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Perhaps it could only take an
outsider to update the American Civil War of the 1860s and imagine what would
happen if similar events tore apart the United States today.
British writer-director Alex Garland didn’t have to
look far for inspiration: The January 6, 2021 mob attack on the Capitol was a
vivid insurrection filmed live on TV in broad daylight. While these events are
a thinly disguised template for the finale of his film Civil War,
Garland seems less interested in apportioning blame to the political right or
left than in asking why we might end up there again.
You could see similar events play out in Britain or any other country, he told an audience at SXSW after the film’s premiere. “Any country can disintegrate into civil war whether there are guns floating around the country or not,” he suggested, adding that “civil wars have been carried out with machetes and still managed to kill a million people.”
“I’ve known a lot of war correspondents because I grew up with them,” Garland said in the same on-stage interview. “My dad worked [as a political cartoonist] on the Daily Telegraph. So I was familiar with them.”
Garland showed cast and crew the documentary Under The Wire about war correspondent Maria Colvin, who was murdered in Syria. His lead characters are news and war photographers played by Kirsten Dunst and Cailee Spaeny, whose character’s names echo those of acclaimed photojournalists Don McCullin and Lee Miller. Murray Close, who took the jarringly moving photographs that appear in the film, studied the works of war photographers.
“There are at least two [types of war
photographer],” said Garland. “One of them is very serious minded, often
incredibly courageous, very, very clear eyed about the role of journalism.
Other people who have served like veterans are having to deal with very deep
levels of disturbance (with PTSD) and constantly questioning themselves about
why they do this. Both [types] are being absorbed and repelled at the same
time.”
He represents both types in the film. While it is
important to get to the truth — in this case, the money shot of the execution
of the US President — he questions if that goal should take priority over
everything else they come across in their path. At what point, Garland asks,
should the journalist stop being a witness and start being a participant?
“Honestly, it’s a nuanced question,
nuanced answer,” he said. “I can’t say what is right or wrong. There’s been an
argument for a long time about news footage. If a terrible event happens, how
much do you show of dead bodies? Or pieces of bodies? Does that make people
refuse to accept the news because they don’t want to access those images? Or
worse, does it make them desensitized to those kinds of images? It’s a tricky
balance to get right.”
In this particular case, one of the agendas was to
make an anti-war movie if possible. He refers to the controversial Leni
Riefenstahl directed 1935 film Triumph for the Will, which is
essentially Nazi propaganda.
Garland didn’t want to accidentally make Triumph for the World, he said, by making war seem kind of glamorous and fun. “It’s something movies can do quite easily,” he said. “I thought about it very hard and in the end, I thought being unblinking about some of the horrors of war was the correct thing to do. Now, whether I was correct or not, in that, that’s sort of not for me to judge but I thought about it.”
Garland establishes the chaos early,
as Dunst’s character covers a mob scene where civilians reduced to refugees in
their own country clamor for water. Suddenly, a woman runs in waving an
American flag, a backpack full of explosives strapped to her chest.
“Like the coffee-shop explosion in Alfonso
Cuarón’s Children of Men, the vérité-style blast puts us on edge —
though the wider world might never witness it, were it not for Lee, who picks
up her camera and starts documenting the carnage,” reviews Peter Debruge at Variety.
To achieve the visceral tone to the action, Garland decided to shoot largely chronologically as the hero photographers attempt to cross the war lines from California to the White House.
After two weeks of rehearsals to talk
through motivations and scenes and characters, Garland and DP Rob Hardy then
worked to figure out how they were going to shoot it. He wanted the drama to be
orchestrated by the actors, he told SXSW. “The micro dramas, the little beats
you’re seeing in the background, are part of how the cast have inhabited the
space.”
Spaeny, offers insight into Garland’s
“immersive” filming technique in the film’s production notes. “The way that
Alex shot it was really intelligent, because he didn’t do it in a traditional
style,” she says. “The cameras were almost invisible to us. It felt immersive
and incredibly real. It was chilling.”
A featurette for the movie sheds light on Garland’s
unconventional filming style, in which he describes Civil War as
“a war film in the Apocalypse Now mode.”
While the A-camera was a Sony VENICE, they made extensive use of the DJI Ronin 4D-6K, which gave the filmmakers a human-eye perception of the action in a way that traditional tracks, dollies and cranes could not. They also bolted eight small cameras to the protagonists’ press van.
To Matthew Jacobs at Time Magazine,
Spaeny likened the road scenes to a play, adding, “unlike theater, or even a
typical movie shoot, Civil War changed locations every few
days as the characters’ trek progressed, introducing constant logistical
puzzles for the producers and craftspeople to solve.”
Dunst’s husband Jesse Plemons makes a
brief appearance in the film, but commands the scene as a menacingly
inscrutable soldier carrying a rifle and wearing a distinct pair of red
sunglasses.
“I can imagine that people might read
into or some kind of strange bit of coding into Jesse Plemons’s red glasses,”
Garland says in A24’s notes. “Actually, that was just Jesse saying, I sort of
think this guy should wear shades or glasses. And he went out himself and he
bought six pairs, and we sat there as he tried them on, and when he got to the
red ones, it just felt like, yep, them.”
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