Civil War’s forest-fire scene gave the director intense anxiety — because it was too good

polygon.com:

Even though Alex Garland’s near-future catastrophe movie Civil War takes place during an American insurrection aimed at forcing an autocratic, democracy-destroying president out of power, it focuses more on the journalists covering the war than on who’s fighting who. That, Garland tells Polygon, was a choice he made because he wanted the story to be about why reporters are a critical part of a functioning society. That same agenda also shaped the look of Civil War: The movie is largely seen through the eyes of two photojournalists, veteran Lee Miller (Kirsten Dunst) and cub reporter Jessie (Cailee Spaeny). Their intent focus on capturing the perfect image made it important for Civil War to be visually striking.

One particular standout sequence comes late in the movie, when Lee, her reporter partner Joel (Wagner Moura), and Jessie silently drive through a burning forest, one of the casualties of the war. The characters exchange grim, weary glances in the orange-lit dark as the fires burn around them. It’s a beautifully shot scene, and Polygon asked Garland how he approached capturing it on camera.

“There’s an easy answer to that, because I’ve never shot-listed,” Garland told us. “I don’t ever arrive on set with a plan. That’s for complicated reasons, which is usually to do with acting, and not wanting to tell an actor where to sit. I don’t want to say, ‘Stand by the window, because I’ve got a great shot.’ If they don’t want to stand by the window, then I’ve got a problem with the actor, a sort of unnecessary tension. I’ve never come to a scene yet where actors aren’t doing the thing they want to do and it’s impossible to shoot it. So I don’t worry about shot lists.”

Instead, he talked to the SFX team about what he wanted for the sequence, and he says they told him, “‘We are going to nail this. We know exactly what we’re going to do. We’re going to try something that hasn’t been done. Trust us.’

“That’s always my favorite thing to hear from a department,” Garland