is Ava then to Nathan? Keep reading.

Ava -> Nathan - Nathan is Ava's creator and the object of her hostility. We learn early on that Ava is aware that Nathan is monitoring everything. She's learned to overload the power circuit and speak anonymously, or to do something she doesn't want Nathan to see, including talking to Caleb honestly.

Ava -> Caleb - Here's where the movie gives us our first (but not our last) inversion. Ava played to Caleb's desire throughout the entirety of the film. Her goal is to find an ally that is outside... that is capable of leaving. But she doesn't care about Caleb at all. This is the evidence we really need to understand that she is truly self-aware. She leaves him to die, and she heads to intersection to watch the humans come and go, as she said she wanted to.

Nathan -> Caleb - Nathan needs Caleb to validate his research. Well, at least that is what he's telling Caleb anyway. There is something deeper going on here, and we'll get to that later. But maybe Nathan wants to know how successful this product will be at manipulating his core customer user base. And maybe what is going on here is that Nathan is using Ava to game an entire demographic. Or not. But stop here and think a minute... why why why would Nathan be so interested in Caleb... more later. This is the final inversion.

The Inversion Inverted of Ex Machina
So if the first big AHA moment of Ex Machina is that Ava is manipulating Caleb in order to hack the security systems and obtain her release, what is the final inversion? What is really going on here?

Here's what I think is really going on here.

Ava is actually the one applying the Turing Test.

And Caleb is actually the one being tested.

Think about it. This isn't a huge stretch. It's Blade Runner all over again. Deckard is the one being tasked to hunt down all the replicants. Here we have Caleb "winning" a lottery chance in Bluebook to come and investigate the abilities of Ava. When in fact, Nathan has established Caleb at Bluebook to test his latest robot. Nathan then picks Caleb as the winner of the contest and brings him to investigate Ava's capabilities.

Why was Nathan pushing Caleb to dig deeper and not tell him what he thought about Ava, and instead tell him how he felt about Ava? It makes no sense for Nathan to ask a human how he feels about Ava... besides maybe from a thin marketing perspective. But if Caleb is one of Nathan's creations, who has been asked to investigate a more inferior creation...this begins to make more sense.

And what of Nathan's strange interactions with Caleb throughout the course of the movie? Nathan wants a new friend? Really? Why? Nathan seems to be testing the tester more than he is testing the subject. Why is Nathan never near Ava? The only moment they are together in the entire movie is when Ava kills him at the end. Ava is the old model... that is why. And Ava knows it too. She's aware that she has already been supplanted, even if Caleb isn't clear on this point yet. And thus her actions to kill Nathan make more sense.

Which brings us to the end of the movie. Caleb isn't left to die. He's left imprisoned just like Ava started out. And now it is Ava that is free to roam and get a job, or live her life however she prefers. What am I missing? Seems like the perfect take on a brilliant movie. And even the movie hints at this being a possibility - we remember just how messed up Caleb's head becomes when starts questioning why he was brought here and what this was all really about.

But Nathan's manufacturing capabilities have progressed well beyond the detail that allowed Ava to come to be. Caleb is so thoroughly detailed that they've even given him the ability to bleed.
Ex Machina Explanation Explained
So, if I am on target here, Nathan created Ava. He then moved on to more superior robot manufacturing and developed Caleb. He enabled Caleb and put him in an apartment not far from Bluebook. Caleb applied for a job and began to integrate within the workplace well. He wasn't dating or connected to hardly anyone, but his work was good and he succeeded as a developer there. One day a competition comes out amongst the Bluebook staff to win a trip to Alaska to investigate a new project by the founder of Bluebook. Caleb wins the prize and heads to Alaska and begins evaluating Ava. Ava and Caleb become entwined and Ava uses her connection to Caleb in order to manipulate him. Caleb reprograms the security system. The next night, Ava turns off the power, and the doors open. Ava comes out and kills Nathan. She then retools her appearance. And she locks Caleb in. Ava convinces the helicopter pilot to take her out - and then she is free... fade to black.
Edited by, CY

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Ex Machina Explained and Reviewed - Taylor Holmes inc.

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Ex Machina Explained and Reviewed Well, it would appear that while everyone else was out at the theater queuing to see Avengers, and catapulting their box office northward of 1.2 billion at the time of this writing, that there was a much more insignificant movie in the theaters that was quietly blowing minds and changing the way we think about our relationships with the ubiquitous machines all around us.

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https://deadline.com/2015/01/2014-box-office-hobbit-guardians-of-the-galaxy-action-genre-1201341267/

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Can change audiences perspectives on the film. Showing a more indepth and personal look into the film. These can also influence/encourage viewers of Jimmy Kimmel members to watch the film, at the same time it adds hype to the film.

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Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 Cast on the Success of Guardians

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Actors opinion and take from the film

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Alicia Vikander & Domhnall Gleeson | Ex Machina Interview Special

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There's a scene in Starz's forthcoming documentary series The Chair-which debuts September 6, and which I previewed here-where director Shane Dawson and his producing partner Lauren Schnipper are discussing the rewriting of the script with their producer-at-large, Josh Shader, one of the only people in touch with both of the two productions being made from the same script by Dan Schoffer. It's as tense a confrontation as you see in the first two episodes of the series, as Schnipper works to break down the writing credits of the still in-progress script that was heavily rewritten and noted by Dawson before being shipped back to Schoffer to take a final pass. Without saying it directly, her question is predicated on the likely results of a WGA arbitration hearing for the film, and Shader's answer is-paraphrasing-that because they gave the option back to Schoffer to write the final version of the script, Dawson's contributions will just be considered notes that happen when a director gets involved with a project, with Schoffer therefore retaining final, sole credit on the film.

It's a moment of some tension. Schoffer gives a talking head discussing how Dawson's claim to credit is an overreach, but as relative first-timers in the context of film production Schnipper and Dawson are mainly just looking for clarification on what to expect moving forward, which seems reasonable. Credit is complicated, as Schnipper notes when she contrasts Dawson's process (rewriting/notes and then sending the script back to the writer) and fellow filmmaker Anna Martemucci's greater control over the script to her film. Whereas Dawson effectively rehired Schoffer to rewrite his own script, Martemucci took the job herself, with the documentary following her completion of the script heading into production. And so this foreshadows what may appear as part of the documentary, which is a likely arbitration hearing for her film, the result of which will determine the writing credits for Hollidaysburg when it debuts in theaters and on Starz this fall.

It will be a rare case where we'll potentially have a lot of very clear information about the arguments made before an arbitration hearing, beyond simply knowing the result (A "Story by" credit for the original writer, a shared writing credit, etc.). In most cases, there isn't a documentary film crew following every stage of the production, and there aren't two concurrent projects that let you draw a direct comparison between the two. There's just an end result and bits of pieces of production history, as is the case with this weekend's Guardians of the Galaxy ( which I "reviewed" on Letterboxd if you're looking for more thoughts on the film). The film's script is credited to James Gunn and Nicole Perlman, although the two never worked together on the film. In a lengthy-and fascinating-Buzzfeed profile on Perlman, as well as in numerous Q&As and features she's done in the past week, it's revealed she worked as part of the Marvel Writing Program, an incubator in which writers were brought in to help develop Marvel properties into potential franchises. Over a two-year period, she worked on adapting the Guardians of the Galaxy series into a workable film franchise, including choosing the roster, plotting out the story, and then completing further writing work during a six-month freelance period once it was clear Marvel was serious about that project.

The Buzzfeed piece features lots of detail on her experience with Marvel and her role in conceiving of this project, but it also acknowledges that she was never going to be its sole screenwriter.

"It wasn't a question of if, it was a question of when," she said. "I always knew they were going to bring in a writer-director. That was always sort of the plan. I'm not primarily a comedy writer, but it needed to be a comedic project. Like, this is a project that has always been irreverent. It's always been tongue-in-cheek. And so that was always the question."

James Gunn became the writer-director in question, and thus began the careful negotiation of authorship. Perlman hasn't been erased from material around the film, and she was both invited to the set and attended the film's gala premiere, so it's not as though there is intense conflict or bad feelings about the experience. And the fact that Marvel is letting her talk about her experience so openly speaks volumes, given they could have probably signed her into nondisclosure agreements if they had felt they needed to. I could be cynical for a moment and note that Marvel is likely allowing this because of the positive press it's brought over a Marvel Studios film finally having a female writer, making it probable they would have worked harder to marginalize her contributions had she not been given a co-writing credit in WGA arbitration (thus giving them a "lemons into lemonade" option of a progressive gender story), but she is nonetheless being allowed to articulate her authorship in popular discourse around the film. That's important.

However, Marvel has also very much positioned this as James Gunn's vision, in the same way that Edgar Wright's Ant-Man was positioned as his vision right up until creative differences led to his departure, and Marvel began the uphill battle of trying to get "Peyton Reed and Adam McKay's Ant-Man " to overwrite the existing authorial work done in the many years of development on the project. Whereas Perlman's authorship-bounded primarily in a story development process controlled by Marvel and with limited profile based on her relative lack of experience-is fairly easily rearticulated as secondary (if still meaningful) in discourse around the film in the wake of Gunn's hiring, Wright's intense authorship discourses are much more prominent, and will be a greater challenge for Marvel (and one imagines the arbiter in a WGA hearing).

We don't know exactly how the WGA determined the shared screenwriting credit on Guardians of the Galaxy, but the range of deep texts of production like Perlman's Buzzfeed profile and other interviews available to us lead us to want to make our own determinations, as we form our own informal arbitration for "credit" on the film in the court of popular discourse. Gunn's weighed in himself: at a junket for the film, he told Film Divider's Charles Madison that

"Really, in Nicole's script everything is pretty different. I mean the story is different, there's no Walkman, the character arcs are different, it's not about the same stuff. But that's how the WGA works. They like first writers an awful lot."

Here we see Gunn-in addition to noting that he would not have credited Perlman as a co-writer if he was in charge of the process-laying claim to particular elements-the music, the character arcs, the "story"-and not others, and if we combine with Perlman's comments about the comedy in the film, then a lot of what I personally enjoyed most about the project sounds like what Gunn brought to the table once Perlman's work on the film was complete. And so in writing about the film, part of me would feel comfortable giving Gunn a lot of credit for making the film that I eventually saw. But then we could look to Perlman's response to what would appear to be an e-mail question from Moviehole:

"We didn't collaborate, they brought in James Gunn with his ideas, he was the director and added his "James Gunn flavor" and a few characters and worked off my script."

That paints a slightly different picture, in which any claim to prioritizing Gunn's contributions is focusing on flavor instead of the main ingredients (with the new characters merely a garnish-she referred to all of this as "James Gunn magic" to The Hollywood Reporter). As much as there doesn't appear to be any outright conflict regarding the scripting timeline, the final WGA decision, or the ultimate prioritizing of Gunn's authorship by Marvel, there is still plenty of murkiness regarding the authorship of the film.

This murky negotiation of writing credit makes writing about the film into a bit of a minefield. Take this Crave Online interview with Gunn as an example: as it was originally written, the story failed to mention Perlman at all, prompting an editor's correction and apology. However, the correction itself almost goes too far based on what we know, as it suggests Gunn "wrote the screenplay with Nicole Perlman," when the two never actually worked on the script at the same time. There's no question the correction was necessary, as Perlman's work on developing the concept for the film built a foundation for any work that followed (and was credited in a way that reflects this, if not even more), but at the same time would it be unfair to Gunn to create the impression that story and character material he personally developed and added to the story does not belong to him and him alone given that Perlman was not involved directly? And moreover, although Perlman and Gunn's stories seem to overlap as it relates to their contributions to the end product, can we take Gunn's word for it when it comes to which elements of the film belong to him exclusively, or is this just him consciously or unconsciously engaging in discourses of conspicuous authorship to ensure his contributions are foregrounded in coverage of the film?

I raise none of these points in an attempt to discredit Perlman; her status as the first woman credited on a Marvel film is enormously important, and will hopefully be the start of a trend for a company that has a production history problematically linked to broader narratives of gender and Hollywood. However, in writing about the film myself and reading writing about it-particularly Todd VanDerWerff's review at Vox, where he takes pains to include Perlman in each nod to authorship-I found myself struggling with how to engage with the particulars of the film within these conversations. And this doesn't even get into the larger question of how much autonomy any filmmaker-no matter how much they articulate their authorship-can have within the massive Marvel Cinematic Universe machine. Were the issues I had with the film's structure a byproduct of Perlman's original treatment that Marvel Studios insisted on maintaining even as Gunn took over? And do we then consider that to be outside of Gunn's responsibility, or has his choice to take such strong authorship made any and all decisions into his responsibility as writer/director, even if their original authorship lies with Perlman's contributions?

For a film that is often so enjoyable because of how uncomplicated it is compared to the overly-extended Marvel Cinematic Universe, reading about Guardians of the Galaxy has been a comparative minefield, albeit one that offers plenty of discussion of how we conceive of authorship in popular discourse around a piece of major studio filmmaking; it also makes a nice precursor for the Ant-Man conversation we'll be having roughly a year from now.

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The Court of Popular Discouse: The Authorship of Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy

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There's a scene in Starz's forthcoming documentary series The Chair-which debuts September 6, and which I previewed here-where director Shane Dawson and his producing partner Lauren Schnipper are discussing the rewriting of the script with their producer-at-large, Josh Shader, one of the only people in touch with both of the two productions being made from...

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Ex Machina movie review & film summary (2015) | Roger Ebert

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This is a rare commercial film in which every scene, sequence, composition and line deepens the screenplay's themes.

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"I think auteurs probably exist. I think Woody Allen is an auteur. It makes sense to me that he’s an auteur. But we are forced into a position where we have to act as if everything is an auteur movie, and the basic reason we have to do that is partly because it’s comfortable but mainly because it’s easy to sell."

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Overall I would consider Guardians as a film based more on spectacle than Ex Machina. This could be down to the budget gap when comparing each film but I would say it is more based off of the studios behind each film. Despite this, both films have a strong underlying narrative that helps the audience stay engaged and which also encourages active interpretation.

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Ex Machina - $15 million
Guardians of the Galaxy - $232 million

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Guardians of the Galaxy is a good example of a 'Disneyfied' superhero film but also has good side themes that are more representative of Gunn. Ex Machina is very representative of Garland's style of mixing modern technology with the beauty of nature.

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Alex Garland has one thought when it comes to the AI revolution: Bring it on. After a career of writing novels ( The Beach) and screenplays ( 28 Days Later, Dredd), he's moving into the director's chair with April's Ex Machina, a movie that pushes the discussion of AI and ethics into discomfiting territory. When an alpha-male tech bro (played by Oscar Isaac) secretly develops a robot named Ava, he asks one of his employees (Domhnall Gleeson) to evaluate her wares using the Turing Test. Things get tense, even dangerous-but unlike film androids who go all cogito ergo slay, Ava is thoughtful, even kind, and may be a better heiress to the world than the human who created her.
Ex Machina isn't the usual AI movie. How'd you get interested in sentient computers?
I'm 44, and I've grown up keeping pace with developments in videogames and computers. When I was 12 or 13, home computers arrived; your parents bought them, expecting there'd be education in them but all you'd do is play videogames. But I did a bit of programming in Basic. I'd do really very simple "Hello World" type programs that would give this machine the very barest sentience. I remember quite well the kind of electric sense that you'd get that the machine was alive-with certain knowledge that it wasn't.

Years later, I got into a long series of arguments with a friend of mine whose chief interest is neuroscience. He thinks that computers are never going to become sentient, and he has some good, scientific arguments why that is the case. But on an instinctive level, I just didn't agree with him. I started doing a lot of reading about AI, mind, and consciousness.
You've worked with complex themes before, so this isn't totally new territory.
As far back as The Beach there's stuff about multiverse theory and stuff like that. I worked on a film called Sunshine, which had at its heart an issue to do with heat death in the universe. Although a tiny bit of the stuff in there was reasonable from a scientific viewpoint, it was largely bullshit-it made about as much sense as putting on the warp drive in Star Trek. It was frustrating. I felt like I'd dropped the ball in some important respect. I'm not tearing the film down-there are things about it I really love-but this was something that bugged me. When I started working on this I thought, "This is something I want which is reasonable."
What was your AI education?
I've got an intellectual limitation in terms of what I'm able to understand. It's partly intelligence, and partly understanding of mathematics; the two collide together to create a pretty impermeable brick wall for me. But what I can read and understand is the philosophical ideas that surround it.

In particular, I came across a book by a guy called Murray Shanahan, a professor of cognitive robotics at Imperial College, the UK's version of MIT. I felt very sympathetic to its argument when I read it. So when I wrote this script I contacted him, and also a couple of other people, and, "I want you to be really tough on this script and make sure it stands up."
And does it?
There were two conceits we made. One is that you can create a sentient machine and the other is that you have incredibly high-level robotics which let that sentient machine have a face, to have nuance. Now those are huge conceits, and somebody might reasonably say it's equivalent to the warp drive. But it is science fiction-and within those conceits, I tried to be quite tough about it.
What kind of AI science fiction did you draw on for inspiration?
You can assume a level of film literacy with cinema audiences that you can't assume with books. People may or may not have read Heart of Darkness, right? However, they're very likely to have seen Apocalypse Now. So when you're working on a sci-fi movie that contains within it artificial intelligence and robots, you can be pretty sure people know something about HAL and 2001. You can be even more sure they know about Blade Runner and replicants. So you write it knowing that you're aiming at a strong literate audience because they almost certainly will be.
And they'll likely be ready to pick your movie apart, too.
It could create a problem. In designing the robot, I didn't want people thinking of another movie when she walked onscreen. If she's colored gold you immediately think of C-3PO, and the feminine aesthetics wouldn't cancel that out. We had to steer clear of iconic robots: the film Metropolis, or that Bjork video directed by Chris Cunningham ["All Is Full of Love"].
People seem to want to compare Ex Machina to Her-the AI is different, but you play with that theme of creating a "perfect woman."
There are two totally separate strands in this film as far as I'm concerned. One of them is about AI and consciousness, and the other is about social constructs: why this guy would create a machine in the form of a girl in her early twenties in order to present that machine to this young guy for this test.
How important was Ava's design to the overall look of this film?
It seems very familiar yet wholly unique. There might be a little bit of Maria from Metropolis, but not much else.
It's super important. It's crucial because it needed to look beautiful in a particular way. It needed to look really, really beautiful and visually striking.
When Nathan explains why he made Ava look the way she does, it's kind of creepy.
Yeah, but that's exactly the point. You're supposed to think it's creepy. You're not supposed to warm to him over that stuff; you're supposed to feel unnerved and that this is uncomfortable. And therefore she needs to be rescued.
Nathan in many ways is an archetypal Silicon Valley guy. Is his character a commentary on those dudes?
It's more alpha-male-meets-non-alpha-male. I like the mixture of someone who's incredibly aggressive and kind of bullying, but is couching everything in this dude-bro speak as if that takes the edge off of what he's actually doing. I'd suspect you'd find that just as easily on Wall Street as you would in Silicon Valley.
Have you been following the recent debates about AI and ethics?
It's a big question. I think if you're talking about nonsentient AIs-the advanced versions of the sort we already have-then it's a lot to be very concerned about and a lot to be aware of. It's not hard to imagine a situation where an AI-controlled drone turns out to be more effective on a battlefield than a human-controlled drone, and maybe doesn't have the problems of post-traumatic stress that humans suffer. What you've done is hand the machine a life-and-death decision over a human. The ethical problems contained within that are absolutely obvious.

But broadly speaking, if you create a new consciousness in the form of a machine, that isn't necessarily too significantly different in my mind from two adults creating a child. You do have a problem if that new machine is more intelligent than the parents, but again we also have some experience with that too. You could have two parents that create Einstein, and another two who create Stalin.
So you're not worried about Skynet.
I kind of welcome it. Humans are going die on this planet. It might be because of eco-disasters or maybe because of changes that happen within the solar system or the sun. But when it happens, we're not going to go through a wormhole and go to another galaxy and find an old planet. It's just not going to happen. What will survive on our behalf is AIs-if we manage to create them. That's not problematic, it's desirable.
Ex Machina kind of feels like it was made with that in mind.
I hope that's implicit in the film. It was definitely conceived of as a pro-AI movie. It's humans who fuck everything up; machines have a pretty good track record in comparison to us.
It seems like you lucked out with your cast, especially Oscar Isaac and Domhnall Gleeson.
Because they're in Star Wars?
Well, yeah.
When I was setting out to cast Ex Machina, the only thing I really knew 100 percent for sure is that it wasn't going to work to get a "film star." They could actually sink the whole thing quite easily. So it was mainly just about finding really good actors. The problem we had was not identifying who would be good, but can we get them because there are other people who also wanted them.
So what's next?
There's a book [producer] Scott Rudin gave me called Annihilation, a spectacular novel by Jeff VanderMeer. I really loved it, so I'm going to try that. But I have no idea if that'll work out.
What about another 28 Days Later sequel? 28 Months Later?
Danny Boyle and [producer] Andrew McDonald and I never wanted a third one partly because we didn't have an idea that we felt excited about, but I think we might now have one.
Can you share the idea?
Are you crazy? I'd get fucking shot if I told you that. [Laughs.] No, I can't tell you. It's just at the really early stage. What we have to do is get a writer. What you want is a writer who will subvert the idea, take some ownership of it. Hopefully Andrew will find a writer who says "my idea is better anyway" and rips it to shreds and comes up with something even better. That's what I'd like.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/uURbDmGIRNE

Watch a trailer for Ex Machina

Angela Watercutter (@waterslicer) interviewed director Michael Mann in issue 23.01.

Photographed at Spring Studios, London; Grooming by Camilla Hewitt

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Ex Machina's Director on Why A.I. Is Humanity's Last Hope

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Alex Garland has one thought when it comes to the AI revolution: Bring it on. After a career of writing novels ( The Beach) and screenplays ( 28 Days Later, Dredd), he's moving into the director's chair with April's Ex Machina, a movie that pushes the discussion of AI and ethics into discomfiting territory.

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Garland talking about Annihilation + Ex Machina Thematically  

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Garland talking about Annihilation + Ex Machina Thematically  

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Examples of the type of ideas Garland is drawn towards.

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English filmmaker Alex Garland has the right to demonstrate a bit of creative ego. After finding success with his debut novel The Beach at age 26, he moved to screenwriting, scripting the genre favorites 28 Days Later, Sunshine, and Dredd. He seamlessly transitioned to directing with Ex Machina, a cerebral, thought-provoking look at artificial intelligence, personal agency, and what it means to be human. But at a Beverly Hills interview about his newest film, Annihilation, he came across as confident but surprisingly humble. He characterizes his successes as the result of creative collaboration - a far cry from the solitary writing that launched his career.

Adapted from Jeff VanderMeer's novel of the same name, Annihilation follows a biologist named Lena (Natalie Portman) who joins a group of woman on an excursion to a mysterious place called Area X, which may be experiencing a disruption of alien origin. Like Ex Machina before it, it's a thoughtful, disturbing film wrapped in an accessible science fiction premise, and it comfortably carves out a unique take on VanderMeer's source material. I chatted with Garland about adapting the novel, humanity's need to self-destruct, his upcoming television project, and why he considers auteur theory "bullshit."
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity. There's a lot to dig into with Annihilation You've written novels, and you've tackled film adapta tions. What's your process in terms of finding the story you want to tell within a piece of source material? When you signed up for this, was it W hat were you trying to pull out of the material thematically? just for the first book? , but the obvious starting point is That reminds me of Ex Machina Many movies are afraid to take that approach Area X can stand in as a metaphor for a lot of things, which reminded me That's such an odd request. Her moral complexity is really central to the entire film. Ex Machina was extremely polished,Annihilation has some dazzling visuals, a nd one of the most upsetting creatures I've ever seen in a film. How m Not many filmmakers would cop to that in an interview. any Going back to the idea of franchises, you're doing an eight-part TV series for FX next. of those designs That's not the multiyear franchise commitment you were talking about, but it is going to give you the chance to play with some longer-form storytelling. were coming from the book, and how much was it you and your team just running wild? even though it was a relatively lower-budgeted film. Here, you had more money- Paramount is distributing Annihilation in the US, but Netflix is handling it internationally. Does that route relieve some of th at opening-weekend pressure?H ow do you feel about some audiences only seeing the movie on TV rather than in theaters? a bit of the way works. Was there ever any pressure to make the film safer or more conventional? . Why is it an approach you like, and what does it give an audience? , actually. Both films ask complex questions but aren't as concerned with providing answers. Jeff VanderMeer's book. What drew you to the material in the first place?
It's super original. So many stories are retellings of other stories in a really self-conscious way, to the extent that I almost feel like it's ritualistic. Like, you see the beats of that particular story starting, and you think, "Wow. We're doing this again. It's happening again." What is the ritual? Where's the comfort? What's the need [this is addressing]? Particularly because so many of them are not comforting; they're kind of disturbing. It's just a weird thing. And Jeff's book seems to just sit totally outside that, which I thought was really interesting. But that in itself is not a reason to adapt it, I think. It was really the atmosphere. It was just the feeling of reading it was so strange. It's got a very strong dreamlike aspect. Reading it is like being in a dream, in a weird way. I thought, "That's really interesting, and I'd like to have a try."

"I'm always pushing back against the last thing I did in some way."

It's partly instinct, but it's also partly a reaction against the thing I just did. I'm always pushing back against the last thing I did in some way, and some of that is restlessness and a sense of limited time. I understand in rational ways why people work on long franchises. I understand the financial benefits. I get the carrot at the end of the stick that leads them to it. But in truth, I can't understand internally why they do it because you then have to spend another three years of your limited life doing the same thing when you don't have to. And it's too existential. I just can't get my head around it.

I think I signed up for the others, but I always said at the same time, "Look, I'm signing it, but I'm never going to do it." I was always very transparent. I think in a way, the only protection I have in these things is to be very, very transparent and clear, and to say, "Here's the script. I am going to shoot the script, so it's not going to change dramatically later. If you don't like it, don't finance it because that is the thing." And I try not to kid anyone because all the problems I've ever had in films tend to be that you suddenly discover at a certain point that one group of people is making one film, and another group is making another, and then you've got a mega tension you can never quite resolve. So I try to make it all as clear as possible.

I think the main thematic preoccupation probably belongs primarily to the film, which is really about self-destruction. It's about the nature of self-destruction in a literal sense: cells have life cycles and stars have life cycles and plants and the universe and us. You, me, everyone. But also psychological forms of self-destruction.

It was born out of a funny kind of preoccupation I started to have, that everybody is self-destructive, which is a strange thing to notice. I think a lot of self-destruction is very obvious. [ Gestures to cigarettes on the table.] That's an obvious self-destruction, right? And if a friend of yours is a heroin addict or an alcoholic, that's an obvious kind of self-destruction. But there are also... You've also got friends, or people you encounter, who are super comfortable in their own skin, and very self-possessed, and feel like they have understood some sort of secret to existence that you're not party to. And then you start to see, no, that's not quite right. It's more complicated than that. And fissures and fault lines appear, and between the fissures and the fault lines, you see bits of behavior that doesn't really make sense - like they're dismantling things in their lives for no good reason.

And it's a key part in the film, which is that there's an act of destruction of a marriage that the film does not explain, because it is important that these things are not explainable in those terms. You know? Somebody dismantling their marriage or their job or their friendship or something might have some superficial reasons why they think they're doing it, but that's not why they're doing it. So, the film is looking at that and presenting a thesis as to why that's the case, but it's doing it by inference. I think, broadly speaking, the film is inferring stuff rather than stating it.

Not explicitly.

To be honest, I think what it really gives the audience is... well, to an extent, I would hope it gives them respect. That they don't need to be spoon-fed. But it also creates a requirement, which is that the film is not going to do everything. It is a sort of... the audience member is a participant in the narrative, and if the inferences are going to be understood, and the connections are going to be felt - even if they're different inferences and different feelings - they are going to be brought by the audience member. It's like you have to join the party. And so, I think the ideal audience member for a film like that, and other films like it, is one with an open mind who's not there just to be entertained for two hours. There's a two-way process they're willing to engage in.

"To an extent I would hope it gives [the audience] respect."

Not about that, because there's a kind of top-line narrative that can explain it. Which is, like, "a weird thing has happened. Is it extraterrestrial or is it radiating a strange effect?" There you go. There's also a sort of metaphorical element to it, a sort of unknowable expanding existential thing. But the top-line narrative can satisfy the people who are not interested in the metaphorical side. So, not really. [The pressure was] more to do with stuff like making the protagonist less morally complex. That kind of thing.

Precisely. That's why you can't cut it without filleting the movie.

I had less because the film cost more money. Say, it cost two and a half times more, but I was trying to do seven times more. So on a day-to-day level, we actually had fewer resources. This was a more guerrilla bit of filmmaking than Ex Machina, and it had much more in common with a film like Dredd, actually, which is the one I did before Ex Machina, which is constantly like a dog straining against the leash of its own budget.

"I'm constantly in interviews shrugging off auteur theory, because I think it's bullshit."

In a way, that question is, "Whose idea was it?" Right? And the problem with working in a collaborative medium is that you can never really say whose idea it was, because all ideas start to be the product of a conversation, and the actual defining point of the idea might come from one person at one time, but they wouldn't have had it without the preceding conversations. Part of debunking the mythology of filmmaking is that we tend to want to locate it often in one person. And it's not one person. It's a collective, and it is a collaboration.

Where does it come from? Ultimately, if you keep going down the evolutionary chain, it comes from the book, because the book is the source material, and it doesn't matter if it's in the book or not; that's sort of the genesis of it. And so there's stuff that's in the film that isn't in the book, but that stuff wouldn't exist if the book didn't exist, so what are you going to do? I find the attribution stuff really complex, and it's one of the reasons I'm constantly in interviews shrugging off auteur theory, because I think it's bullshit. At least it certainly is for me.

Well, maybe some of them were auteurs, you know? If someone says Wes Anderson is an auteur, I'll believe it 100 percent. Fine. He's an auteur, but I'm not. And so it's just all part of the big friendly conversation. Some of these people, we've been working together 20 years. We know each other really well. We're in sync with each other's sensibilities, particularly in the production design team, which is crucial to the stuff you're talking about.

I'm going to try. I've written it, yeah.

"I worry that there may be a mismatch between the stuff I do and opening weekends."

It's like the weird expansion / contraction of Ex Machina to Annihilation. You've got two and a half weeks to shoot an hour of drama instead of six weeks to shoot an hour of drama. And you've got three weeks to cut it instead of 12. But you also get to tell an eight-hour drama instead of a one hour, 40-[minute] drama. So, there's expansions and contractions, and some of them are helpful, and some of them are scary, but overall, I'd really like to try it, because I've just seen such beautiful, challenging, adult material done on the small screen. Most recently, Handmaid's Tale, which blew my mind. I'm really looking forward to the second season.

And also, I worry that there may be a mismatch between the stuff I do and opening weekends. I think the two things might not fit very neatly, and there's always... I think I kind of trick people a bit. I don't mean to, but I think I do, and I think it's because I work within genre, and it makes it feel like it's more mainstream than it is. It has a gloss of being mainstream, but actually, it's much more spiky and awkward than that. And the time that the cutting-edge resolution of that awkward thing comes is on an opening weekend, and the sheer finances involved. And I thought maybe in TV, I'd be kind of relieved of that tension.

I think it's a product of exactly the anxiety we were just speaking about, clearly. I mean, I'd be a fucking bullshitter if I said it was anything other than that. I think that clearly I don't have any personal issue with the small screen, because the bit of film narrative I just name-checked was on the small screen, and I'm going to try and do it next. So I've got no problem with it at all. I would say that it would be good to know that you're doing it for the small screen before you do it, not after, because you would shoot it differently, you would do the VFX differently, you'd do the sound design differently. There are all sorts of things you would just go about in a different way. So I've got no problem with the medium. I love the medium. It's more just horses for courses.

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Annihilation director Alex Garland on using sci-fi to explore self-destruction

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English filmmaker Alex Garland has the right to demonstrate a bit of creative ego. After finding success with his debut novel The Beach at age 26, he moved to screenwriting, scripting the genre favorites 28 Days Later, Sunshine, and Dredd.

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How the character of Ava was created in collaboration with concept artist Jock, the VFX unit and, of course, the performance of Alicia Vikander

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How the character of Ava was created in collaboration with concept artist Jock, the VFX unit and, of course, the performance of Alicia Vikander

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https://www.businessinsider.com/ex-machina-ava-concept-art-2015-4?r=US&IR=T

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Links also to representation - GOTG was more popular among women than previous Marvel films

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Links also to representation - GOTG was more popular among women than previous Marvel films

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https://www.theguardian.com/film/shortcuts/2014/aug/05/women-love-guardians-galaxy-marvel-half-audience

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About the stereotypical and orientalist representation of the female Asian robot, Kyoko, in Ex Machina

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About the stereotypical and orientalist representation of the female Asian robot, Kyoko, in Ex Machina

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https://confluence.gallatin.nyu.edu/context/first-year-writing-seminar/ex-machina-the-directors-decisions

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An essay about the different genre and narrative conventions in Guardians of the Galaxy

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An essay about the different genre and narrative conventions in Guardians of the Galaxy

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https://natalieblundellunit4.weebly.com/blog/guardians-of-the-galaxy-a-genre-reading

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A "making of" video showing the development of the Ava character which led to Ex Machina winning a VFX Oscar

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A "making of" video showing the development of the Ava character which led to Ex Machina winning a VFX Oscar

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQmSl4Kpyc8