Before making a splash as a feature film director, Alex Garland wrote two of Danny Boyle’s great films 28 Days Later, and Sunshine. In the 2010s, he wrote the Andrew Garfield romance film Never Let Me Go and the modern iteration of Judge Dredd titled Dredd. He made his directorial debut with the sci-fi thriller Ex-Machina which has been considered one of the best sci-fi films of the 2010s.
Garland was a novelist before stepping into Hollywood with three novels under his name including The Coma, The Tesseract, and The Beach. The latter proved to be the most popular and successful one among the three. However, Garland didn’t expect the novel to become as big as it did and it made him uncomfortable.
Alex Garland Did Not Enjoy The Fame That Came With The Success of The Beach
Before his foray into films, Alex Garland published his first novel The Beach in 1996. The novel set in Thailand chronicles the journey of a young backpacker in search of an idyllic beach, and his camaraderie with other like-minded backpackers he meets along the way. The book became a sleeper hit and Garland talked about the success it achieved in an interview with The Guardian.
Garland stated that while the book received mixed reviews when it was published, the book slowly began to find more and more admirers through word of mouth and became hugely popular. He also admitted that he felt immediately uncomfortable by the unexpected popularity of his book. He said,
“What happened to that book was genuinely a surprise and it was a surprise to everybody. What really happened is it came out, it did all right, it got some good reviews, it got some bad reviews. Then some months after it came out, I started hearing, because I was a big backpacker, about people in Thailand reading it and passing it among themselves. This is the pre-internet period; it was a proper word-of-mouth thing.”
While Garland is happy about the success of the book, he does not like the fame and popularity that came with it. Garland’s book was adapted into a feature film starring Leonardo DiCaprio titled The Beach in 2000, directed by Danny Boyle. The film received mixed/negative reviews but became a box-office success. He earned a Razzie nomination for his performance in the film.
Alex Garland Might Not Return to Directing After Civil War
To date, Alex Garland has directed four feature films Ex Machina, Annihilation, Men, and Civil War. The latter is his latest film and recently premiered at SXSW, receiving positive reviews from audiences. However, the director has claimed that he is not planning to direct again in the foreseeable future.
In an interview with The Guardian, the director stated that while he still loves movies, the challenges of making them, the responsibility to deliver a good one, and dealing with his actors and crew on set made him fall out of love with making them. he said,
“I’m not planning to direct again in the foreseeable future… I do actually love film, but filmmaking doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It exists in a life and also in a broader context. The pressure doesn’t come from the money. It comes from the fact that you’re asking people to trust something that, on the face of it, doesn’t look very trustworthy. The deep sense of responsibility to cast and crew literally keeps me awake at night”
Garland serves as a co-director (he insists he’s not directing) on the upcoming film Warfare which will be Ray Mendoza’s directorial debut. While he may drop out of directing, Garland is still active as a screenwriter. He is set to write the sequel to 28 Days Later titled 28 Years Later with Danny Boyle returning to direct.
