Exclusive: Civil War director Alex Garland speaks with CBR about making the battle scenes feel realistic.

A24's new movie Civil War has arrived in theaters, imagining what might happen if a fractured United States goes to war. The film has been commended for its realistic battle scenes, and that's thanks in part due to the great efforts director Alex Garland had taken with making those moments feel genuine.

In a new interview with CBR's Kevin Polowy, Garland commented on the war scenes in the film. He shared how he didn't want these scenes to feel formulaic, preferring to have them be much more realistic than what is typically seen in these kinds of movies. That meant surrounding himself with veterans on the set who were tasked with ensuring that battle scenes focused more so on realism than what was more traditionally cinematic.

"The starting point was, we took our cues, in terms of sound, imagery, action, sequence of events, behavior, all sorts of stuff like that, not so much from cinema, as news footage, documentaries, and also, lived experience," Garland said of the inspiration behind the battle scenes. "So, the military supervisor was a veteran. Lots of the people working on the film were veterans, and they were given a lot of - I don't know what the right word is - freedom, encouragement... they were requested to stage these moments as accurately as possible, and to forget about the way film would normally present this, and to go with what they felt was correct. Correct to their experience, rather than to the way cinema normally does this stuff."

While the film is set in the United States, Garland also noted how these kinds of conflicts are global, as he also said, "The context is division, polarization, populist politics, you know, that kind of thing, absolutely exists in my country. Exists around Europe. Different degrees, but sometimes really quite extreme degrees within Europe. Also, the Middle East, and Asia, and South America. This is not a phenomenon to this country. It just isn't."

Alex Garland wrote and directed Civil War. The film stars Kirsten Dunst, Wagner Moura, Cailee Spaeny, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Sonoya Mizuno, and Nick Offerman. The movie is described as a "race to the White House in a near-future America balanced on the razor's edge," per its official theater listing.

Civil War is now playing in theaters.


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