Alex Garland

The Writer Who Didn't Want to Be One

Alex Garland never wanted to be the spokesman for a generation of backpackers. In 1996, he published The Beach, and suddenly thousands of young people across Europe wanted to lose themselves on an island in Thailand. It was a sales phenomenon that haunted him for years, because all he had wanted to do was write a scathing critique of modern colonialism.

The novel sold millions of copies in just a year.

Danny Boyle decided to bring the story to the big screen in 2000 with Leonardo DiCaprio as the lead, but by then Garland already felt that world of beach utopias was too far removed from him. Instead of sitting around waiting for royalty checks, he decided to learn how a movie is built from the page up.

The screenwriter who hated the sun

In 2002, he wrote the script for 28 Days Later. He brought back fast-moving zombies at a time when nobody gave a damn about horror in British cinema. The film was shot with low-resolution digital cameras to give the empty streets of London a gritty, documentary feel.

And the gamble paid off.

Then came Sunshine in 2007. The film divided critics with its psychological horror final act, but Garland always defended the weight of hard science fiction over commercial concessions. By then, the screenwriter was spending more time on the film set than at his desk, learning about lights and lenses alongside the crew.

The result was an awkward silence in the offices of major studios that didn't know how to sell his stories. But that didn't stop him from writing Dredd in 2012, a comic book adaptation that flopped at the box office, earning only 41 million dollars despite being a cult classic today.

The Architecture of Control

To shoot Ex Machina in 2014, he needed just 15 million dollars. He locked three characters in a glass house in the middle of Norway and got a robot to dance. The film won an Oscar for its visual effects despite competing against blockbusters with triple its budget.

And the world understood that Garland didn't need big explosions to create tension.

In 2018, Onslaught premiered directly on digital platforms across almost the entire international market. It was a strange move. Paramount was afraid the story was too intellectual for the average moviegoer and preferred to sell the distribution rights.

Garland stayed true to his vision of an alien zone where the laws of physics did not work. In 2020, he moved into television with the miniseries Devs, in which he explored determinism and quantum computing through a minimalist aesthetic. It was an eight-episode project that worked as a philosophical essay on free will.

In 2022, he directed Men, a rural horror fable that cost 10 million dollars and provoked a visceral backlash among part of the audience over its final body horror scene.

The Noise of War

With Civil War in 2024, the budget rose to 50 million dollars. It is the most expensive production in A24's history. Garland chose not to explain the political causes of the conflict in the script, so viewers wouldn't take sides with any particular faction.

He preferred to focus on the sound of the bullets.

During the promotion of this film in the United States, he mentioned that he intended to step away from directing for a while. But his activity didn't stop. In 2025, he returned to his roots to write the screenplay for 28 Years Later, revisiting the franchise he started two decades earlier.

Location shooting in Northumberland had a budget of 75 million dollars.