Quotes from Alex Garland

The cell doesn't grow old. It becomes immortal. Keeps dividing. Doesn't Die. So where we see the aging process as natural, it's actually a fault in our genes.

I'm fine. I have bad dreams but I never saw Mister Duck again. I play video games. I got my thousand-yard stare. I carry a lot of scars. I like the way that sounds. I carry a lot of scars.

I don't like dealing with money transactions in poor countries. I get confused between feeling that I shouldn't haggle with poverty and hating getting ripped off.

Escape through travel works. Almost from the moment I boarded my flight, life in England became meaningless. Seat belt signs lit up, problems switched off. Broken armrests took precedence over broken hearts. By the time the plane was airborne I'd forgotten England even existed.

So: I knew dream life. In fact, in a way, I was actually comfortable with it. Dream life, I realized, was only confusing when you were awake. It was from the perspective of waking life that dream life seemed fractured and lacking consequence, lacking any certainty that one thing led to another. But from within dream life, the world was generally coherent. Not exactly an unconfusing world---just no more confusing than any other.

Take six cubes and arrange them into the shape of a crucifix. Take two more cubes and stick them on either side of the crucifix, at the point where the cross is made. Now you have a tesseract. A tesseract is a three-dimensional object — a hypercube — unraveled.

Waking was the most reliable part of a dream, as built into dreams as death is to life. You dream, you wake: you live, you die.

I didn't go to film school.

I'm always pushing back against the last thing I did in some way, and some of that is restlessness and a sense of limited time.

I think everything I write is from an atheist perspective. I mean, it's partly from an atheist perspective because I'm an atheist, and I'm just not really interested in religious-based questions.

I don't write on set. I also - in a funny way, I don't really differentiate between the writing and directing. I think it's all sort of the same thing.

The scripts of 'The Wire' are fantastic - the scripts of 'Breaking Bad,' the scripts of 'Mad Men,' the scripts of 'The Sopranos,' the scripts of 'Battlestar Galactica.' You could keep going on. They're incredibly well written.

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.

Vietnam, me love you long time. All day, all night, me love you long time.

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.

It slightly depends on your perspective, sort of how you look at these things, but when I sit down to write a script, I'm not planning to write a script; I'm planning to make a film, and so I only see the script as being just a step there.

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.

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.

By the time the plane was airborne I'd forgotten England even existed.

My approach to directing is to not do very much directing. I'm mainly interested in what the creative group individually and together are thinking.

I've written original material before, where I've come up with the idea and the characters myself, and that's definitely very different to working with someone else's characters and stories.

I know some directors get very involved in trailers and posters. Some even cut their own. I stay completely away from it. I just see my job as making a film.

When I'm really fixated on a bit of writing, I can easily spend six days without leaving the house and barely leaving my room.

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.