Alex Garland names his favourite musical: “Scorchingly honest”
If you’ve seen an Alex Garland movie, you can probably guess that his favourite musical is not Singin’ in the Rain. There’s no one like him working today. Having gotten his start as a novelist, writing the source material for Danny Boyle’s The Beach, he moved into screenwriting with 28 Days Later, Sunshine, and Never Let Me Go. When he began directing, he earned even more acclaim, bursting straight out of the gates with Ex Machina before making Annihilation and Civil War.
All of those movies are bleak, unsettling, and hard to pin down. You might assume that 28 Days Later is going to be a scary zombie movie or that Sunshine is just your standard sci-fi thriller in space. But no matter how many horror movies you’ve seen, you aren’t ready for the toe-curling sense of discomfort that those two movies provide.
It’s a weird claim to fame. Does any artist start out hoping that their work will mentally and emotionally scar people for life? Was Garland crossing his fingers that the genetically mutated bear in Annihilation would be one of the most disturbing and eerie creatures to ever hit the silver screen? Was he trying to create a new laundry list of anxieties?
We may never know. Garland has been pretty cagey about his intentions from the beginning, something which has, in itself, become contentious. Civil War, in particular, created a bit of an outcry with its brutal portrayal of a present-day Civil War in the US. Released at the most precipitous moment of the 2024 presidential election and highlighting the savagery of everyday citizens, it was conspicuously ambiguous about why the war happened and what each side of the conflict stood for. It was, however, an unflinching, even ruthless, exploration of what human beings are capable of in a time of conflict.
Given his background as a filmmaker, it’s hardly surprising that Garland’s favourite films would be simultaneously confrontational and evasive. In an interview with Letterboxd, the Warfare director said that Bob Fosse’s 1979 musical All That Jazz was one of his all-time favourites, calling it “scorchingly honest about itself” and saying that he was “blown away” by it.
All That Jazz is one of the rare musicals that veers into fantasy without ever losing its grip on mundanity. Starring Roy Scheider, it is an autobiographical and often confessional profile of a famous choreographer and Broadway director who spreads himself thin with rehearsals for a new musical, the editing of a film about a stand-up comedian, and the relationships he has with his daughter, ex-wife, and partner. Suffering from chest pain, he imagines a series of interactions with the angel of death, played by Jessica Lange.
Seamlessly melding all the elements that the medium allows, sound, spectacle, and emotive camerawork, All That Jazz is the definition of pure cinema. Scheider portrays Fosse’s thinly-veiled avatar Joe Gideon as devastatingly charismatic, self-centred, self-aware, and repentant. The film is a confession more than an ego trip, and it refuses to offer any concrete conclusions about the questions it raises. For that reason, it might be confounding for some, but it’s also why Stanley Kubrick called it one of the best films ever made and why Alex Garland was so bowled over by it.
