ROGUE NATION

AMERICA IS TEARING ITSELF APART IN ACTION-THRILLER CIVIL WAR. CROUCHING FOR COVER, TOTAL FILM ASKS DIRECTOR ALEX GARLAND AND STARS KIRSTEN DUNST, CAILEE SPAENY AND WAGNER MOURA HOW THEY SET ABOUT CAPTURING THE CARNAGE – NOT WITH VFX BUT REAL TANKS, JETS AND EXPLOSIONS – AND IF THIS NEAR-FUTURE NIGHTMARE COULD REALLY COME TO BE…

Alex Garland is a deep thinker. It’s what you’d expect of the man behind such sci-fi classics as Ex Machina, Annihilation and TV series DEVS, and right now his brow is knitted as he ponders the question that’s halted his flow while talking to Total Film.

‘“How did I go about making this an anti-war film?’”’ he mulls, repeating the query. Isn’t it true, after all, that many so-called anti-war movies exhilarate viewers with their music and guns, choppers and camaraderie? ‘It’s a question that I thought about a lot, and really tried to apply myself to. I think that Apocalypse Now is masterful; I certainly wouldn’t call it an anti-war film.’

Lowering his eyes from the Zoom frame, he pauses to ponder which films he certainly would consider anti-war movies, and comes up with two: Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory (1957) and Elem Klimov’s Come and See (1985). ‘To me, I think it’s something to do with the way that the effects of war, which relate to violence…’ He stops to consider. ‘It’s not just the way they are presented, but the way they are seated in the heads of the audience. That can be to do with a number of things: it could be to do with music. It could be to do with juxtaposition. For example, here’s a thing we often do in film: “There is a problem. What is the solution to the problem? Violence.” You “violence” your way out of a problem. And then, of course, there’s slow motion used in a particular kind of way, and music used in a particular kind of way.’

The 53-year-old writer/director is deliberating further. Like we said, he’s a deep thinker. ‘We did little things, I guess. This will sound a bit grim, but we looked at things like: what would you typically see if someone gets shot? Do you see a big spray of blood? And do they yank back as if they have a wire attached to them?

‘What you often find is that people just collapse as if someone has turned the lights off. You may or may not see blood. And if you do, it might not be for a little while. [Filmmakers] tend to use big splashes of red in a graphic, declarative way. There are all sorts of rules and rhythms [to films]. And if you disrupt them with something very naturalistic… even if people don’t know what the natural version is, they sense the reality of it.’

Garland looks up, almost like he’s coming out of a daze. ‘But I’m talking as if I know the answer to your question, and I don’t. I’m doing the best I can. You would not want to make a pro-war movie.’

ALTERED STATES

Civil War is something different for Garland. Though set in the near-future, he does not regard it as sci-fi, but rather a war movie and an action film, and a thoughtful thriller akin to the movies that Alan J. Pakula made in the 70s – Klute, All the President’s Men, The Parallax View. He wrote it during the pandemic, when death and catastrophe were very much on his, and everyone else’s, mind, and he was pushed towards the scenario by the fervid polarisation evident in the populations of America, Britain, Europe and other areas of the world. It wasn’t hard to imagine an America embroiled in full-blown civil war. And so his screenplay posited a tyrannical president ordering tanks and armed soldiers onto the streets, and air strikes on his own people. POTUS – played in the movie by Nick Offerman, who so impressed as a tech leader in DEVS – is looking to quash the Western Forces, a rebel uprising led by an alliance between Texas and California. In all, 19 states have seceded.

‘YOU WOULD NOT WANT TO MAKE A PRO-WAR MOVIE’

ALEX GARLAND

Garland’s way into the large-scale story is a group of four journalists – Lee, Sammy, Joel and Jessie – who track the rebel forces across the war-torn country from New York to Washington, DC as they push towards the White House. The journalists are played, respectively, by Kirsten Dunst, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Wagner Moura and Cailee Spaeny, all of whom agree that Civil War was one of the best scripts they’d read and quite unlike anything else. The decision was made easier still for Henderson and Spaeny by the fact they’d both starred in DEVS, and revered Garland. Moura, meanwhile, had read for the same show but couldn’t commit when it clashed with a previously booked gig.

Dunst was the one with no previous, but had followed the English writer/director’s career with admiration since he wrote 28 Days Later and directed Ex Machina. She signed on the dotted line and started prepping immediately, reading books and watching Under the Wire, the 2018 documentary that chronicles Sunday Times war correspondent Marie Colvin and photographer Paul Conroy’s fateful mission in Syria in 2012 to tell the story of civilians trapped in Homs and under military attack.

‘As soon as I got the role, I was like, “Alex, please just send me the camera that I’m using so I can get as comfortable [with it] as I can, because people who actually shoot all the time, they hold their camera like it’s a part of their body”,’ she says, though she admits that lockdown meant she could only shoot her husband, Jesse Plemons (who has a small but vital role in the movie), and their kids. ‘That was stressing me out the most – not looking like I’m having all of this heavy gear on, and making sure that my camera seemed very natural.’

Dunst’s Lee is an award-winning photojournalist who’s seen it all, but never on her own soil. Also renowned is Henderson’s Sammy, who’s semi-retired but can’t resist the pull of these historic events. ‘He has to be a part of it,’ shrugs Henderson, a theme that Moura picks up. ‘Almost all of the war correspondents that I’ve spoken with, the war becomes an addiction, something that they cannot live without again, which is a fuckedup, crazy thing,’ he says. Moura was himself a journalist before he became an actor known for playing Pablo Escobar in Narcos, and earlier this year excelled as super high-risk agent ‘Other John’ in TV series Mr. & Mrs. Smith. To play Joel, he spoke with real-life war correspondents. ‘The things that they go through in a war zone are so intense that when they come back home, their regular lives just stop making sense,’ he explains.

As for Spaeny’s Jessie, she’s a talented photojournalist who’s just starting out and looks to learn from Lee as they journey towards Washington. It’s a bumpy ride given the chaos in the streets. ‘There were definitely times in the back of the car where me and Kirsten would go flying across the seats like we were on some Disneyland rollercoaster ride,’ she laughs.

‘I’m a good driver, man,’ shrugs Moura, who was behind the wheel in some hairy situations. ‘There was a moment where I was starting to become a little concerned about it, because I was praised so many times about my driving abilities. It was like, “I’m here to act.” I was looking for, “Hey, man, good scene.” But most of the time, it was like, “Great driving, bro.”’

Dunst and Spaeny both refer to the driving scenes as performing a play at the centre of a $50m movie (the biggest by far for both Garland and production company A24): the vehicle was rigged with multiple cameras, meaning that the four leads could perform scenes with no one in their eyeline; Garland and the sound team followed in a van. The same approach was adopted for other scenes, whenever possible. Take the chilling sequence glimpsed in the trailers when Plemons’ soldier asks the journalists, ‘What kind of an American are you?’ Like some modern-day Robert Altman, Garland used long lenses to avoid putting cameras in the actors’ faces. They would shoot in unbroken takes, never knowing if they were the focus of the shot. It felt authentic.

‘That scene’s a major turning point in the film,’ says Dunst. ‘It’s the shift in the movie where things start to get pretty gnarly.’ The sequence makes for a distressing watch. But isn’t it undercut for Dunst, given her husband is the source of the threat? ‘No, because we fell in love first as creatives on Fargo [Season 2] – like, we got together a year after shooting Fargo. So, creatively, we respect each other so much. It’s more like working with your favourite actor rather than your husband.’

Moura stresses that the tension of the confrontation was palpable. ‘I totally felt it,’ he winces. ‘That scene is the scariest scene in the movie. It had a powerful effect on me, because I’m Brazilian. I live in America, but I always think about, “What would I do if I was driving through one of those places in the South?” I go to a gas station, and I speak with this accent, and someone is like, “Who are you? What are you doing here?”’

He takes a breath. ‘What’s scary about this film is it doesn’t feel like Independence Day, like aliens coming to Washington, DC. It feels weirdly possible.’

REALITY FRIGHTS

Authenticity was key for Garland. So while the shoot was based in Atlanta and made use of green screen for the third act of the film, to augment the blocks of Washington that were constructed on set, he insisted on real tanks, real weapons and real jets. It was, to put it mildly, cacophonous.

‘We shot pretty much in order, and so the last two weeks were all gunfire and explosions – it was very intense,’ admits Dunst, who normally only needs a glass of wine to decompress after a stressful day’s shooting. ‘I mean, I can leave it mostly on the set. But I did feel a little bit of trauma going back to normal life after this. I felt out of it for a good two weeks.’

‘The planes, oh my goodness, the planes,’ Henderson shudders. ‘And the tanks, the sound of the weaponry…’ Moura takes over. ‘It made the whole thing very real.’ A reality that translates to the viewing experience, he says. ‘The thing about this movie is, you see these wars in the Middle East and in Africa or in South America or the Ukraine. So the cognitive disruption that this film causes when you see this going on here, it’s very scary.’

Courageously, Garland doesn’t fear a backlash from US viewers who might resent an outsider having cast his gaze over the antics of the last few years and then envisaged a full-scale civil war as the imminent endpoint. He claims that he did not make allies of California and Texas to swerve accusations of a red or blue bias, but rather because a president bombing his own country goes beyond party politics, and anyone who feels otherwise… well, that says a lot.

‘One of the underlying rules to my job is that you should not think about that thing you just said too much because it will stop you doing stuff,’ Garland states. ‘It could really stop you having an opinion, and I don’t know if it’s good for people who are writing novels or plays or films to remove all opinions, unless they are super-confident that the opinion is safe. That just doesn’t seem like a good space for any of us to be in.’

Garland is similarly dismissive of other points raised. When it’s suggested that his having the White House overrun is prescient, given it was written before the mob attacked the Capitol Building on 6 January, 2021, he shrugs. ‘If you just teleport yourself back, you realise it’s not prescient. That is what people were worried about. So when I saw those images [on TV], I was not, at that moment, thinking about the film. I was thinking, “Oh, shit, this looks really bad.”’

And what does he make of the conspiracy theory that spread after the first trailer of Civil War dropped - that the film is predictive programming orchestrated by a political cabal in order to prepare citizens for the real civil war that is incoming? ‘I’m pretty sure you could guess what I think about it,’ he sighs, pointing out he grew up before the internet and social media, and that he still gets his news from traditional sources. ‘Concepts like predictive programming just never…’ He sighs again. ‘The BBC doesn’t do a lot of stories on predictive programming. But then I imagine that someone who believes in the concept of predictive programming would say, “Well, of course that’s what he would say. Nice cover story, pal.”’

What Garland and his cast really want is for Civil War to get people talking. Too many people sit at home voicing their strident opinions; better to go to the cinema for a communal experience and discuss it with others after. It’s one of the reasons that Garland compares Civil War to those 70s Pakula movies.

‘They were called paranoid conspiracy thrillers,’ he says, ‘and they would tap into something real that people were feeling at that moment. You’re left with something thoughtful. But they were also a great thriller with Faye Dunaway or Warren Beatty or whoever it happened to be.’

‘IT’S LIKE A FABLE: WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU STOP TREATING EACH OTHER LIKE HUMAN BEINGS’

KIRSTEN DUNST

‘Find out who you’re sitting next to when you watch it,’ Henderson implores. ‘It’s one that I truly hope that people go to the movie house to see. You know, we sit together as citizens, watch it and talk about it.’

‘It’s equally terrifying and mesmerising,’ says Dunst. ‘It’s an action film, but it’s also thought-provoking and it’s also letting audiences reach their own conclusion about this fictional America. It’s like a fable: what happens when you stop communicating with each other, and treating each other like human beings. The message is very moving for me. I feel like people will love to talk about this film in a really intense way after they’ve seen it. You can’t get it out of your mind. It penetrates your body. Even for me, who was in the movie – after Jesse and I saw it, we were shook.’ JAMIE GRAHAM