EX MACHINA : INTELLIGENT DESIGN

Directed by Alex Garland

Produced by Andrew Macdonald, Scott Rudin

Written by Alex Garland

Starring Domhnall Gleeson, Alicia Vikander, Oscar Isaac

Distributed by Universal Pictures (UK), A24 Films (US)

Release dates 23 January 2015 (United Kingdom), 10 April 2015 (United States)

Running time 108 minutes

Country        United Kingdom

Budget         $20 million

Armed with spectacular effects and big ideas,

Ex_Machina might just be 2015’s mostambitious and thought-provoking sci-fi. We ventures on set towitness the creation of the next generation of movie robot.

This is the room in which she was constructed. Over there are plans of her body...” Novelist-turnedfilmmaker Alex Garland is showing us round a lab in which an AI with humanoid form has been constructed. Or at least, it has in Ex_Machina, Garland’s latest sci-fi thriller. It’s a film set, of course, although given its 360° nature and in-built lighting, it feels eerily like a location. Adding to the mysterious atmosphere is the fact that, earlier that morning, we had to sign a hefty non-disclosure agreement before being admitted into Pinewood Studios. It’s August 2013, and before witnessing today’s shoot, we knew, frankly, nothing about what to expect, save for an intriguing title and the knowledge that it was the brainchild of Garland. We didn’t even know who was in it.

Before meeting writer-director Garland in the lab, a publicist leads us through the production department, where the walls are lined with sketches and location photographs of glass buildings, lakes and observatories, and briefs us on the particulars of the premise. Ex_Machina starts to sound very interesting, very quickly.

The shroud of secrecy is fitting, and in keeping with the plot. The logline is that Caleb, a young coder at the world’s biggest search engine, Blue WORDS MATT MAYTUM Book, wins a lottery that’ll see him spend a week with the company’s reclusive CEO, Nathan, at his Alaskan retreat. Once he gets there (and signs a hefty NDA of his own), he discovers that he’s actually there to test Nathan’s latest creation: a humanoid robot AI. And the cast – comprising three key players, and a couple of support roles – feel like they’ve been practically handpicked from a ‘stars of the future’ list.

The key scene to be shot today is an exchange between Domhnall Gleeson’s Caleb and Oscar Isaac’s Nathan, the CEO showing his young ward around the lab in which he created Ava, his femininely-formed AI (played by Swedish actress Alicia Vikander). At the time of the shoot, Gleeson’s lead turn in About Time hadn’t been released, and Isaac’s barnstorming performance in the Coens’ Inside Llewyn Davis had just wowed Cannes. It’d be almost a year before the pair were cast in J.J. Abrams’ Star Wars: Episode VII. Gleeson and Garland had previous form, having collaborated on Never Let Me Go and Dredd.

“He’s possibly my favourite writer,” enthuses Gleeson. “I was buying his scripts to read before I worked with him.” Isaac, meanwhile, also had history with Garland.

“When I graduated from [Juilliard] in 2005, the very first audition I had was for Sunshine... I was blown away by the script,” Isaac remembers. Although he didn’t end up getting the part, he followed Garland’s work, and when Ex_Machina came up, “I was already in his corner.” As for Vikander, she’d impressed in Danish breakout A Royal Affair, and appeared alongside Gleeson in Joe Wright’s Anna Karenina. It feels like the precisely calibrated cast you’d need on your side when you’re making a (relatively speaking) low-budget sci-fi with ambitions to punch well above its weight.

We’ve arrived at Pinewood in time for the final stretch of a four-week shoot, before the production ups sticks and heads to Norway (doubling for Alaska) for two more weeks. Garland’s busy briefing his actors, as the crew get the cameras and lights geared up. Huddling over a monitor, we watch as Isaac and Gleeson stroll through the dimly lit lab, all sharp, square lines of metal and glass. Scattered about are the component parts of Ava: eerily detached faces and other mechanical parts. Slipping a small transparent brain out of one of the chrome skulls, and handing it to Caleb, Nathan’s explaining how he built his latest creation. Isaac, with closely shorn hair and incredibly dense beard, is unshowily authorative, and Gleeson delivers his lines in a note-perfect American accent. While Ex_Machina might be produced by UK-based DNA Films and have a largely British crew, this is clearly going to be aiming beyond just British multiplexes.

In a brief, hushed chat on the sidelines, Allon Reich (a producer at DNA Films, and another long-time collaborator of Garland’s) explains how they’re hoping the film will have broad appeal.

“It is a desire to have films that, if you make them as well as you hope you’re going to, they could have an international audience, definitely,” he says. “Alex takes genres and plays with them. I think he has a sixth sense of a zeitgeisty thing of what people are interested in.”

After ‘cut’ is called, the surfaces are buffed in preparation for another take. When the actors head off for lunch, we step onto the set and marvel at the level of detail up close. On the wall hang blueprints for Ava’s skeleton, while the eyeless faces based on Vikander’s own are even more unsettling up close. Inside the lab there’s a glass enclosure, housing a table topped with the pieces of Ava’s gleaming skeletal structure. It’s at this table that Garland joins us for a chat, not showing any signs of strain at trying to shoot a film of this ambition in just six weeks (although he does find time for a dig at industry colleagues who bemoan filming something in just 12 weeks).

As Garland picks up and inspects various robotic components, some of which were 3D-printed based on Vikander’s measurements, he muses on the difficulty of getting the robot design right, in a world where so much has already been done. “It’s very interesting how hard it is to get away from the female-looking robot in Metropolis, which most people haven’t seen but the image is iconic,” says the writer-director.

“If you create a humanoid robot and colour it gold, you immediately think C-3PO: it just happens. There’s also Chris Cunningham, who in his Björk video created a really fantastic concept of a robot that was then ripped off by I, Robot.”

When it came to designing a unique looking machine, it was as necessary for the story as the wow factor. “You want to be having this response which is similar to the protagonist’s when he sees the robot girl for the first time, and not be thinking about Anthony Daniels...” smiles Garland. Whipping out his iPhone, Garland gives us a sneaky glimpse of what the finished effect of Ava will look like on screen, zooming in to show how her surface reflects light.

Thanks to advances in technology, Vikander didn’t have to spend the length of the shoot in a green bodystocking. Double Negative, the London-based VFX house who have worked on the likes of Man Of Steel, Godzilla and Interstellar, are able to take reference points from Vikander’s mesh costume to create her largely transparent robot form: the see-through outer layer revealing  a gleaming chrome skeleton and intricate wiring to mesmerising effect. Vikander’s own face will be seen, although the effects team will neaten up the practical work that extends her forehead and hides her hair. “It really does help to be in that costume,” laughs Vikander, in note-perfect English. “I really forgot I was in it. And suddenly I went to catering for the first time and everyone just turned around because I didn’t have any hair.

I was just this robot, and had my forehead built out on top of my skull.” It wasn’t all fun and games though, particularly given the heatwave that hit London that summer. “It was very, very, very hot, and it took four hours to get into every morning, so you work insane hours really.”

The special effects had to deliver – even if you’re an ‘underdog’ in budgetary terms, second-rate VFX won’t cut it in an international marketplace. Vikander, reflecting Garland’s own mantra, admits, “when it comes to special effects nowadays, if you have a film that doesn’t have a studio budget, you need to aim to have special effects on the same level, because that’s what people are used to seeing. It needs to be top level for it to work.”

For all the ambition on display here (looking at the sets, there’s no sense that Ex_Machina is an underdog), the screenplay and concept came from humble beginnings. “It came out of a long argument with a friend of mine,” laughs Garland.

“When I say long, I mean like, six or seven years.” The argument was about whether or not a computer or non-organic machine could ever have a consciousness. As the debate raged on and became more complicated and nuanced, the idea morphed into a screenplay. If Ex_Machina is going to blow your mind with special effects first, it’ll be the pub debate-inspiring conundrums that’ll have you scratching your head afterwards. “That kind of philosophical stuff pushes buttons in me,” says the writerdirector.

“There’s weird little arguments going on in Dredd – I don’t know if people picked up on them watching people being blown to bits, but they are there!”

The arena for debate was the reason why sci-fi held such a strong appeal, and one that chimes with Garland’s previous work. “What I try to do – it’s in 28 Days Later, it’s in Sunshine, it’s in

Ex_Machina definitely - is approach sci-fi with something like naturalism: it’s real people in a hyperreal environment,” he explains. With the focus so firmly on three central characters who’d have a lot of intense, dialogue-driven scenes, the pressure was on to find a cast that could handle it.

Isaac beefed up for role of Alpha male Nathan (“the whole idea was this is a formidable opponent for Domhnall’s character,” says Isaac), and took inspiration from genius figures like Bobby Fischer and Stanley Kubrick when he was researching the character. “Usually a three-hander, you see in a play at the theatre. In film, it’s rare. So that was definitely something I had a feel for,” beams Isaac.

For Gleeson, the shoot was as challenging as it was rewarding. “I found it a difficult shoot in many ways,” admits the 31-year-old Irish actor. “My character’s in every scene basically. They were intense days, because there was a lot of dialogue. The stakes are very high. It’s an absolute thriller, as much as anything.”

Isaac concurs. “What ensues is a psychological cat-and-mouse thriller where it’s basically people torturing each other with their brains, so I was on board with that,” he laughs. Landing the right cast was clearly going to be essential. It’s just one of the conditions that Garland stipulated, that came from operating at a very specific budgetary level. “What we were doing in this was deliberately working at a budget where we had a sequence of creative freedoms,” Garland explains. “One of them was to do with cast. It’s true that with a $15m film, you couldn’t just pull three people off the street and say this is how I want to do it, but within the parameters of normal filmmaking, there was pretty much total freedom.” Asked why he cast those three in particular, his response is direct. “Ultimately the movie will rest on performances.

There’s nothing you can do in terms of camerawork or VFX or editing that will get you around that very, very simple fact. They have to be be serious actors first and foremost and that’s what those three are.”

While we’re on set, it’s pointed out that it could have been a low-budget play, if it wasn’t for the need to create a 3D robot girl, and a high-end facility that could believably belong to one of the five richest people in the world. “It did feel quite a bit like going to do a play,” says Isaac, “because there were a few areas that a lot of things would happen [in]. I thought the production design was so sleek and well done. They put you in the world of the film.”

The leanness of the budget resulted in the tight shooting schedule, but that only encouraged the various departments to band together to create a genre film that’s more than the sum of its parts.

“It was pressured, but it was a good pressure,” admits Garland. “It’s one of those pressures that creates a lot of camaraderie and grafting.”

Garland’s keen to celebrate the achievements of his production team, repeatedly namechecking DoP Rob Hardy (who was given free rein to shoot scenes as he liked), production design team Mark Digby and Michelle Day, and VFX supervisor Andrew Whitehurst. “Alex does give every team on a movie the chance to do their best work,” says Gleeson. “Everybody got a chance to be pushed.”

If it proves to be a hit, Ex_Machinacould be the blueprint for a new model of ideas-driven genre film. But as Garland points out bluntly, regardless of the budget, “You always have to do the same thing: at some point you have to persuade someone, if you back this film, you will get your money back.” Gleeson is desperate to see the finished product: “I really hope it’s the best thing I’ve been in because the script is spectacular.”

Isaac is similarly proud. “I think it’s really special: I’m excited to go see it too!” And, Star Wars fever certainly won’t harm Ex_Machina and its canny casting choices. Garland admits that, when he heard J.J. Abrams’ casting announcement, “what I really thought is, Ex_Machina is going to be a very hard film to sell, and this will help, so I was really pleased. I danced into the office that day.” Vikander, meanwhile, is hoping that Ava has impact. “I would love her to become a pop culture [icon],” she laughs. “I hope to go to Comic-Con as Ava!”