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Thursday, May 7, 2015
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
ARTS

Director-producer
discusses genre and

special effects

By JAMIE BIRCOLL

Senior Arts Editor

Science fiction is a difficult

genre to tackle, as it asks the
audience to suspend its disbelief
and buy into unusual, fantasti-
cal ideas. But, if successfully
engendered, sci-fi can achieve
what no other genre can really
tap into: grand thematic strokes
combined with exceptional cre-
ative flourishes.

“The reason to work in sci-

fi from my point of view is that
you’re just allowed to deal with
big themes and big ideas and not
be embarrassed about it,” writ-
er-director Alex Garland said in
a conference call in which The
Michigan Daily took part. “You
know if you try to put that stuff in
an action movie or even an adult
drama … people get kind of sort of
almost self-conscious about really
big questions, and feel like it might
be all be too pretentious or what-
ever. But sci-fi audiences want big
ideas, they like them being named
checked, it’s seen as an advantage
rather than a negative.”

Garland’s
latest
film,
“Ex

Machina,” has been hailed by
many critics as a modern genre
staple, an achievement all the
more impressive when one realiz-
es the film is Garland’s first serv-
ing as director, though it wasn’t
his initial idea to direct.

“I didn’t think in those terms (of

directing). In a weird way, I don’t
really care about those terms, it’s
partly ’cause I just don’t — I don’t
really overstate the role of the
director,” Garland said. “I think
at the point I was writing it, I was
really just trying to figure out does
this work, is there a movie here,
does it work in its own terms.
And the directing aspect of it was
something that just came later and
just felt like it made sense.”

For Garland, filmmaking is

a team process, one where the
director is just another cog in
the machine that is film produc-
tion. Every person on set has a

role to play.

“The way to make it work is all

about the people you work with,
it’s just as simple as that,” Garland
said. “I mean it’s the team that
are the filmmakers and how they
work with each other and the level
of the ideas they come up with and
how they solve problems. And so
you know it’s the director of pho-
tography and it’s the production
designer, and it’s the actors, and
that’s how twe film is executed.”

But certainly there were

potential challenges, especially
with crafting the sleek comput-
er-generated effects to create
Ava (played by Alicia Vikander,
“Anna Karenina”), the hyper-
intelligent AI on whom the
story is centered. Ava’s sleek
metallic body features eerily
human
characteristics,
and

gives the character a complex
appearance. But Garland notes
how the computer generation
process didn’t interfere with
the rest of production.

“Actually it was very, very

easy on this film,” Garland said.
“You can’t shoot this constantly
fussing about the effects shot.


Just shoot it as if you’re shoot-
ing humans and we will figure
out a process by which you don’t
have to worry about it past that.
In other words just shoot the
drama, don’t worry about the
process … (the computer gen-
eration) was all done in post-
production. So it was a, from my
point of view, a very simple pro-
cess indeed.”

While the computer generated

image certainly adds an aesthetic
appeal, it is the actors who bring
the characters forward, finding
the deep-seated motivations of the
characters. Of particular note are
Vikander and Oscar Isaac (“A Most
Violent Year”).

About Vikander, Garland said,

“You could just see that (she) was
just totally holding her own and
sort of transfixing you and had
this amazing presence and amaz-
ing confidence,”

And about Isaac, Garland took a

more assertive stance.

“One of the most common lines

of bullshit that I read in reviews or
film writing is talking about how
a director coaxed a performance
out of an actor. If you met Oscar,
I promise you, you’d see I didn’t
coax anything out of him,” he said.

But the ideas of the film — ideas

of gender, identity, free will, the
very construct of humanity — all
constitute the soul of the film. And
it was conveying these ideas in a
realistic but thought-provoking
level that motivated Garland most.

“I mean, basically, because it’s

an ideas movie, that’s really what
it is. It’s got a bunch of thoughts
and questions and it’s proposing
them and only answering some
of them,” Garland said. “And so
there was an attempt to be very
thoughtful
and
very
reason-

able in the presentation of these
things, because I know, unfortu-
nately all too well, what my own
limitations are and failings either
in talent or intellect.”

Alex Garland talks
making of new film

FLICKR

Who dat who dat?

Shallow ‘Vacancy’

TV REVIEW

By KAREN HUA

Daily TV/New Media Editor

“The movie wasn’t as good as

the book,” we’ve said, we’ve heard,
we’ve recounted time and again
about
all
our

favorite classics.

Unfortunately,

just as we said
about the “Harry
Potter”
series,

the same notion
applies to “The
Casual Vacancy,”
the HBO minise-
ries based on J.K.
Rowling’s epony-
mous novel. After
the “Potter” frenzy that launched her
to success, “Vacancy” meant to set her
apart from a name that would define
her entire authorial career — proof
that she could write more than just
wizarding fantasy.

And prove she did — Rowling

wrote another quintessentially British
novel aimed to explore similar themes
as “Potter” did, but through a more
mature lens. “Vacancy” delves into
the intertwined world of teenagers
and their parents, reminiscent of a sti-
fling suburbia where individuals grow
up and stay trapped forever.

The small-town tale jumps in

media res, introducing the mundane
lives and minute social conflicts in
Pagford, a pastoral microcosm with
an unsettling kind of immaculacy.
While idyllic hills and cobblestone
streets and laughing kids on bikes roll
across the screen, the town struggles
to uphold its pristine nature by vying
the “needs” of the few over the needs
of the less fortunate in an almost
Dickensian way. Exemplifying that
dynamic is Pagford’s city council,
headed by the conservative curmud-
geon couple Howard (Michael Gam-
bon, Dumbledore from the “Harry

Potter” series) and Shirley Mollison

(Julia McKenzie, “Notes on a Scan-
dal”) who strive to socially engineer
Pagford’s perfection. The council is
stabilized by the more liberal Barry
Fairbrother (Rory Kinnear, “The Imi-
tation Game”), who spearheads the
movement to overturn Mollison’s ini-
tiative to turn their community center
into a tourist and retail enterprise.

Barry is popular among the lower

class for his altruism, as he looks
after Krystal Weedon (Abigail Law-
rie, newcomer), a crass-mouthed teen
under social service surveillance for
having a heroin-strung mother; and
Arf Price (Joe Hurst, “Private Peace-

ful”), his reserved nephew with an
abusive father — both youths who the
community center benefits. When
Barry mysteriously dies, perfection is
usurped as citizens scramble to fill his
temporarily vacant spot on the coun-
cil, unveiling their true colors beneath
their façades.

The first part of the miniseries

ends with a premonition from “the
ghost of Barry Fairbrother” narrating,
“It’s impossible to keep secrets in this
place, isn’t it? Oh, you’d be surprised,
Pagford. Everyone’s got skeletons
raveling in their cupboard.” Pagford
attempts to obscure its problems of
class and justice, when really, they
are more evident than ever in a place
where everyone knows everything
about everyone. In a land of homo-
geneity, trivial problems become
magnanimous to its inhabitants, and
perfection soon becomes uncomfort-
ably eerie — a social statement on
Rowling’s part about the perils of stag-
nant suburbia. The show uses silence
and the motif of mirrors to reflect this
eeriness on the characters themselves,
leading viewers to question every
intention and ulterior motive.

In Pagford, everyone duals as

both a protagonist and an antagonist
— every character has texture and
complexity. However, what could be
a beautiful multidimensionality scat-
ters the focus of the show, providing
inadequate screen time for characters
who must be conveyed with greater
depth. There are less heinous sides to
Krystal that inform her self-destruc-
tive tendencies; Arf has small, but
significant spurts of independence,
while the show only depicts him as
an awkward doormat; other council
members Tess Wall (Monica Dolan,
“Pride”) and Parminder Jawanda
(Lolita Chakrabarti, “Venus”) are
strong female figures who could have
balanced out this patriarchal tale.

Their story is painted through stel-

lar cinematography of a picturesque
rural England, a key highlight of the
show. However, the visual impecca-
bility is analogous to the “pretty” but
superficial writing that doesn’t quite
dig deep enough into the characters.
The 500-page novel is shrunken into a
three-hour miniseries — just a tad lon-
ger than a feature-length film, yet not
nearly long enough to capture more
than the brisk essence of the story. It’s
the characters, not the plot, that gives
the novel its true depth — that makes
the novel worthy of our tears, rage and
pity. Three hours is only enough to
introduce personas, not to empathize
with them.

B+

Casual
Vacancy

3-Part
Miniseries
April 27-29

HBO