Alex Garland

There's one massive problem with coming from writing novels into screenplays that I've discovered over the years, which is that you've got too much facility on the page.

It slightly depends on your perspective, sort of how you look at these things, but when I sit down to write a script, I'm not planning to write a script; I'm planning to make a film, and so I only see the script as being just a step there.

Look, when AIs come up, they're not going to be like us. A self-aware, sentient AI is not going to be like a human.

It's perfectly reasonable to say that AIs are potentially dangerous. That seems to me like a statement of fact.

I know some directors get very involved in trailers and posters. Some even cut their own. I stay completely away from it. I just see my job as making a film.

A lot of people, I think, harbor some kind of ambition to write a novel - they say, 'One day I'm going to write a novel,' and they maybe find the first three pages quite easy, and then they hit a kind of brick wall, and they think that that brick wall means that they're not a writer.

I think everything I write is from an atheist perspective. I mean, it's partly from an atheist perspective because I'm an atheist, and I'm just not really interested in religious-based questions.

What I see in science is a lot of imagination referring to things that are fundamental to what we are. Our cells, our history, our future, our place in the universe, our lack of place in the universe. That's poetry as far as I'm concerned.

I'm just interested in science, and I try to keep track of what's going on and get my head around it - inflation, the multiverse, whatever. It's very hard for me because I don't have a scientific background, and I wasn't any good at science at school, but all of that stuff I just find incredibly attractive and fascinating.

The first draft of 'Ex Machina' is extremely different than the finished film. That would be like 10% of the original draft stayed into the shooting script.

I've written original material before, where I've come up with the idea and the characters myself, and that's definitely very different to working with someone else's characters and stories.

If I was being very honest about it, probably more honest than I should be, '28 Days Later' was a reaction to 'The Beach' in some ways because I felt it lacked a kind of aggression in it.