6

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