Alex Garland on how Attack on Titan shaped his horror movie Men: ‘I’ve got to run faster’
In a Q&A after the world premiere of the startling new horror movie Men, writer-director Alex Garland (Annihilation, Ex Machina) caused a minor social media sensation when he said he’d taken some inspiration from the anime series Attack on Titan, which he was still in the process of watching. The post-apocalyptic sci-fi horror series has had a huge impact on the anime industry, but no one was expecting the creator of such singular live-action American movies to cite the show as having an impact on his work. After the film’s premiere, Polygon spoke with Garland about how he came to watch Attack on Titan and what it’s meant to him.
“I was watching it with my daughter, who brought me into it saying, ‘Dad, you really should watch this,’” Garland tells us. “I’m just blown away by that show. It’s so complex on so many levels, but in the Titans themselves, it did something really interesting — it takes human forms and makes slight changes that take things to the edge of ridiculous, but does it with real courage and confidence.
“So it hovers on this strange space between something absurdist and something actually really frightening. I was just really, really impressed. And I thought, on some level, I’m being too — too lazy, maybe. I don’t know what the right word is. But I’m just not anything like as good as that, and I’ve got to get better. So it made me reinvestigate Men and rethink about it. That’s the nice stuff about other people’s good work — it sort of lifts everyone a bit, you know?”
Garland is quick to point out that there’s no specific image or idea in Men that directly echoes Attack on Titan — he says he first started working on the script about 15 years ago and has been steadily rewriting and revising it since then.
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