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Alex in Wonderland

EX MACHINA written and directed by Alex Garland, with Domhnall Gleeson, Oscar Isaac, Alicia Vikander and Sonoya Mizuno. A Mongrel Media release. 108 minutes. Opens Friday (April 24). See listing.


As a screenwriter, Alex Garland laid waste to England in 28 Days Later… and nearly snuffed out all life on Earth in Sunshine. For his directorial debut, he wanted something a little more intimate – just a few actors, modest locations, no heavy lifting.

The result is Ex Machina, a sort of sci-fi chamber drama starring Domhnall Gleeson as Caleb, a programmer tasked by his boss, Nathan (Oscar Isaac), with evaluating an artificial intelligence called Ava (Alicia Vikander).

The precisely controlled narrative asks essential questions about humanity and sentience – and Garland wanted to be sure those questions were the right ones.

“If the film is functioning in the way I hoped it would function, Domhnall effectively acts as a surrogate for the audience,” Garland says, sitting on a couch in the Trump Hotel during a foggy Toronto press day.

“He’s asking questions they’re starting to feel. Either asking himself or asking Nathan, like, ‘Why does this machine have a gender? Why is it not just, you know, a grey box?'”

The easy answer is that the movie’s AI – called Ava and played by Alicia Vikander (A Royal Affair) – has to have a gender, and be recognizably humanoid, in order to let the characters (and the audience) forge an emotional connection with her. But there had to be a disconnect beneath her appearance, which Garland and Vikander realized by giving Ava an impossible precision in every motion and gesture.

“To really bring that sort of elegance, she used her ballet training,” he points out.

That level of physical control extended to Vikander’s facial expressions. She basically blanked herself in order to seem even less naturalistic – but Garland wanted the other actors to do that as well, so their characters could be similarly enigmatic.

“You know, the classic poker tell is [when] you’re bluffing and you betray it because you start acting overconfident or whatever. You just project the wrong bit of information. One of the things to do in this film was to ruthlessly hide the things that actors and filmmakers and all sorts of people might want to consciously or unconsciously telegraph to the audience.”

And in the end – to Garland’s surprise – the viewer gets to make up his or her mind about Ava anyway.

“I’ve often encountered people who don’t attribute any wants and needs to her,” he says. “It’s to do with what one takes into a narrative, one’s own agenda. I watched this movie with a couple of guys who were engineers on the film, doing some technical stuff late in post-production, and they were saying, for example, ‘Why does all this matter? She’s basically a toaster.’

“I was saying, ‘Well, she’s not really a toaster. A toaster doesn’t know it’s a toaster. She knows she’s Ava.’ It didn’t matter how much I talked, we always got back to ‘No, she’s a toaster.’

“It’s an interesting thing to see, because ultimately that becomes about empathy. You’ve got some people who project sentience into pretty much anything – a computer, a fountain pen, their coffee maker, their car. Stuffed animals, as children. Others won’t project sentience into anything. And there are some people who won’t even project sentience into other people, in some weird kind of way.

“So there’s an enormous range, isn’t there? And where you stand on that spectrum will hugely affect how you perceive the film.”

Alex Garland on making a calm film at a frantic pace:

Garland on actors and motivation [potential vague spoilers]:

Garland on his overarching themes, and his distrust of the social-media Kool-Aid:

See our review of Ex Machina here.

normw@nowtoronto.com | @normwilner

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