Alex Garland, the filmmaker behind intellectual sci-fi films Ex Machina and Annihilation (and the writer of 28 Days Later), delivers a disturbing picture of the future in the politically heated dystopian thriller Civil War.
In the film, a Second Civil War has broken out in the United States, causing conflict across the country as Western Forces seek to take on the loyalist US states and assassinate the President (Nick Offerman), who appears to be the driving force behind the nation’s division and whose actions triggered the outbreak of violent warfare.
We experience this version of the United States at war with itself through the eyes of a group of journalists: photographer Lee (Kirsten Dunst), reporter Joel (Wagner Moura), their mentor Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), and young aspiring photographer Jessie (Cailee Spaney).
Together, they embark on a perilous journey across these new ‘United States’ to reach Washington as Western Forces draw in on the White House.
It is a film in which the actual causes for the divide and outbreak of war are purposefully ambiguous.
Still, its many scenes of bleak, bloody, and brutal warfare, in which many atrocities are committed in terrifying detail, can’t help but evoke imagery seen in recent headlines as two conflicts rage across the world in Ukraine and Gaza, as well as reflecting political division in the United States during an election year.
In an interview with Metro.co.uk, writer-director Garland discusses the idea for his dystopian thriller, which is based on realistic real-world images.
‘I’m a genre writer. So I work within some genre or another sci-fi, horror, thriller, whatever it is. I’m always using something I’m interested in, what’s happening at that moment, which could be to do with technology, or just something that is occurring at that time, that for some reason, sort of provokes a set of thoughts and responses, and then turning that into a story,’ says Garland.
‘So this is just like all the others really – reactive is the right word.’
Garland, 53, is an English filmmaker born in London who rose to prominence as a novelist with bestsellers like The Beach and The Tesseract before transitioning to screenplay with Danny Boyle’s classic zombie picture 28 Days Later.
With the UK undergoing its own politically divided moments in recent history, we asked the British-born writer if he ever imagined a version of this scenario taking place in the UK.
‘I did actually think about it in the UK at some points. There’s one part of the story which is about journalism, and the function of journalism and the nature of journalism, just things to do with journalism. And that could absolutely apply in the UK or the US or many, many other countries.
‘It’s also a story about polarisation and populism. And that could absolutely also apply here. But I think the way I look at it is something like if the planet Earth is a big mattress, if the UK rolls over on the mattress, it’s like if you have a baby sleeping next to you, and it rolls over, and you don’t really notice, if America rolls over the whole mattress sort of shifts. And we look to and when I say we I mean pretty much the world looks to America sees what’s happening, understands things about American politics, sometimes that we don’t even understand about our own country. So it made sense in all sorts of different ways to set it there,’ he explains.
Following Garland’s trend of featuring a female lead after films such as Annihilation and Men, Kirsten Dunst plays Lee, an experienced photographer who has become jaded by the horrors and war crimes she has witnessed over the years, once in faraway countries but now taking place on American soil.
The Spider-Man star, 41, leaped at the opportunity to work with Garland, who doesn’t create many films. The filmmaker recently told The Guardian that he wants to move away from filmmaking.
‘I just love his way of seeing the world. His films are just so unique,’ she tells Metro.co.uk.
Reading the script was a pulse-pounding experience for the Oscar-nominated star, who has been acting since she was seven years old: ‘I was completely at the edge of my seat’ she says.
‘And not really reading for my role; I kind of was just reading it as this movie that was making me feel, you know, it was a page-turner, you know, it evoked a lot of feelings in me.’
To get into the headspace of Lee, Dunst turned to several documentaries and movies as inspiration, naming the Marie Colvin documentary Under The Wire as ‘one that spoke to me the most about what Lee was like for me, and what she experienced.’
Garland replicates this idea in his film, which incorporates material from documentaries and news footage, as well as observations and found objects.
One example of this ‘found’ approach to visual storytelling resulted in a lucky accident during filming one of the film’s most suspenseful moments at an abandoned Winter Wonderland fair; the set was not created, but rather found.
‘We were driving through Atlanta looking for locations and we just came across them, abandoned by the side of a road. Someone had put on a kind of Christmas fair. Christmas had been months and months ago. The person that put it on went bankrupt and just left their stuff there to the annoyance of the farmer who then had all this crap strewn around his fields. And we said we’ll use that and pay for its disposal, so let us take that on,’ he explains.
While it was a happy accident, finding that set also directly relates to the imagery in the film being either grounded in the ‘real world or has a real-world parallel,’ he says.
‘And I think one of the things about the real world is that it’s in a way it’s stranger and more surreal than people typically think it is. And things that may look very constructed were actually just found.’
Garland also allowed his cast the space to rehearse and bond, referring to his core cast as ‘The Car’ throughout production.
‘By the end of those two weeks of rehearsal, we were friends. And everyone was very generous in spirit and acting and very loving. We had a very kind group of actors, we all really loved each other and really had each other’s back in terms of the work’ says Dunst.
This was especially true for her teenage co-star Cailee Spaeny, with Lee and Jessie’s mentor-mentee connection in the film mirroring real-life on set.
‘It was very natural’ Dunst explains. ‘We didn’t really have to think about it so much because it naturally happened between us. We both really, really bonded and loved each other immediately, Cailee and I, so it was very effortless.’
Spaney, 25, who had already worked with Garland on his TV show Devs, went on to star in Priscilla shortly after production on Civil War, and it was Dunst who recommended the young star to filmmaker and regular collaborator Sofia Coppola, according to IndieWire.
Critics have already hailed Civil War for the intriguing, immersive, and scary experience it provides, following its SXSW debut last month.
Much of the provocation stems from how grounded the action seems, emphasising to a disturbing degree how genuine this reality is.
While Garland admits that the film has some wrath and may be read as a cautionary tale in that regard, Dunst is a little more hopeful about what she thinks viewers will take away from the experience.
‘It is the type of movie that you see and it really does evoke so much out of whatever, however you perceive things or conversations,’ she explains.
‘I think that this movie is very important because of that, you don’t really get those experiences from the theatre much. And for me, the film weirdly, left me hopeful as well. I think it’s really about humanity, and what happens when people start seeing each other that way, and not listening to each other and extreme polarisation. And I think that this puts things in a perspective that yeah, will get a lot of people talking.’
Civil War is out in cinemas from April 12, 2024
