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What Would a Second U.S. Civil War Look Like?
The Assignment with Audie Cornish
Apr 11, 2024
The new movie “Civil War” asks: what could happen if the system of checks and balances that hold the United States together falls apart? Audie talks with the writer and director of the film, Alex Garland. It follows journalists as they make their way through a war-torn American landscape, one where Texas and California have gone to war against a three-term president who has disbanded the FBI and deemed journalists enemy combatants who may be shot on sight.
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Episode Transcript
Audie Cornish
00:00:00
I met with Alex Garland, director of the new buzzy film Civil War, on the day of the solar eclipse.
Alex Garland
00:00:06
I actually feel.
Audie Cornish
00:00:07
Like the eclipse is happening right the second. Is that weird? Okay, sorry to interrupt. No, no, like, it's very dark out.
Alex Garland
00:00:15
It is. And also, people are standing by windows on the other side of the street, which is —
Audie Cornish
00:00:19
I mean, it was suddenly very still and very quiet on the streets of New York, right outside of the A24 movie studio offices where we were meeting. And it was eerie. It was fitting. His movie is set in a quiet, war torn American landscape, one where Texas and California have gone to war against a three term president who has disbanded the FBI and deemed journalists enemy combatants who may be shot on site. The story starts as that civil war is coming to an end. You're treated to images of burnt out military helicopters and mall parking lots, interstate highways clogged with abandoned cars, and you follow a group of photojournalists trying to capture the final images of the war at any cost. Now, Garland was the writer behind the zombie flick 28 Days Later, and frankly, I wished a zombie would have appeared in this film to kind of offer some relief from what felt like an all too real scenario. This is a movie that asks what could happen if the system of checks and balances that hold a democracy together fall apart? And I wanted to know, how do you talk about that without lecturing or talking down to the people that you want to see it? This is The Assignment. I'm Audie Cornish. And on today's show, writer and director Alex Garland on his film Civil War. Alex Garland. Welcome to The Assignment.
Alex Garland
00:01:59
Thank you.
Audie Cornish
00:01:59
Appreciate you talking with us.
Alex Garland
00:02:00
Pleasure.
Audie Cornish
00:02:02
You've talked about your films all being a kind of argument. What was the argument that was the germ of this one?
Alex Garland
00:02:11
Argument, as conversation, I would say. But yeah, sure. The germ of this one, it was, there were two distinct areas, but they completely correlated. One of them is, populist politics. Division. Populism really leads towards extremism, which —
Audie Cornish
00:02:32
Where were you when you were encountering populism?
Alex Garland
00:02:35
Oh, everywhere. I mean, I have it in my own country, in the UK. It's extremely evident here. It's evident across Europe. Populism and polarization and the way they go together and the journey they're on. Israel, Asia, South America. It's it's not hard to find countries that have some kind of deep division which is represented, in their politics and in their population. So there was that side of it, which was just the thing we're all very familiar with and has been around for quite a while now, actually. And there was another set of thoughts which was to do with journalism and journalists and wondering why journalism had lost the traction that it used to have, why it was perceived as being an enemy often, why it wasn't trusted. What had led to that situation, which obviously a complex picture, but that's the if the question is, where did it all come from? That's where it came from.
Audie Cornish
00:03:39
Yeah. Because there's always a germ of something. I know for me, storytelling, like, we haven't done very many movies on this show. And when this came out and the internet kind of went nuts because of what they perceived to be like a kind of obvious, allegory. The first thing I thought, well, but why is Alex Garland doing it? And that was the germ of me wanting to talk to, you know what I mean? It was like, wait a second. Why would this person...tackle this and after seeing it without like, irony. Right? Like this is not something that's a little bit of a joke or a wink.
Alex Garland
00:04:12
'No, no. Partly because I, I take it seriously. I don't take it seriously in a self-serious way. I mean, some of it is if you're going to work on something for two years, you'd better care about it because you're going to be living with it for a long time. In fact, this in the end, was longer than two years. But also, I don't actually take the subject matter lightly with a wink. In fact, I have a feeling that we've partly entered into the situation wherein by people being playful with serious stuff. What I think is that people believed and this was politicians, but it also included sections of the media, that they could act in a way that didn't take their position seriously in terms of a requirement to truth or to society, or to tone or to the meaning of words, and that it was all kind of, in a way, knockabout fun, and it might progress their career, but wasn't really that damaging because they're just a small voice in a bigger canvas.
Audie Cornish
00:05:15
So a little bit of like, this story is really wild. Without underscoring for the audience the very serious nature of some of those ideas.
Alex Garland
00:05:22
Yes. Or what I'm saying is really wild Sandy hook or whatever it is that is the example being used is is an invention. And uh...uh...
Audie Cornish
00:05:33
I get it. So kind of the online commentary that escalated into...
Alex Garland
00:05:37
Online. Print, politicians, anybody with a voice, social media that there isn't any danger attached to doing these things. There's something playful about doing these things that would absolutely include politicians as well. And it's it's a complicated picture because. There is in some ways an element of truth, which is that being irreverent has its own function, and and different voices in different spaces have their own function. But as it drifts away from being extremist and becomes mainstream, then something else starts to occur. And I felt worried by it. Lots of other people feel worried about it. One of my one of my general feelings about this whole subject matter is that...
Audie Cornish
00:06:30
Of subject matter meaning polarization and the threat of dysfunctional democracy, right? Things breaking down.
Alex Garland
00:06:38
Which leads to authoritarianism, eventually. It can lead to fascism, in fact. And that this was a there was a generalized sense of disquiet, and the disquiet was not located to a political party. It was actually quite shared. It would probably be shared in a centrist space, but still shared. And, I could certainly see lots of journalists doing good work and being, straightforward and balanced and honest and direct, but their work having no traction in the way it used to have traction. And, so I would think about why that was and what was going on. And what are those journalists there to do? What? Why do we need them? What are they protecting us from that they're not able to protect us from in the same way.
Audie Cornish
00:07:28
So what's interesting about what you're saying? If I can help people out with the plot, even if you haven't seen it, you have this handful of effectively war journalists on American soil taking an odyssey, a trip from New York, to the District of Columbia, where they hope to get the big scoop, the final scoop, this sort of fascist president either stepping down, being captured, or doing an interview with him of some kind and...
Alex Garland
00:07:54
Being courageous. Taking a personal risk for a story.
Audie Cornish
00:07:59
But in choosing kind of war correspondents, I feel like you picked a certain breed. That sort of, wartime journalists, they have experiences that...can turn them into risk takers, can turn them into...
Alex Garland
00:08:13
Right.
Audie Cornish
00:08:14
Get...right? A kind of cynicism. The reason why I'm saying this is you didn't take small town newspaper people and turn them into people reporting, right? What you did is you took people who we typically see in glimpses in international reports, and you brought them here, and it made it for a very jarring experience. Right. For me, as an American, it made for a jarring experience because I'm not used to seeing my country through that lens.
Alex Garland
00:08:41
Right. I also chose them just by the way, as reporters, which in that way they are likes someone work on a small time, a small town paper. In a sense, they're recording what they see, but they're the sharp end of that form of reporting, for sure. And and yeah, that's baked into the story that really you have a journalist who, at the start of the film is very traumatized by things they have encountered over the course of their working life and is now having to deal with that kind of imagery, being at home in a way that she didn't expect or thought that she might have been warning against, in a sense.
Audie Cornish
00:09:16
'And is imagery that, as a certainly, I would say the West. But certainly Americans were sort of studiously protected from. So the main characters played by Kirsten Dunst, she's the sort of longtime, you know, photojournalist, and there were so many visual references in her memory to traumas that I recall sort of, reading about in reporting. So whether that's, necklacing. Right? Which is like the, the way that anti-apartheid activists would execute traitors in South Africa, seeing bodies hanging from an overpass is something people may think of from the reporting of cartels in Mexico. All of these images that she has lived with, you've put on U.S. soil.
Alex Garland
00:10:01
Yeah, that's exactly right. Same references you have are the same ones I have. And I think part of that is a is a sort of anti exceptionalism, point, which is that nobody's immune. Underneath the whole film is a pretty simple idea, I think, which is that the system of checks and balances we have, which is the parts of government, but also journalists are there to guard against something that they're not arbitrary, they're there to protect us. And if you erode them, what are you guarding against? The thing that you are guarding against might now arrive. And people do get complacent about seeing that in other countries and do not believe that they have some kind of immunity. They have no immunity. The immunity is actually the checks and balances. And if in the playful way I was talking about earlier, you could call it playful or you could call it irresponsible, you erode those things. There can be serious consequences.
Audie Cornish
00:10:59
One other point on this that I found interesting, and I hope it's not a spoiler to talk about, but you have references throughout the film where characters will imply that their parents are somewhere, somewhere else. People aren't paying attention to the fact that there is a violent civil war going on on American soil.
Civil War movie clip
00:11:19
A lot of interest. I guess a where there's like a pretty huge civil war going on all across America. Oh, sure. But we just try to stay out. Stay out with what we see on the news. Seems like it's for the best. Yeah. Well, let me know if you want to try anything on.
Audie Cornish
00:11:43
And at one point there is a character who says, well, like that's not happening here. That's on the news. It is depressing because it's like the logical conclusion to people constantly telling you that you're fake news, or that there's misinformation that one day they'll look you in the face and not acknowledge that, like tanks are rolling down the street, right?
Alex Garland
00:12:02
Yes, yes. Absolutely. I and so the thing I would spend a lot of time thinking about, why is it that when I was younger, if the press broke a certain kind of story about a certain kind of politician and drew attention? Look, the best example would be Nixon and Watergate. It's a perfect bit of journalism, leading to the downfall of a president. What was he doing? He was lying and he was being a crook, and he was called out for it. And that ended his career. And I wonder, would that happen in the same way? Now? I'm not sure. Why wouldn't it happen? In fact, I suspect I really suspect it might not happen that in arguably it has happened and it didn't have any consequences. Or the consequences are currently unknowable. But we're in the we're in the process of seeing it all get played out.
Audie Cornish
00:12:52
Because there's no political ideology in the film. Meaning you don't have to agree with that. Oh, tell me more. What I mean when I just said is nobody comes out and says, I'm from a red state, I'm from a blue state, I'm from this party. I'm from that party. Tell me how you think of it.
Alex Garland
00:13:05
Actually, that that's true, but that in itself is not the absence of a political ideology. Political ideologies don't have to reduce to red versus blue. And in fact, within the film, there is a deliberate discussion about that to do with Texas and California having joined forces, which is there to provoke a question which is on what terms is this civil war playing out? Why are these two allied? What would they consider to be more important than their political differences?
Audie Cornish
00:13:38
In this case, it's a president who extends to a third term, disbands the FBI, attacks people with strikes on US soil. What else? Did I miss anything?
Alex Garland
00:13:48
Is a fascist.
Audie Cornish
00:13:49
Yeah.
Alex Garland
00:13:49
Yeah. Is an authoritarian.
Audie Cornish
00:13:51
But there were precise...I think it was interesting. You picked a couple of precise beats.
Alex Garland
00:13:54
I did pick precise beats. And that is usually the terms in which, the conversation in the film takes place. I hope it allows for conversation and interpretation and discussion. I think it's more that people say the film is not political. And then I question just what politics means as a word. And also if people say it's not sufficiently left wing enough or it's not sufficiently right wing enough, one of the things I would ask is, what do you mean by left wing and right wing? What does left wing and right wing actually mean to you? What... and also where does where do their boundaries sit? Where does it stop being a left wing, right wing discussion? It becomes an extremist discussion.
Audie Cornish
00:14:42
Like, what do you need to see for it to fall under your preconceived notions? Just because it does? It's not laid out. Using all of our cultural and media markers doesn't mean it's not political.
Alex Garland
00:14:57
'I'll tell you, one of the things I'm saying is that things have been dragged into what is notionally a left right debate that I'm not sure have any real position within left wing or right wing politics. So I just whenever having that conversation, I need to know what people mean by left wing and right wing. Are they talking about, the way taxation gets used? Are they talking about free markets versus regulated markets? Or are they talking about abortion? And I am personally not sure whether abortion is a left right issue. I can easily imagine a left wing person who is anti-abortion, maybe because they're a Catholic, for example. I can't say the same about free markets or.
Audie Cornish
00:15:37
Yeah, but that overlay, we have a tendency to..reductive overlay.
Alex Garland
00:15:42
We have an overlay. And the question is what are the forces behind those overlays? What is being dragged into the debate? Who is dragging it into the debate? Why are they dragging it into the debate? And how much of that is part of polarization? How much of that is somebody saying, I need that constituency, who votes that way? So I'm going to take this position whether I believe it or not, for example.
Audie Cornish
00:16:06
Alex Garland is the writer and director of Civil War. It's out now. More in a moment.
Audie Cornish
00:16:21
This is The Assignment. I'm Audie Cornish, and I'm talking with Alex Garland, writer and director of the new A24 film Civil War. I want to know about your relationship with illustrations and photography. I felt like I was watching a film where, I mean, there are moments of it that are quite literally through a viewfinder and quite literally reference famous war photographs. But also just, beautifully composed. And it just I understand your dad was a cartoonist and I just.
Alex Garland
00:16:55
Dad was a cartoonist, yeah.
Audie Cornish
00:16:55
Yeah. I'm kind of curious about your drawing life.
Alex Garland
00:16:58
Well, I grew up with him and my mum, of course. And drawing was always around. He was always drawing. He was always fascinated in other people drawing. And I grew up around, people on newspapers because —
Audie Cornish
00:17:11
He as a political cartoonist or...?
Alex Garland
00:17:13
Yeah. And also newspapers don't have many cartoonists, but they have many journalists. And, so his buddies were people that worked on the paper in all sorts of different capacities. They were editors and political journalists or foreign correspondents and, but in terms of images, I, I was also I was trying to do a throwback, really, to an old fashioned kind of journalism about reporting and the way news photographers would operate. And in some ways, the film is about a young news photographer who's who is an older one is attempting to dissuade them, in a sense, from the path they're taking.
Audie Cornish
00:17:51
Kind of, you don't want this life, kid. It's a little bit of the tone.
Alex Garland
00:17:53
Yeah, because because there's often a conflict between the personal price that a journalist might pay, in relation to the work they actually do.
Audie Cornish
00:18:02
Yes, we should say so. We talked about the trauma that this character has, thinking about the things that she's seen. But also she says at one point, which I have heard before in terms of justifying the work you do, in which you chronicle but do not intervene, is that we record so other people ask.
Alex Garland
00:18:20
Yes.
Audie Cornish
00:18:20
Is that something you heard from someone or something we came up with?
Alex Garland
00:18:23
Yeah. Oh, no. Yeah. Or all the time. But there's a price that the individual pays, so. So the individual journalist, so many of those people are traumatized. They're doing important work. But as an individual, they have to live with some of the consequences.
Audie Cornish
00:18:38
And people still ask about the ethics of that. That's still a conversation of like...
Alex Garland
00:18:43
And they should ask about it. But on balance, we we do need people doing that. I, I think in some ways it's, you could compare it to like an E.R. surgeon who is maybe doing very difficult things and being traumatized. If a child has been hit by a car and then they lose that child, that must have a terrible effect on them. But we still need someone doing that. The net effect is not just that they help, but we need them.
Audie Cornish
00:19:11
It's you. You think they help?
Alex Garland
00:19:12
Yes, I do. I think I am a huge believer in the importance of unbiased journalism. I think the something strange has happened to journalism has been hugely undermined. It's partly the context of social media. I think it's also politicians going out of their way to undermine journalism and journalists. And it's also, been done internally by large organizations really embracing bias and trying to hold on to advertising revenue, by making sure they keep their audience. And there's been a net effect for all of all of these things.
Audie Cornish
00:19:51
I don't want people to hear this and think that it's like academic film, because it's one of the most visceral and kind of stunning experiences I've ever had. In part...
Alex Garland
00:20:02
And I'm blowing it. I, you see, I I'm terrible at selling films, right?
Audie Cornish
00:20:05
Oh, yeah. No. Yeah, for sure. You're underselling it a bit.
Alex Garland
00:20:08
Yeah, yeah.
Audie Cornish
00:20:09
It's not that it's a war movie that is not... We see so many things blown up. I've seen the white House blown up how many times in a film?
Alex Garland
00:20:18
Many times.
Audie Cornish
00:20:19
And I absolutely never felt the way I felt watching the attacks on monuments in this film. And I don't know why that was.
Alex Garland
00:20:30
I think it's because it had, a sense of real danger and...
Audie Cornish
00:20:37
Stakes. Maybe.
Alex Garland
00:20:38
Stakes. Yeah, exactly. The, the the things that it's showing are probably things you're worried about. And one of the reasons I made this film in the way I made it is because I don't think ...or rather let me phrase it this way. I do think those concerns are shared by lots of different people who may disagree about all sorts of things, but they agree about that. And not only that, I join them in that concern. I also am concerned about it. I don't think that the these things have no consequences. I think they do have consequences. So I was speaking to that.
Audie Cornish
00:21:14
We talked about this idea of the journalists saying, you know, we record, so other people ask. I think of writers and directors as people who dream so that other people ask, like, I feel like you show us scenarios and we sit in the audience and ask ourselves, can I live in this? Could I survive in this? Whether that be light or funny or etc..
Alex Garland
00:21:36
But and also some films are just there to purely entertain and that's okay.
Audie Cornish
00:21:40
That's not this.
Alex Garland
00:21:41
Well.
Audie Cornish
00:21:42
I know you like defending many points, but like, this is not a popcorn situation.
Alex Garland
00:21:48
No, but hopefully what it is, is a compelling film and it's engaging. So it's compelling and it's engaging and then hopefully is thought provoking. But it is a kind of visceral experience that that leads to. Yeah, thinking, talking, that kind of thing.
Audie Cornish
00:22:05
I've used a lot of your time and I appreciate you talking with us. Is there anything that you wish people asked about this film that they aren't?
Alex Garland
00:22:12
No. I just wish I was better at selling films. I'm hopeless. So bad.
Audie Cornish
00:22:16
But you're hopeless at it. Because I have to tell you something. I've interviewed a lot of directors, and just because you're not doing the razzle dazzle doesn't mean, like, the fact that you want to talk about it actually is huge.
Alex Garland
00:22:28
Thank you. I...it's just not in me that razzle dazzle.
Audie Cornish
00:22:32
But it's in you as a writer. Like, one of the reasons why you're good to interviews. Because writers know the story. You're not somebody who's, like, adapted the story or thought about it a lot, or just lived with it for a long time. Fundamentally, this is you in a lot of ways.
Alex Garland
00:22:45
Yeah, but it's also other people. My experience of other people is always not always. There's outliers. There's always outliers. But most people are polite, conversational, respectful when you meet them one on one. You can come from any number of different backgrounds or worlds or whatever, and this includes a lot of traveling, all sorts of different places. I'm not just talking about your country and the country, and people are broadly pretty sensitive and pretty good natured unless you put them in extremist. But...
Audie Cornish
00:23:16
And then they're willing to shoot and hang their neighbor.
Alex Garland
00:23:18
Then they are willing to shoot and hang their neighbor. And that's why it's a sort of anti exceptionalism film because we're all open to that. The question is in the film, is this something we should be really thinking about and guarding against? And the answer probably implicitly, is yes. But then no, you know what? I'm going to shut up. I'm just going to leave it there.
Audie Cornish
00:23:43
What kind of books did you read as a kid?
Alex Garland
00:23:44
I read almost exclusively nonfiction. I, I read history and science and journalism, actually.
Audie Cornish
00:23:54
I remember talking to one of the, creators of the Lost. Right? Yeah. And, he told me that his dad or parent, someone gave him books, kid mystery books, and they would rip out the end, like the choose your own adventure.
Alex Garland
00:24:09
And then they never figured out how to do endings.
Audie Cornish
00:24:10
Yeah. And I'm not going to say this person had trouble with third acts, but they might have had trouble with third acts. And so, you know, I'm sure everyone does this to you. We think about your body of work and we try and put together a narrative. Right. That's our job as like reviewers or critics or trying to create a story for the audience to say, here's here's why we think this film is interesting. And I guess, you know, I wondered for you over time, have you heard people say, hey, this seems to be the theme of your work?
Alex Garland
00:24:37
I have, and I and sometimes I think, oh, I know what you mean. And sometimes I think, what? Where did that come from? And, but very broadly, I would say it's always the same. There is some kind of thing going on in the world where it could be AI, it could be quantum computing, it could be politics, it could be people's behavior within marriages or whatever it happens to be. And then I just react to it. And that's all it's ever been, really. Even 28 Days Later, which is a zombie flick, right? Was really, that was a consequence of me having just been in a country that had been, destroyed really by decades of conflict and just thinking, it's like wanting to bring it home to wake people up, maybe, or something. Even a zombie flick is, is a reaction to something that that's the through line, I think.
Audie Cornish
00:25:34
Well, thank you.
Alex Garland
00:25:35
Thank you.
Audie Cornish
00:25:36
Alex Garland, he's the writer and director of the movie Civil War. It's out in theaters now. The Assignment is a production of CNN audio, and CNN audio has been nominated for a bunch of Webby Awards. So big congrats to all of my colleagues Anderson Cooper, Sanjay Gupta, David Rhind, and the team behind the podcast Tug of War. I also want to note that the assignment has been nominated for two awards Best Interview Talk Show and Best Host. So thank you so much for that recognition. And thank you so much to our crew and our producers here. The Webby's are actually awarded by a public vote, which means I've got one more thing to ask, which is head over to the website and vote for us. That link is vote dot Webby awards.com, and we'll put that in our episode notes.
Audie Cornish
00:26:38
This episode was produced by Lori Galarreta. Our senior producer is Matt Martinez. Dan Dzula is our technical director, and Steve Lickteig is the Executive producer of CNN Audio. We got support from Haley Thomas, Alex Manasseri, Robert Mathers, Jon Dianora, Lenny Steinhardt, Jamus Andrest, Nichole Pesaru and Lisa Namerow. Special thanks to Katie Hinman. I'm Audie Cornish. And thank you for listening.