Speaking at Edinburgh International Film Festival, director Alex Garland revealed his favourite among the many projects he has worked on.
That being 2014’s Ex Machina, which the duo of Garland and Andrew Macdonald agreed came at the perfect time in their careers.
Garland said: “I enjoyed Ex Machina very much, it was an easy film to make. It was logistically easy, and that helped. We had four weeks in Pinewood on a soundstage, two weeks in Norway on location. We Had a very small cast.
They were young and very hard-working and very committed. We had a very friendly crew that believed in the project and were working as hard as they could. There was a good vibe, and everyone was pulling together. It was friendly.”
As to specifically why it stands out and was timed well, aside from being a nice experience, Garland said:
“Speaking for myself, but I always speak for Andrew too, we had just done a sequence of toxic movies, and toxic film sets are extraordinarily unpleasant places to be.
You cannot escape the bitching, the factionalization, the departments falling out with each other. They’re just terrible. And I think Ex Machina came as an antidote to that. It was the precise opposite” (thanks, THR).