CS Video: Ex Machina Director Alex Garland

When it comes to modern day science-fiction, you don’t get much better than author-turned-screenwriter Alex Garland, who cut his teeth working with Danny Boyle before finally going behind the camera to direct his own screenplay for Ex Machina.

The film deals with artificial intelligence (A.I.) and how a reclusive billionaire tech genius (played by Oscar Isaac) hires a young programmer (Domnhall Gleeson) to perform the Turing Test to determine whether his latest creation, a sentient cyborg named Ava (Alicia Vikander), can pass the test and prove her artificial intelligence.

In the video interview below, we spoke with Garland about why he decided to make a movie about A.I. and sentient robots and direct it himself, getting the cast together and developing both Oscar Isaac’s character and how they turned Alicia Vikander into the cyborg Ava using VFX after shooting.

We also spoke with Garland about his adaptation of Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation, the first chapter of the “Southern Reach” trilogy which was published last year—he’s turned the first draft into Paramount–and how he felt about how Dredd was ignored by moviegoers despite having a lot of buzz for months before its release.

Ex Machina is now playing in New York and Los Angeles and will expand further over the next few weeks with its widest release on April 24.