Alex Garland says part of Civil War is embarrassingly autobiographical

When Alex Garland told someone in the film industry that he wanted to make a film where journalists are the heroes, they responded, "Don't do that, everyone hates journalists." The British writer and director made the film anyway precisely because there's a growing antagonism toward the press that he thinks is not only unjustified, but unwise.

"The system that exists of checks and balances — executive, judiciary, legislature and the fourth estate, the journalists, who are holding those to account — those things exist to prevent extremism," Garland says in a conversation with Q's Tom Power. "However alarmist it might sound, I can see fingerprints of fascism appearing in all sorts of different places and the guarding systems being diminished."

WATCH | Alex Garland's interview with Tom Power:

Set in a dystopian America of the near future, Garland's new film, Civil War, follows a group of four journalists who travel across the country during a rapidly escalating second American civil war. It's a chilling work of speculative fiction, but it also feels incredibly plausible — and Garland partly drew from his own experiences to craft the story.

"This is pretty embarrassing in many ways actually, but there is a big element of autobiography in this film I haven't spoken about before," he tells Power.

Civil War portrays three different generations of reporters: the seasoned New York Times journalist Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), the Reuters journalists Lee (Kirsten Dunst) and Joel (Wagner Moura), and the young freelancer Jessie (Cailee Spaeny) who's just starting out and "full of puppyish idealism," according to the director.

Like Jessie, Garland says he was once an aspiring foreign correspondent who thrust himself into dangerous conflicts in search of adventure and purpose, without ever truly considering the risks.

WATCH | Official trailer for Civil War:

"Very eccentrically — rather sort of bizarrely — I would go to foreign countries, I would blag or fake a press card, and I would attend what I thought was the most dramatic thing going on … thinking I was going to end up at some point, somehow, by force of will, as a foreign correspondent. That's what I thought, what I imagined … and I was definitely wrong.

"[One] very, very experienced war correspondent who was observing this, did, in effect, what Lee in the film does to Jessie and says, 'You need to cut that out.' The difference was, I listened. I thought, 'Yeah, no, you're right. I should cut it out.'"

Looking back to his late teens and early 20s, Garland says he was "indulging in a childish fantasy" and not treating the job with the seriousness it deserved. At 26, he wrote a book loosely based on those early experiences. He says his bestselling debut novel, The Beach, is "really about the nature of vicarious adventure-seeking when you are young."

"Where does the imagery come from that is creating the adventure you're trying to seek? How much are you really thinking about the place you are in, as opposed to your fantasy version of the place you are in? To me, privately, that's what The Beach is about. And that's why fiction works for me, because I can sort of mutate these things into a story that works on my own terms."

The full interview with Alex Garland is available on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Interview with Alex Garland produced by Lise Hosein.