Alex Garland on new film Civil War: ‘How do we defend ourselves against extremism?’

Alex Garland expects Civil War to generate controversy. For a film depicting a near-contemporary US descending into bloody conflict, that seems a given. But controversy for its own sake is not what the writer-director is after; rather he is aiming for something far more ambitious and elusive: to get people to listen to each other.

“The whole film stems from everyone knowing there’s a problem,” he says when we meet at a central London hotel. “Everyone senses what the problem is and there is a conversation being had with very coherent, reasonable points being made, but they have no traction.”

A self-proclaimed science nerd of long standing, he likens what happens instead to what in quantum physics is called “decoherence”. “It’s a moment where things behave one way and then start behaving another way,” he explains.

To avoid perpetuating such divisions, Garland removed certain elements from his movie: political triggers that might stop viewers from watching with an open mind. Similarly, throughout our meeting, he words his answers very carefully so as not to appear partisan or polemical. “If it was just another piece of inflammatory bullshit, then that really would be a failure,” he says. “Because, however it looks, the film is actually trying to find a non-polarised point of agreement. Its whole intention is to be able to have a conversation.”

Garland insists this is a genuinely anti-war film rather than one that secretly revels in jingoism, spectacular explosions and violence. “You [can] end up with something that is sort of name-checking how bad war is, but is really saying, ‘Oh, my God, that looks cool,’” he says.

Civil War trusts its viewers to work out the ethics for themselves and drops only a few hints about what has given rise to the conflict. For example, in the film’s near future, California and Texas have seceded to form a two-state polity called “the Western Forces” (though Florida may join soon). They are in revolt against a blowhard president with a tendency for rhetorical hyperbole (Nick Offerman) who has given himself a third term, broken the constitution, disbanded the FBI and ordered air strikes against his own citizens. Garland started writing the film in June 2020, just after the Black Lives Matter protests that climaxed with the National Guard using tear gas on unarmed crowds in Washington DC and then-president Donald Trump holding up a Bible in Lafayette Square.

But the focus in Civil War is not on the film’s fictional dictator. Instead, the story revolves around three seasoned journalists — photographer Lee (Kirsten Dunst), reporter Joel (Wagner Moura) and elder statesman Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson) — and a rookie named Jessie (Cailee Spaeny, star of Priscilla). Together they set off from New York to the capital for the ultimate scoop, an interview with the president, hopefully his last before being deposed.

Garland asked his cast to watch two films before they started shooting: Russian director Elem Klimov’s masterful anti-war classic Come and See (1985) and Under the Wire, a 2018 documentary about celebrated war correspondent Marie Colvin. The latter is a clue to one of Civil War’s primary preoccupations: it is more about celebrating journalism than politics or speculative fiction. Garland’s father Nicholas was a political cartoonist, and the young Alex grew up in London in the company of reporters. Both he and his brother had foreign correspondents for godparents.

“How do we defend ourselves against extremism?” the 53-year-old asks, rhetorically. “One of the absolute fundamental ways is through journalism. In any kind of stable state it’s not a luxury, it’s a stone-cold necessity. The film acknowledges that journalists can be conflicted or compromised as individuals, and can have all sorts of strange motivations. But, under all that stuff, there’s an ideology. They are there to report. One of them says at one point: ‘We do this so other people can make their inferences.’”

The film’s central foursome fight to keep these ideals in mind even as they encounter horrors heaped on horrors. At a sleepy rural gas station, they find people torturing old acquaintances. Down the road, two men are trying to kill a sniper, unsure which side he’s even on. And in arguably the most nightmarish sequence, with imagery that evokes atrocities in Ukraine, a terrifyingly nonchalant soldier (Jesse Plemons) coolly selects people for summary execution if he doesn’t deem them “the right kind of American”.

Throughout such sequences, Garland’s flair for surrealism and mordant wit pokes through. He captures the absurdity of a battle at a disused Christmassy theme park (a real location the filmmakers found already in a state of decay) and the eerie peacefulness of a cosy small town where the residents still go about their everyday lives as if nothing is happening.

Hannah Arendt wrote that “storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it . . . it brings about consent and reconciliation with things as they really are.” Perhaps what’s most admirable about Civil War is its refusal to define itself or its meaning to clear a space for the viewer to draw their own inferences.

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Accustomed to viewing US politics as a binary that divides up states into “blue” and “red”, some have balked at the idea that supposedly liberal California and conservative Texas would ever align. That fails to acknowledge that both states are hugely diverse in terms of demographics and politics and that it is largely the winner-takes-all nature of the electoral college system that makes Texas go red while California goes blue. For Garland, a Texas-California alliance would be perfectly plausible if a president had become a fascist autocrat.

“He’s killing his own citizens, so Texas and California have decided that their political differences are less important than [fighting] fascism. Is that unreasonable? . . . To me, that is such a small logical leap, but it’s interesting that people find it so problematic.”

That question should be answered this weekend when Civil War opens in the US, UK and elsewhere. Early box office tracking metrics suggest it will be a hit, but as scriptwriter William Goldman famously said, when it comes to this business, “Nobody knows anything.”

Garland’s work as a novelist, screenwriter and director, which includes penning the 1996 bestseller The Beach, scripting 2002’s 28 Days Later and directing 2014’s Ex Machina, has largely been met with critical acclaim, but his films as director have hardly been box office smashes. “I keep losing everyone money,” he says. “There’s a certain point where capitalism just says: ‘Nope, sorry. That’s not how this works.’”

However, in some ways, Civil War is his least “difficult” film compared with, say, 2022’s Men with its final-act orgy of psychedelic battiness. Garland’s American production house A24, known for taking big risks with the likes of The Zone of Interest and Beau Is Afraid, has invested more in Civil War than any previous film. (The budget is rumoured to have been between $50mn and $75mn.)

That said, with a wider audience comes more risk of being misunderstood. Garland is wary of his words being distorted, aware that, especially in the digital age, quotes can easily be taken out of context and used for clickbait. This year being a US election year brings even greater stakes. “I wasn’t making a film about America,” he stresses. “It’s about populism, and populism is a substantial step towards extremism.”

Civil War, he argues, could just as plausibly have been set in the UK or any number of other countries. “The reason it’s about America is because America is by far the biggest and most powerful country in the world,” he says. “The rest of us look to America. I think many people know more about American political life than they do about the political life in their own country.”

As we say our goodbyes, part of me hopes that Civil War will be a big enough hit that a UK-set sequel will follow, with a battle scene set in Glasgow’s desolate Willy Wonka theme park. Cue epic new levels of decoherence. 

‘Civil War’ is in UK and US cinemas from April 12

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