Alex Garland

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. ”

I didn't like being a name attached to a book. ”

The truth is, I hadn't grown up really wanting to be a writer. The whole thing was a weird aberration in some ways, and I didn't feel personally connected to the level of success I had with it - the success of sorts, I guess. ”

When I see 'Sunshine,' I see a film that part of me is kind of very proud of and another part of me is very sad about, so it's a really complicated film for me. And I've never been really able to resolve all that in myself. ”

When you encounter people in life - like a chance encounter at a bar or wherever you happen to be - you make these incredibly quick, quite intricate decisions about people based on very small amounts of coded information. We're good at that. ”

I don't write on set. I also - in a funny way, I don't really differentiate between the writing and directing. I think it's all sort of the same thing. ”

The scripts of 'The Wire' are fantastic - the scripts of 'Breaking Bad,' the scripts of 'Mad Men,' the scripts of 'The Sopranos,' the scripts of 'Battlestar Galactica.' You could keep going on. They're incredibly well written. ”

My approach to directing is to not do very much directing. I'm mainly interested in what the creative group individually and together are thinking. ”

I've never been to Comic-Con, but I'm certainly aware from this side of the Atlantic that it's a very important part of film marketing now, even when the films are not directly linked to a comic. ”