WITH HIS NEW ACTION THRILLER CIVIL WAR, WRITER-DIRECTOR ALEX GARLAND PRESENTS A RAVAGED AMERICA IN DISARRAY. IN A PIECE WRITTEN EXCLUSIVELY FOR EMPIRE, HE EXPLAINS WHERE IT CAME FROM, HOW HE DID IT, AND WHY IT’S MORE RELEVANT BY THE DAY

WORDS ALEX GARLAND

I STARTED WRITING CIVIL WAR IN JUNE 2020, A FEW MONTHS AFTER COVID ARRIVED, AND A FEW MONTHS BEFORE THE FIRST TRUMP/BIDEN ELECTION. I HAD THREE MAIN AIMS.

I wanted to make something non-afraid. I wanted the heroes to be a throwback to an old form of journalism. And I wanted to make an attack on political polarisation.

First drafts come in two forms for me. One, the script pours out fast, and the experience of writing blurs with the experience of watching a film. The room feels darker, and I can see the scenes and shot compositions more clearly than I can see my laptop screen. It seems more like transcription than writing. In the back of my mind, I often find myself wondering, “What’s going to happen next?”, as if I don’t have input into the narrative.

The second form is slow and laborious. No page or scene comes without disproportionate effort. There’s no cinema effect; there’s courier-font words on a Final Draft screen. I re-write the same scene endlessly, and single lines of stage direction have hundreds of variants. It feels more like editing than writing, and still feels as if I don’t have input into the narrative, but for different reasons. In the end, I don’t (personally) see a quality difference between the different forms of writing. Some of my scripts are better than others, but it isn’t the speed of the writing that separates them. Ex Machina, 28 Days Later, Sunshine, and Devs were all fast scripts —written in around a fortnight (Devs, about a fortnight per episode, over three months of mania). Annihilation, Never Let Me Go, and Dredd were slow scripts, and took several months each.

Civil War was in the poured-out category. The first draft took just over a week, and I think I never had a clearer sense of watching a film while writing it. It was hallucinatory.