It is without a doubt one of the films of the year. And after its premiere on Friday in 3,838 theaters in the United States, it was the most viewed of last weekend in that country, with 25 million dollars in revenue, half of its budget. It is Civil War, the new and controversial film by the British Alex Garland (London, 1970), one of the great explorers of dystopias in current cinema: he has been the director of Ex Machina and Annihilation, screenwriter of 28 Days Later and author of the novel , and then movie, The Beach.
Now Garland leaps into a future that could be the day after tomorrow in which the United States is experiencing a new and bloody civil war. A president who has skipped two constitutional mandates, is in his third, and has dismantled the FBI faces the armies of various areas of the country: on the one hand the popular forces of California and Texas, on the other those of Florida. A group of journalists (led by an impressive Kirsten Dunst) wants to cross all lines and guerrillas to try to interview the president in Washington. A reflection on power, violence, racism, hatred and the role of journalism with inevitable echoes of images of terrible historical episodes that have provoked controversy: it is not obvious who the “good guys” are.
Are you surprised by the great success and the reviews, some of which claim that it is an apolitical film?
I think critics who say it’s apolitical are maybe being a little naïve about politics, to be honest. I also think a lot of them are actually left-wing and angry that I’m not using the movie as an obvious attack on Trump. As simple as that. They think it’s actually cowardice. But the film is not left versus right, but centrist versus extremist, and I am a centrist. And in some ways they are behaving like extremists.
Why doesn’t it seem impossible for us to imagine a second civil war in the United States? What happened?
Not only the United States, but my country, the United Kingdom, and many European countries and several around the world, have been divided. You can debate why, but not that they have done it. And within the division there is a very particular flavor that is extremism. And extremism ends up being like a gateway drug. A gateway drug to fascism. So social division, political division, lack of sensible bipartisan communication, leads to populism, populism leads to extremism, and extremism leads to fascism unless it is contained in some way. And there are many fascist states in the world right now and they have emerged from many different political systems. It is a real and clear problem.
We always imagined that with the United States’ system of checks and balances, this would be impossible. It is not?
No, because when the United States delved deeply into populism and polarization, and indeed extremism, it began to consciously and deliberately dismantle those controls. You could say that the controls worked, but I’m not really sure: it hasn’t been tested yet because the phenomenon hasn’t finished developing. In some ways they failed surprisingly. They were weaker than people thought.
I give you a very simple example, which I believe is indisputable. We have the checks and balances of government, the executive, legislative and judicial branches, and then we have journalism, the fourth estate, which controls them all. And so in the 1970s, when I think these systems were working well, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post were able to run a story and take down a corrupt president, Nixon. If Woodward and Bernstein or equivalent journalists published that story now, would it have the same effect? I think that in recent years it has been shown that it is not. Something is different. If the press is anything, it is a check and balance. Is it as strong as it used to be? No, it is not. And if checks and balances are removed, what is the danger?
Are you thinking of Donald Trump with this example?
Yes, I’m thinking of Donald Trump, absolutely. What I’m not thinking about is left versus right, because I think we’ve stopped talking reasonably about what left versus right is. I’m in my fifties. When I think about that I think about these differences: Do you believe in free markets or regulated markets? Do you believe in low taxes to stimulate growth or do you believe in higher taxes to redistribute wealth? These are arguments from the left and the right. Donald Trump is really just an extremist, in the same way that Nigel Farage in my country was an extremist who has co-opted a pre-existing political party. The Republican Party has been largely reshaped not exactly in Trump’s image, but certainly in tone. Nigel Farage did the same with my country’s Conservative Party.
How that will play out is uncertain at this time. In my country what happened was that the Conservative Party was not defeated by the left. I’m a leftist, but the left was astonishingly ineffective against them. In reality, they collapsed under their own weight, became corrupt and inefficient. And that was the end of the Conservative Party under that extremist group. What is not clear is what the long-term effects will be. When the Conservative Party restructures, will it do so along the lines of the extremist model or in a different way?
And that question is more overdue in the United States because there are elections this year. Incredibly, the elections are with the same two people who faced each other four years ago. It’s almost unbelievable that after January 6 and being tried for rape and many other different things, Trump is still in the same place. To me that suggests that that system of extremism has not yet collapsed. It will? Maybe not.
He’s busy? Do you think Trump can be the next president again?
Yes, I think it can. In some ways, I can’t quite believe it. I find it surprising. But he can, just as Brexit happened and as he himself won before. But if we are going to talk about Trump, I want to separate him as an individual, with his tone and the way he behaves, from the people who vote for him. Because I think one of the problems is that polarization involves bringing large groups of people together in a way where it seems like everyone has to share your tone. And I am opposed to that.
Does he mean despicable Trump voters, as Hillary Clinton said?
Exact. The left repeatedly says “basket of deplorables” and that is wrong. I am a member of the Labor Party but I have very good right-wing friends. Some are right-wing because of the home in which they were born, others because they believe in it ideologically. But they have their arguments, which we treat as if they were bad.
Do you think then that we are not that far away from people taking up arms against each other?
If there is a system of checks and balances, it is for good reason. Protect states from fascism. Western democracy exists primarily so as not to be fascist. Its secondary function is to improve the lives of everyone. There are countries and states that have become authoritarian so many times that to think that the United States or my country is somehow magically immune to this problem seems simply ridiculous. In that case, if we are magically immune, why do we need checks and balances? Of course, we are not.
Speaking of checks and balances, why have you chosen journalists as the vehicle for the film?
Because journalism is one of the most important checks and balances. In reality the first three, executive, legislative and judicial, are really connected and journalism is outside of them and independent. And he has proven many times to be a very good detective in matters of corruption. But journalism is under attack. And not only is it being attacked, but it is being successfully attacked.
If it’s true that Woodward and Bernstein’s story wouldn’t work today, why wouldn’t it work? One of the reasons is that journalists are not liked, the nobility of the profession has been questioned and rejected in some way. And I don’t agree with that. When I see BBC journalists who are quite good at being impartial despite being spat at, shouted at or attacked not just in other countries but within their own country, something in me feels really offended. It makes me angry. I wanted to oppose that and put journalists at the center of the story. They can be naïve, like the younger protagonist, or cynical, but they are also very brave and do important work. It’s my little way of combating the situation.
Throughout his career he has continually worked with utopia and dystopia. Today there are many films about dystopias, are we at a turning point?
Cinema has always liked dystopias. There are a lot of dystopias from the seventies and eighties. Obviously there’s Mad Max and Terminator and things like that. There’s Pursuit, Mystery Ships, Logan’s Escape… I think dystopias often have a cathartic and fun element. They are safe explorations of something. But in a strange way, the civil war dystopia is not as fun for the audience as Terminator, even though the bad news of Skynet and the robots taking over the world and hunting humans was terrible. But somehow, fun. On the other hand, Civil War makes some people angry, sometimes with me. Maybe they got bored or weren’t interested. But they didn’t find it fun.
