Alex Garland

“If I was being very honest about it, probably more honest than I should be, '28 Days Later' was a reaction to 'The Beach' in some ways because I felt it lacked a kind of aggression in it.”

“I didn't get the impression that the policeman cared much about the whole thing either. After another thirty minutes of ruthless interrogation ('Can you ve'fy you eat banan' pancake?') he let me go asking me not to leave Khao San within 24 hours”

“Look, when AIs come up, they're not going to be like us. A self-aware, sentient AI is not going to be like a human.”

“I didn't intend to be a novelist. I didn't intend to be anything. I thought I'd be a journalist.”

“Trust me, it's paradise. This is where the hungry come to feed. For mine is a generation that circles the globe and searches for something we haven't tried before. So never refuse an invitation, never resist the unfamiliar, never fail to be polite and never outstay the welcome. Just keep your mind open and suck in the experience. And if it hurts, you know what? It's probably worth it.”

“I didn't go to film school.”

“I'm just interested in science, and I try to keep track of what's going on and get my head around it - inflation, the multiverse, whatever. It's very hard for me because I don't have a scientific background, and I wasn't any good at science at school, but all of that stuff I just find incredibly attractive and fascinating.”

“Part of debunking the mythology of filmmaking is that we tend to want to locate it often in one person. And it's not one person. It's a collective, and it is a collaboration.”

“I've never been to Comic-Con, but I'm certainly aware from this side of the Atlantic that it's a very important part of film marketing now, even when the films are not directly linked to a comic.”

“When you encounter people in life - like a chance encounter at a bar or wherever you happen to be - you make these incredibly quick, quite intricate decisions about people based on very small amounts of coded information. We're good at that.”

“Really original material is quite hard to find.”

“The truth is, I hadn't grown up really wanting to be a writer. The whole thing was a weird aberration in some ways, and I didn't feel personally connected to the level of success I had with it - the success of sorts, I guess.”

“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.”

“A lot of people, I think, harbor some kind of ambition to write a novel - they say, 'One day I'm going to write a novel,' and they maybe find the first three pages quite easy, and then they hit a kind of brick wall, and they think that that brick wall means that they're not a writer.”

“Though I walk through the valley of death I will fear no evil, for I am the evilest motherfucker in the valley”

“When I see 'Sunshine,' I see a film that part of me is kind of very proud of and another part of me is very sad about, so it's a really complicated film for me. And I've never been really able to resolve all that in myself.”

“There's one massive problem with coming from writing novels into screenplays that I've discovered over the years, which is that you've got too much facility on the page.”

“As for me...I'm fine. I have bad dreams, but I never saw Mister Duck again. I play video games. I smoke a little dope. I got my thousand-yard stare. I carry a lot of scares.I like the way that sounds.I carry a lot of scares.”