Filmmaker Alex Garland, who has yet another film in theaters with the Iraq War thriller “Warfare,” recently spoke with GQ Magazine and has admitted that he has ghost-directed films he previously wrote, which is most likely further confirmation that he did indeed shadow-direct the R-rated comic book remake, “Dredd.”
“In truth, what happened, just to be candid about it, look, a lot of time has passed, I did end up on some films essentially doing ghost-directing. Something would be going wrong, or I would feel something was going wrong, and I saw the execution of scenes, and I would be thinking, ‘That’s not really what that scene is like, it’s missing this key component part, and it doesn’t quite make sense to me.’ I could also see when the film was released that people didn’t care whether that key component was there or not, but I cared.”
Given that a lot of screenwriting was for Danny Boyle, starting with “The Beach” (they have reunited for “28 Years Later“) and on Mark Romanek‘s clone drama “Never Let Me Go,” the options of what movies he could be talking about are limited. A longstanding rumor about his only comic book adaptation, “Dredd,” is that Garland and producers were frustrated with director Pete Travis, only for Garland to take over those duties and reshot most of the film himself without getting the credit for it.
This rumbling was backed up in 2018, when “Dredd” star Karl Urban told JoBlo that he believed the real director of “Dredd” was Garland, and he was directly the reason for the film’s post-theatrical success with genre fans.
“A huge part of the success of ‘Dredd’ is, in fact, due to Alex Garland and what a lot of people don’t realize is that Alex Garland actually directed that movie,” Urban said of Garland’s contributions going beyond producer and screenwriter.
When specifically speaking directly about the experience of making “Dredd,” it sounded like creative clashes were the main problem. “In TV, the writer/showrunner has kind of the authorship button handed to them, and in film, it’s the director who has that. They can be true simultaneously. Television is not so much different from film that magically it’s the writer/showrunner and now magically it’s the director, and some people I’m working with, their principle was ‘Why don’t we take that concept from television and use it in film. For complicated reasons that couldn’t work. It just created a bloody mess.”
Garland also explained why he refused to take a directing credit for the film while praising the contributions of the original director. “Within this is a disservice to Pete Travis, who is the credited director, who did some fundamental/crucial things, and he deserves that title. He was put in an absolutely impossible situation, and in retrospect, the longer I’ve worked, the more ridiculous I think it was.”
Released in 2012, the film based on the 2000 A.D. comics starring Urban, Olivia Thirlby (“Juno”), Lena Headey (“Game of Thrones”), Wood Harris (“The Wire”), and Domhnall Gleeson (“Star Wars: The Force Awakens”) didn’t make that much of an impact at the box office but has since achieved cult status leading to years of chatter about plans for a follow-up film (the original distribution deals with multiple companies across various markets making that near impossible) and a tie-in series, “Mega-City One,” had once been in development with Urban expressing an interest in reprising the grizzled anti-hero.
The impact of “Dredd” on geek culture is hard to avoid, and even recent AAA video games like “Cyberpunk 2077” lifted a BUNCH of visual cues, character/production design, technology, weapons, and ideas from the cult futuristic comic book film (sort of shocking how much they took from it, honestly).
You can watch that full exchange between Alex Garland and GQ below.
