With Ex_Machina helmer Alex Garland hard at work on post-production on his latest film Annihilation, author Jeff VanderMeer has been chatting to The Watch podcast about the upcoming adaptation of his sci-fi novel, describing it as “mind-blowing, surreal, extremely beautiful, extremely horrific, and tense.”
“The first thing I realized is that even though Alex Garland says he’s not an auteur, he is an auteur,” said VanderMeer. “So my expectation was to not have anything to do with the movie and that’s the actual fact. He wrote the script and he was kind enough to keep me in the loop during every part of the process, but that wasn’t for me to put my two cents in, basically. It was just so I would know what was going on.”
“It’s actually more surreal than the novel,” he continued. “There are a couple places where I was like, ‘I might need an anchor here.’ The ending is so mind-blowing and in some ways different from the book that it seems to be the kind of ending that, like 2001 or something like that, people will be talking about around the watercooler for years… Visually, it’s amazing. I must say that and that’s all I probably should say.”
The first chapter of VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy, Annihilation revolves around an expedition into an environmental disaster zone known as ‘Area X’. The film stars Natalie Portman, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Gina Rodriguez, Tessa Thompson, Oscar Isaac, David Gyasi and Sonyoa Mizuno, and is slated for release in 2018.
Via Dark Horizons
Originally published June 5, 2017. Updated April 15, 2018.
