#like truly i see the audience for AI books in these takes and it’s disheartening

[mermaidsirennikita]

Romance IS precisely the genre where readers go to be catered to their very specific desires. And to find 100% comfort, however the reader wants it. There's no other genre where you find your books with such specificity: I want a one bed, second chance, age gap, small town read, with extra fries on the side. It's not strange that people want to weigh in the names of their characters too. I get it may be bother you, but I see it as perfectly on brand for the genre. Also ppl love their spicy reads but for many it's weird when the character is named like your son. For a "learn to read outside your comfort zone" is literally the rest of the bookstore.

First off:

Romance is a commercial genre, and it absolutely is not alone in the ways in which it caters to readers lmao. Mystery/thrillers are probably the books I’d compare to romance most easily. Want something lowkey? Cozy mystery. Want something about the everyday devastation of suburban life and its perils? Domestic thrillers. Want something sexy? Erotic thrillers.

And yes, that genre has tropes too. And yes, I can get pretty damn specific with it lmao. Maybe not as much as romance! But I tend to chafe at people summing the genre up as a trope factory. Because it’s not.

Believe it or not, although romance is written to be sold (as most books are) romance novelists, or at least the good ones, also write stories that they’re invested in. It’s not just about pleasing you—it’s about writing something you want to write and believe in and want to see on the page. The book you think is missing from your shelf. And I, personally, feel that you can tell the difference between a writer writing purely for the audience (and the money) and a writer writing something they want to see.

THAT is what makes the genre good. Not pick and choose tropes. Good fucking books written by people passionate about the genre. It’s not meant to be puzzle pieces that y’all can just pick and choose.

If that is truly how you see it… then yeah man, I guess the AI romance novels are the future.

As for “that is literally the rest of the bookstore” lmao dude that is literally the rest of the GENRE. Romance is more than tropes. There are books within the genre that push the envelope and make you feel things you perhaps didn’t expect. Romance is actually incredibly diverse and bold… if, again, you’re willing to explore outside your comfort zone.

If you aren’t; that’s fine. You do you. There’s no right way to read the genre. But I’m gonna draw the line, personally, at tolerating people being unable to withstand a fucking name they don’t like. Truly, seek out y/n fanfic if that’s a dealbreaker.

[uomo-accattivante]

If there’s one thing for certain about Annihilation: it’s that it’s going to be really, really weird. It was an absolute certainty when I stepped on set last year and saw production stills of psychedelic mutations – plants shaped like people, decaying bodies merging into swimming pool tile, tentacle-looking black ‘growths’ filling every nook of a lighthouse… The imagery was more than spectacular – it was truly otherworldly. So it comes as no surprise that over a year later, Annihilation has run up against some studio hesitation, a recent Hollywood Reporter article suggesting less than desired test screening results prompted the nervous studio to release the film internationally on Netflix only (Annihilation, though, will still be released theatrically in the US). This news – while disheartening – actually fulfills the promise of the film I saw being shot: a singularly odd and bold exploration into alien mutation, genetics and marital dysfunction. The fact that Annihilation didn’t please every audience member at the Burbank 16 only makes the film seem all the more intriguing and singular.

Annihilation, based on the novel by Jeff VanderMeer, follows five women (including Natalie Portman, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Tessa Thompson) as they journey into an environmental disaster zone where something otherworldly changes the genetic make-up of everything within. The film marks something of a departure for filmmaker Alex Garland – whereas his first feature, Ex Machina, was grounded in practical (albeit-distant) tech & science, Annihilation is far more rooted in the surreal. As Garland himself is wont to say – Annihilation, at its essence, is a “journey from Suburbia to Psychedelia.”

In my interview with Alex Garland, presented below, he discusses the surreal oddity of Annihilation, re-writing the script, breaking through sci-fi tropes and his thoughts on the international Direct-to-Netflix release. For the full interview, read below.

(Of note: a small portion of the interview was conducted on set; the rest conducted two days ago via phoner)

I just watched the new trailer, which looks great. How involved are you in the marketing materials and trailer?

ALEX GARLAND: I’m not really involved at all. 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. I don’t trust my own judgment with trailers and posters because so many times I’ve seen a trailer and thought that looks fantastic and then the film bombs. Or I see a trailer and think that looks like a pile of shit and then the film does amazing. So I have no judgment. I just stay away.

Jumping back to the beginning — how did the book [Annihilation] come to your attention?

GARLAND: I had a story I’d wanted to tell for a while and I’d been discussing it with [producer] Scott [Rudin]. Then Scott said I should read this book, Annihilation. So I did and I could see how the novel and my particular fixation would dovetail.

What spoke to you about the book?

GARLAND: I thought it was really beautiful and strange and also genuinely original. Really original material is quite hard to find. It’s subjective but I just felt truly surprised and engaged. I found the process reading it to be a powerful experience.

Was there any theme in the book that spoke to you in particular?

GARLAND: It was partly this feeling of originality, but if there were something apart from that, it would be the atmosphere. It has a really particular dreamlike atmosphere and I found that really fascinating.

It looks like you’ve made a number of changes from the book to the film. What were those key changes?

GARLAND: It’s just a different set of preoccupations. I’ve worked on some very faithful adaptations that are like holding a mirror up to the source material. Never Let You Go – which I adapted a few years ago – was really a very faithful adaptation… I did another adaptation, Dredd, which was a semi-faithful adaptation. It was very faithful to a character but less faithful to the world. This is probably more of a free for all. It’s a very dreamlike, very beautiful novel and it worked well for my purposes. I loved what [author] Jeff [VanderMeer] had done but one thing I know… Years ago I used to work as a novelist and I know that novels & films are independent of each other.

The book is fairly open-ended. Does the movie answer any of the questions the book raises?

GARLAND: The movie has its own questions. Some of which… the fundamental questions that the film poses, it does answer. When I wrote this – I knew there was going to be a trilogy [of books] but I hadn’t read the other two books. They hadn’t been written so I saw this as a contained thing. I tend to think of stories as contained things, not necessarily requiring further stories. The novel, though, was written very consciously as the first part. It’s a short novel. Jeff very clearly had the intention that he would be unfolding the story as it went along. I had the intention of completing the story.

Now that there are two more [books], do you want to continue that story along with him?

GARLAND: I’m more interested in contained stories.

How similar was the initial draft of Annihilation to the eventual production draft?

GARLAND: I think probably like eighty percent or something like that… I’ve written [scripts] where things have changed hugely. 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. On this, though, it was seventy-five or eighty percent…

What changed on Annihilation?

GARLAND: It was partly to do with how the conceit of the story is set up and it was partly to do with how the ending, approximately the last thirty or thirty-five minutes are executed.

Did you ever send a draft to Jeff VanderMeer? Or ask for his opinion?

GARLAND: Oh yeah.

What did he say?

GARLAND: Well – the film and the book are in some ways very closely related, but in other respects very different from each other. The truth is – you’d have to ask Jeff what he really felt, but what I felt was as a writer, [he] understood how and why the two things were different. He was very open minded about giving us creative permission as filmmakers to just go ahead and do the best we could.

How much impact did Jeff have after you sent him a rough script?

GARLAND: I always talk to people and listen to what they have to say. So he had that imprint and we discussed it quite a lot. We’d have two, three-hour phone conversations going through it all. And he’d say, ‘Tell me why you’ve done this? What’s the justification for doing this or that?’ So for example – a bit like the film Stalker – the characters in Jeff’s novel don’t have names and I, for tonal reasons, thought I’m going to have to give them names. In a film with this kind of execution, it would be slightly too arch if they’re saying, ‘Hey, Biologist, come check this out’ It makes it too other. This film is weird enough…

When Natalie, Jennifer and the rest of the cast join the film, do you polish the script to suit the actors?

GARLAND: What we do – and I always do this – is we do a two week rehearsal period. The rehearsal period is not actually to do with affecting performance, but it’s to do with making sure everybody gets why a scene exists and why the lines are the way they are. Then the actors have absolute open permission to say I’m not really sure about this line, it doesn’t really fit in my mouth, it doesn’t really feel right to me. Then with all of us sitting around the table, we work on it. We change it right then and there and put it in the script. There’s a lot of openness. As long as the meaning and the intention stay the same, it’s not really a problem for me. Really what you’re doing is you’re handing over the ownership of the character to the actor. So if the actor has a way they want their character to do something, you have to listen to that and make sure it’s accommodated.

How did the characters change during this rehearsal period?

GARLAND: Each of the actors made the characters more their own so that they… 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. Whether it’s Tessa or Gina or Natalie or Jennifer – they’re all taking the character, thinking about it and morphing it into the performance they want to do.

How much research do you do into mutation and genetics for the script?

GARLAND: I did a bit. I have a friend who’s a geneticist. We would have long conversations about the nature of mutation and its role in evolution and its role in just our day-to-day existence. We talked about it a lot, but it’s not the same type of science fiction that Ex Machina was, which had very explicit concerns about consciousness and AI. This is a much more dreamlike and fractured landscape.

So would you say the movie is far more surreal than grounded in reality?

GARLAND: It’s definitely more surreal. The first conversation I had when I was meeting actors or having production meetings was that the film is about various things and various themes but the basic underlying principle is the journey from suburbia to psychedelia. We’re going to start in suburbia and end in psychedelia. That was the underlying principle.

How do you map that out so that there’s a gradual transformation from reality to psychedelia? What is the process to make sure that follows a linear path?

GARLAND: I think you hit it immediately – which is that you have to map it out. If you just begin in psychedelia, you get diminishing returns right away because you’re stuck in a deeply strange place and you stay in a deeply strange place and then you get acclimated to a deeply strange place and then its not strange anymore. So we didn’t want to do that. We wanted to build to it, from normality to something very strange and earn the strangeness. Then we discovered that you have to map it – because we knew where we had to get. What we discovered is that sometimes you have to put your hands on the story’s back and give it a shove. It’s like you’ve got a hundred miles to travel so you better start clocking up miles or else you won’t get there. [We needed] to give it these moments of propulsion where suddenly you drop down into another level of strangeness and then another level and just keep pushing it.

How cognizant are you of breaking traditional sci-fi and alien tropes?

GARLAND: I tend to say that I’m very cognizant of them but then you’ll say something and I’ll realize I’m not… But one of the things we were interested in on this was an experience of something alien that was truly ‘alien’. That had all sorts of elements to it – not just about how something physically appears, but also about what it is and how it acts and separating it completely from the way we act. [I didn’t want] to make human type assumptions about it in terms of motivation like it wants to steal our resources or take us back to the galactic federation or anything like that. We wanted to do something truly ‘alien’.

When a book or movie is called Annihilation – that gives the impression of being fairly pessimistic and cynical. Is that fair? Do you see the film as pessimistic or cynical?

GARLAND: It’s definitely not cynical at all. It’s actually quite heartfelt. It has elements of sadness and melancholy in it but there’s also a visceral propulsion to it.

How timely do you find the film given all the constant talk of nuclear war and annihilation?

GARLAND: Do you know what – I don’t think that’s timely. I think we’ve had a real problem with this for a long time. I grew up under the threat of nuclear war and people being very worried about it when I was a kid. That faded away for a bit and now it’s back. But there’s always some kind of existential thing that people are worried about for good reason.

Recently it was announced Annihilation would be released on Netflix internationally. What was your reaction to that?

GARLAND: Disappointment really. We made the film for cinema. I’ve got no problem with the small screen at all. The best genre piece I’ve seen in a long time was The Handmaid’s Tale, so I think there’s incredible potential within that context, but if you’re doing that – you make it for that [medium] and you think of it in those terms. Look… it is what it is. The film is getting a theatrical release in the States, which I’m really pleased about. One of the big pluses of Netflix is that it goes out to a lot of people and you don’t have that strange opening weekend thing where you’re wondering if anyone is going to turn up and then if they don’t, it vanishes from cinema screens in two weeks. So it’s got pluses and minuses, but from my point of view and the collective of the people who made it – [it was made] to be seen on a big screen.

Annihilation opens on the big screen in the US February 23rd.