Alex Garland On “Dredd” & Ghost Directing

With his new film “Warfare” now out in cinemas, filmmaker Alex Garland recently did a career retrospective video with GQ Magazine (via The Playlist) and has admitted that he has ghost-directed on films he previously wrote.

One of the early films covered in the video is that “Ex Machina” which is officially the first film he directed on his CV after serving as writer on “28 Days Later,” “The Beach,” “Sunshine,” “Never Let Me Go” and “Dredd”.

In talking about the film, he says it’s slightly misleading to call it “the first bit of directing I did… it’s almost clearly not the first bit of directing in some complex sort of technical ways” before he goes into a more candid explanation:

“In truth, what happened, just to be candid about it, look, a lot of time has passed, I did end up on some films essentially doing ghost-directing. Something would be going wrong, or I would feel something was going wrong, and I saw the execution of scenes, and I would be thinking, ‘That’s not really what that scene is like, it’s missing this key component part, and it doesn’t quite make sense to me.’ I could also see when the film was released that people didn’t care whether that key component was there or not, but I cared.”

The comments are most likely referring to “Dredd,” the 2012 adaptation of the “Judge Dredd” comic book series. Pete Travis is the credited director on the film but there has long been rumors that Garland essentially directed it.

At one point both Travis and Garland released a joint statement saying they had agreed on an ‘unorthodox collaboration’ before production had even begun, shooting down talk Garland was seeking a co-director credit. The film’s lead actor Karl Urban stirred the pot a bit in 2018 saying in an interview that “Garland actually directed that movie”.

Now, in this new video piece, Garland goes into that ‘unorthodox collaboration’ which sounds like it was inspired by prestige TV and ended up simply not working out. He explains why he refused to take a directing credit for the film, praises Travis’ contributions, and spoke about how the experience led to him ultimately directing himself:

“At this period, television was changing quite dramatically, and there were some very, very brilliant television shows that were changing the way television film drama was perceived. Really not just perceived, but also changing what it was.

What television did, television and film is really very similar and people who say it’s not similar are more wrong than they are, right. In TV, the writer/showrunner has the kind of authorship button handed to them, and in film, it’s the director who has that. They can’t both be true simultaneously.

Television is not so much different from film that magically it’s the writer/showrunner and now magically it’s the director, and some people I’m working with, their principle was ‘Well, why don’t we take that concept from television and use it in film.’ For complicated reasons that just didn’t work. It just created a bloody mess.

Within this is a disservice to Pete Travis, who is the credited director, who did some fundamental/crucial things, and he deserves that title. He was put in an absolutely impossible situation, and retrospectively, the longer I’ve worked, the more ridiculous I think it was. After the experience of making ‘Dredd’, what I said is I’m not doing that again. Just let me do that job, let’s simpify this.”

Olivia Thirlby, Lena Headey, Wood Harris and Domhnall Gleeson co-starred in “Dredd” which didn’t make much of an impact at the box office but was well-reviewed at the time and has only grown in estimation since. The film’s indluence has also been seen on subsequent works, most notably the video game “Cyberpunk 2077”.

Garland meanwhile went from “Dredd” to writing/directing “Ex Machina,” “Annihilation,” “Men,” “Civil War” and now co-directing “Warfare”. He returns to just writing and working with Danny Boyle again for the upcoming “28 Years Later”.

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