The 2012 movie Alex Garland couldn’t stand making: “It just created a bloody mess”
The story of how Alex Garland became one of Hollywood’s leading science fiction auteurs is a fascinating one.
It was after his novel, The Beach, was adapted into a feature film directed by Danny Boyle that Garland initiated a friendship with the future Oscar-winning filmmaker. He wrote 28 Days Later and Sunshine for Boyle, and then went on to pen adaptations of Never Let Me Go and Dredd. However, the latter became a much more intensive experience than he had initially expected.
Although there had already been a Judge Dredd film that starred Sylvester Stallone, it was criticised for being overly silly and formulaic, which was nothing like the original source material. With director Pete Travis onboard, the new Dredd took a much more grounded and philosophical approach to the notion of one man serving as judge, jury, and executioner within a lawless 21st century. Stallone had only been cast because he was a movie star, whereas Karl Urban landed the role because he was the best actor suited, and could both pull off the character’s steely resolve and commit to doing the intense action scenes.
There was inherent scepticism from the community of comic book fans, given that they had already been burned before. However, the tension also existed on set, and Garland found that he was making more decisions than would usually be expected from a writer, as he recalled, “In truth, what happened, just to be candid about it, look, a lot of time has passed, I did end up on some films essentially doing ghost-directing. In TV, the writer/showrunner has the kind of authorship button handed to them, and in film, it’s the director who has that. They can’t both be true simultaneously.”
While Garland respected Travis as a director, he said that he had primarily had experience on television, which wasn’t what was needed for an ambitious project like Dredd. “Television is not so much different from film that magically it’s the writer/showrunner, and now magically it’s the director,” he explained.
“Some people I’m working with, their principle was ‘Well, why don’t we take that concept from television and use it in film?’ For complicated reasons that just didn’t work. It just created a bloody mess.”
The experience of Dredd led to a complex creative clash in which Garland was asked to fulfil more responsibilities than he had originally signed up for. Nonetheless, it had an impact on the way that he shaped the rest of his career.
“Within this is a disservice to Pete Travis, who is the credited director, who did some fundamental/crucial things, and he deserves that title,” Garland said, “He was put in an absolutely impossible situation, and retrospectively, the longer I’ve worked, the more ridiculous I think it was. After the experience of making Dredd, what I said is, I’m not doing that again. Just let me do that job, let’s simplify this.”
Dredd was not the hit that anyone expected, but it did earn strong reviews, especially from comic book fans who felt that Garland had captured the essence of the character, and thankfully, he would be greeted with far more success for the films he is actually credited for as a director, such as Ex Machina, Annihilation, Civil War, and even the controversial Warfare.
