Quote

I knew my affection for the Philippines was equally as telling: a democracy on paper, apparently well ordered, regularly subverted by irrational chaos. A place where I'd felt instantly at home.

Alex Garland

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Alex Garland
Age: 54
Born: 1970
Born: May 26
Film Director
Film Producer
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
London
England
Alexander Medawar Garland
Democracy
Instantly
Knew
Apparently
Felt
Irrational
Place
Equally
Home
Affection
Subverted
Wells
Chaos
Philippines
Well
Telling
Ordered
Paper
Regularly

More quotes by Alex Garland

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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.
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I wrote a whole novel before The Beach. Unpublishable. Junk. But, for some reason I stuck at novels and wrote a second. Still not sure why I didn't give up. Stubborn, maybe.
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I used to think about video games, This is clearly an amazing, new narrative medium, and it's going to be mind-blowing when people get to grips with what's possible within this medium. It took us a century to get really good at film. Video games are at a much earlier stage.
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Vietnam, me love you long time. All day, all night, me love you long time. (...) Dropping acid on the Mekong Delta, smoking grass through a rifle barrel, flying on a helicopter with opera blasting out of loudspeakers, tracer-fire and paddy-field scenery, the smell of napalm in the morning. Long time.
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There are one hundred glow-stars on my bedroom ceiling. (...) Glow-stars are strange. They make the ceiling disappear.
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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.
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I can kid people, including myself, into believing that something on the page will work. But when you film it, you just think, Oh ....
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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.
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Of course witnessing poverty was the first to be ticked off the list. Then I had to graduate to the more obscure stuff. Being in a riot was something I pursued with a truly obsessive zeal, along with being tear-gassed and hearing gunshots fired in anger.
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The first I heard of the beach was in Bangkok, on the Ko Sanh Road.
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You fish, swim, eat, laze around, and everyone's so friendly. It's such simple stuff, but... If i could stop the world and restart life, put the clock back, i think I'd restart it like this. For everyone.
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Normally, small talk is enough for me to form an opinion of someone. I make quick judgments, often completely wrong, and then stick by them rigidly.
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Every dream that anyone ever has is theirs alone and they never manage to share it. And they never manage to remember it either. Not truly or accurately. Not as it was. Our memories and our vocabularies aren't up to the job.
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The key relationship for writers in film is producers, because those are the first two people involved and the ones who work on it intensely in a private way without the big machinery of film.
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If I'd learnt one thing from travelling, it was that the way to get things done was to go ahead and do them. Don't talk about going to Borneo. Book a ticket, get a visa, pack a bag, and it just happens.
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Vietnam, me love you long time. All day, all night, me love you long time.
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When I see 'Sunshine,' I see a film that part of me is kind of very proud of and another part of me is very sad about, so it's a really complicated film for me. And I've never been really able to resolve all that in myself.
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The thing about tourism is just that it's incredibly powerful. It's like a gun and it's incredibly easy to be irresponsible with it. And the speed of the impact that tourism can have on a place can be quite breathtaking. It doesn't take years, it takes months. That's how quickly it works. And it can be quite a bleak thing to witness.
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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.
Alex Garland
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I don't like dealing with money transactions in poor countries. I get confused between the feeling that I shouldn't haggle with poverty and getting ripped off
Alex Garland