Transcript: Culture chat — ‘Civil War’ is not the film you think it is

This is an audio transcript of the Life and Art from FT Weekend podcast episode: ‘Culture chat — “Civil War” is not the film you think it is’

Lilah Raptopoulos
Welcome to Life and Art from FT Weekend. I’m Lilah Raptopoulos, and this is our Friday chat show. Today we are talking about Civil War, the new film from director Alex Garland. When it starts, it’s the near future. The US is in turmoil and at war. A number of states have seceded. Kirsten Dunst is a veteran photojournalist, and she and her two war reporter colleagues are racing to get to the fascist third-term president before the White House is stormed by rebel factions. They’re joined last minute by a rookie photojournalist, played by Cailee Spaeny, and the three of them drive through a dangerous, destitute America from New York to Washington, DC. It’s part war movie, part disturbing road trip.

[AUDIO CLIP OF ‘CIVIL WAR’ PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
The movie, of course, is coming out in an election year in the US and people have very strong feelings about it, both praise and criticism. And today we’re gonna talk about it. I am Lilah and I’m bumming a ride across America with the guy from Narcos, the guy from Dune, and the girlfriend Priscilla. Joining me in New York representing the Florida Alliance, it’s the US executive producer of audio. He produces the News Briefing and this great show, among others. It’s Topher Forhecz. Welcome Topher.

Topher Forhecz
Thanks, Lilah.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Also from London, sitting on his farm pretending this isn’t happening, it’s political columnist, film buff and friend of the podcast, the great Stephen Bush. Hi, Stephen.

Stephen Bush
Hi.

Lilah Raptopoulos
It’s great to have both of you. OK, let’s just get into it. Big picture, what did you think? Did the film succeed? Did it fail? Stephen.

Stephen Bush
Yeah, I thought it was terrific. I mean, I think, yeah, the thing that the film is trying to do is to depict the type of civil war and indeed the type of conversations journalists covering that type of civil war have about what they’re doing. But instead of setting it in the sort of place where that type of war happens and it’s covered all the time, but to set it in the imperial court, as it were, right, and to set it in the most recognised cinematic location ever. You know, so the opening sort of establishing bit of dialogue and establishes this road trip they’re about to go on takes place in a hotel about 500 miles from the border between various journalists talking about the passage of the conflict, which I thought was so reminiscent of the kind of conversation I’ve had or overheard in hotels in Zambia or South Africa about Zimbabwe. So I thought it was a fantastic war film that managed to succeed where very few war films do. Like, even Apocalypse Now is a brilliant, brilliant movie, but the war does actually look very cool. I thought it really succeeded in its aim of being harrowing, but the war was not cool.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Not cool. Yeah. Topher, what did you think?

Topher Forhecz
Yeah, so I think as a piece of visual storytelling, it was incredibly successful. I saw it in a packed theatre full of people, I think opening night. And everybody’s locked in. You’re just really engaged. You’re not gonna think about anything else. And I think I left . . . after that experience after I, like, took a deep breath and everybody was like, I guess we’ll continue our night now.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Don’t go on a date to this movie.

Topher Forhecz
Yeah. America has fallen. Anyway, go get dinner. I think after that, you know, I was really sort of perplexed and had to chew on it for a while. I didn’t know how I felt. I think that it really subverted my expectations. And I think there was a period of me kind of having to get over what I thought it was gonna be immediate on its level. And in doing so, I felt like it was a really great depiction of kind of just American rage and just sort of a warning or a red flag of what could be the consequences if we continue to kind of eat one another.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, yeah. I agree with both of you. I really was ready to not like this film because I didn’t really want to see a civil war in my country as I knew it. And in a weird way, it didn’t do what I expected it to do. And it made me like it. Like, I felt that it did a really good job making it general enough that it didn’t feel like a war that we exactly would be having, in that, you know, for example, Texas and California, very, it’s very unlikely that they will come together and secede from the rest of the country. But it was showing very up-close images of, as you were saying, Stephen, the kinds of wars we know are going on around the world that we see in the news but in, personally, for me, my home, you know. It’s not set in Vietnam or Afghanistan or Somalia. It’s set on a highway that I know, with cars burnt out in the middle of it. It’s set at a sort of JCPenney in the suburbs. It’s set at a refugee camp and in Pennsylvania. It’s sort of, for an American, you can’t otherise anyone in that movie. I felt like we deserved to have to watch this.

Topher Forhecz
Deserve? No, I mean, I think it’s a movie that provokes you. It is provocative, but it’s not provocative and kind of like an edgelord or like I’m trying to be hardcore and show you something shocking. Although there is, there’s shocking acts of violence. It’s throwing a lot at you and then asking you to make sense of it and work backwards and process why things are the way they are. It’s kind of purposely disorienting and like, you don’t always know who’s on whose side or which team or which sort of military outfit is representative of what army. But it’s throwing up all these things and asking you to kind of fill in the blanks and, yeah, try to sort of process what might be, what would be ultimately a very disorienting experience.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
I want to ask you both about the politics of the film. One big criticism is that Civil War lacks a political point of view. One critic called it evasively apolitical. Stephen, a lot of British critics hated the movie. I’m curious why you think that is. Like, what is it that people are reacting against when they’re not liking that this movie isn’t being sort of definitive in its politics?

Stephen Bush
So I think some of what people are reacting against is the, you know, the trailer. And I don’t know if that’s a kind of deliberate bait-and-switch on the part of Garland to want to get the audience in one mood so they are more effectively hit by the shock of it. Or if that, someone at A24 going, we can’t market this, just market it as a political thriller.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right. We gotta make money.

Topher Forhecz
They make it very, like, hurrah action.

Stephen Bush
Yeah. And this thing is, you know, it’s perfectly legitimate for a film to market itself in a way that actually gets people to see it. So I think some of it is that. But I think, the other thing about it is the . . . because the, you know, the president is quite obviously Trump-esque, particularly if you’re a European. For some British film critics, you’re like, oh, well, this is obviously a Trump-y president, where’s the rest of the kind of politics of this film gone, rather than being hit by the shock of the war.

Topher Forhecz
Yeah, I just want to say, I think it’s kind of a misnomer to say that it’s apolitical for whoever says that. It’s just maybe isn’t giving you the political conversation you want us to have, like there are politics wedded into it. I mean, he even starts, the film starts, I think, with intercut footage of January 6th and other riots, you know, they’re . . . He’s trying to say something about the nature of the country today about violence at large. But I think he’s just not interested in filling in the blanks in a way that people were hoping that the movie would be about those blanks. And I think he’s trying to say more about, something about violence, an obsession with violence and a way of using violence and hate as a means of control and sort of what it does to civil society and how it tears us apart. So I don’t think it’s apolitical. I just think, you know, people wanted . . . a lot of dissenters wanted a very different movie.

Stephen Bush
Yeah, I think that’s exactly it. In some ways, there is a very strongly political argument in the film, which is that it is a cautionary tale about why one shouldn’t want to settle political disputes with violence, which obviously is salient because obviously, in the last American presidential election, some representatives of one side did want to settle their political disputes with violence. And so he came up with the original idea, you know, watching all that on television in 2020. But you can tell that other influences and ideas and other conflicts have clearly influenced how he thinks. I mean, it opens with a necklacing, which was famously one of the things which happened a lot in apartheid-era South Africa in the 1980s.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right. That’s the way that people were executed there with rubber tires and gasoline around their necks.

Stephen Bush
Yeah. And there are aspects of it that, to me at least, felt very reminiscent of conflicts in sub-Saharan Africa and how they’re talked about and covered in, etc. And I think this is the thing is that what he, yeah, what he’s doing incredibly powerfully is depicting the way that, you know, often, particularly civil wars, you know, they start about one thing. And then even though in this film, to be honest, the war has been won — we’re in that war’s last days — there’s still a lot of sort of just auxiliary violence that takes place in the margins of wars. And I think one of the reasons why the Texas and California alliance is a masterstroke is it’s as close as you can get to the audiences turning around and going, for goodness sake, don’t try and read a consistent politics into this film, not least because the second you start asking questions about actually existing American politics, you would ask other questions like, well, surely the president has got the nuclear arsenal and, you know, a bunch of other things, and we’ll just break the conceit of the film.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right, right, exactly.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

OK, for our next section, I would love to talk about what you think this is about, big picture. I personally found this film hard to analyse fully zoomed-out because it’s pretty provocative and it has so many interpretations. But I found when I zoomed in it was very poignant. Like if you zoom in, it’s about a lot of important things. It’s about the fact that, like, wars are fought really close up between people, and actually people don’t always know what it is that they’re fighting for. They’re just trying to kill the person who’s trying to kill them. It’s about how, you know, genocidal groupthink can happen pretty quickly. It’s about the fact that, like, war is addictive. I mean, it’s really about, like, the little moments of war. Stephen, what do you think?

Stephen Bush
I mean, I think it’s, I mean, in many ways, I think Alex Garland is an imagist filmmaker — and I don’t mean that in a remotely derogatory way — in that with almost all of his films, the things that haunt you and rattle around your head afterwards are so . . . you know, obviously, like most Londoners of a certain age, I think a lot about 28 Days Later because it was filmed in the parts of London where I grew up and it, you know, depicts a very familiar-seeming apocalypse if you’re from that part of the world.

I think what has kind of lived with me since this film was actually that I think you’re exactly right to say, it’s a film which most makes sense in its kind of small moments, right, because it doesn’t want to give you a bigger picture, but it does, right down to the very arresting final image that resolves on the screen as the credits roll, it’s a film that really leaves you with how dehumanising war is. Even this Trump-adjacent president who has held on to power in a third term, he’s bombed his own civilians, his final moments are horrible.

And I think also the thing that his final moments are doing isn’t . . . I don’t mean for this to surprise someone. It is also a journalist’s film. And the way that the president’s final moments are so linked with all of the questions about, you know, are you just covering this story or are you just by being there, changing the story, shaping how it’s covered, you know, there’s so many questions there. And it sort of it raises but kind of doesn’t answer, then sort of stay with you for a long time.

Topher Forhecz
I do think you have to be OK with watching a movie that’s not gonna answer your questions if you’re gonna like this movie. I will say the thing that I bumped up against was probably the journalism part the most. I mean, I get it as a, you’re following this group of journalists. It’s a road trip movie. They’re outside observers, and they’re being able to, like, move into spaces that maybe the military wouldn’t and have commentary on what this sort of destabilisation looks like.

Lilah Raptopoulos
And that’s why you would follow a journalist vs a military person through a movie like this.

Topher Forhecz
Right. But you know, I mean, it ends on sort of, it’s even hard to figure out. Does it end on a cynical take? Is it like, how does he feel about journalists? It’s a complicated picture. But I do feel like with the journalism part, it was especially asking a lot of questions that it just didn’t have answers to.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Interesting. This is related to my last question, was just that, you know, because this is a film that can’t help but rattle around in your brain, I’m curious where you landed and what it made you think about the most. It made me think about journalism the most too. And I actually felt sort of like, I felt like it gave me a view of journalism that felt more finished than the other things. I felt like, you know, even though these people were all individually flawed and some of them had big egos and they were, some of them were sort of addicted to war and totally traumatised, etc, they also still, like, believed in it, even though all trust in journalism had basically been eroded in America. Like, they still, you know, believed in documenting, creating a record and it kind, yeah.

Topher Forhecz
Did the Narcos guy believe in it? He didn’t take a single note that whole movie. What is he doing? He’s like, I got this for, like, a photographic memory. I’ll get it for later.

Lilah Raptopoulos
I don’t know. He was there . . . he hit the stage. He was there.

Topher Forhecz
He played witness but also told no one.

Lilah Raptopoulos
It did, you know, we had our foreign editor, Alec Russell, on Monday to talk about, like, how to process the news when all the news feels bad. And he basically said that what gives him hope at the end of the day is that he does believe in justice. And he does believe that, like, over time, a record is accumulated and people do, you know, justice can happen. And I felt that that movie sort of believed in that, too. I found that slightly hopeful.

Stephen Bush
Well, I think because what I do, I try and I agree that it is a broadly hopeful film about what journalists do. But I think what I particularly liked about it is it does successfully capture that there is just inevitably a lot of ambiguity, particularly there’s a lot of ambiguity when you are reporting on a conflict of any kind and you’re embedded right within the battle. Now, of course, the slightly strange thing about it is that in many ways it is like a kind of pre-Vietnam war depiction of war reporters. Yeah. One journalist just doesn’t appear to make a single note. Just clearly in that old New Yorker long read era of . . . and then he said something incredibly eloquent that no one can check if he said it or not. There are hardly any, actually haven’t mounted cameras in there, but I think it does capture all of the ambiguities and the personal conflicts and challenges within them while being a hopeful movie in many ways about that bit. And so yeah, I think it is a very profound film about journalism as well.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. Well it was a real movie. It wasn’t a remake. A new script. We had a lot to say about it. I think in that way it did a job. So Topher and Stephen, thank you so much. We will be back in just a minute for More or Less.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

[FIVE-MINUTE INVESTOR PODCAST TRAILER PLAYING]

Welcome back for More or Less, the part of the show where each guest says something they want to see more of or less of culturally. Topher, what do you got?

Topher Forhecz
So last night, I watched Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, and that movie famously ends on the top of Mount Rushmore. And it just made me think we need to have more movies that end in their third act in surprising landmarks. We’re using the same landmarks. It’s getting old. We saw Godzilla suplex Kong on a pyramid this year. I’m over it. And so if you’re a studio and you’re not sure what you want to do, but you know you want to end it on an unusual landmark, I found one that keeps your options open. It is Casey, Illinois. And it is home to 12 of the world’s largest objects. You got the world’s largest rocking chair, mailbox, gavel, wind chime. Have King Kong hit Godzilla with the world’s largest gavel. Let’s be a little less lazy, studio executives.

Lilah Raptopoulos
(Laughter) Topher, you’ve come prepared . . . 

Topher Forhecz
I did my homework. This is my passion.

Lilah Raptopoulos
 . . . and surpassed the perfect More Or Less. Wow. Stephen, what about you?

Stephen Bush
My less is I would like less Ghostbusters. In fact, having, and I know like, myself, because it’s not like I was forced to see Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire. But having seen Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, I think the ideal number of future Ghostbusters films would be zero. And so yeah, less Ghostbusters, please.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Any quick reason why?

Stephen Bush
I think because basically it’s like, it sums up what’s wrong with that kind of nostalgia market, in that you have what’s clearly a filmmaker’s promising and perfectly charming young adult fiction turned into an original movie starring Dan Aykroyd living alongside, you know, kind of almost like, someone’s used Ghostbusters nostalgia as Polyfilla. And the resulting film makes no sense. It was just a bit tawdry and depressing, really.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. OK. No more Ghostbusters. I have a less too. I’m gonna say fewer, fewer menus at restaurants. I went last week into a restaurant in Jersey City that was an old Italian couple’s house. It was called 15 Fox Place. And you just sit there and eat for 2.5 hours. They bring things out. And it was really a delight. And it reminded me of restaurants in Copenhagen that did the same thing, although they were much trendier. You just showed up and they fed you. And I think more restaurants should do it. Just, like, sit you down. Don’t let you see a tasting menu. Don’t let you see a menu at all. And, bring me on a journey. I don’t want to choose.

Topher Forhecz
Nothing tastes better than not having to choose. Someone just bringing you food.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Exactly. Stephen, Topher, this is about as much fun as I could have talking about an American civil war. Thank you both for being on the show.

Stephen Bush
Thanks for having me.

Topher Forhecz
Thank you.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
That’s the show. Thank you for listening to Life and Art from FT Weekend. Take a read through the show notes. We have links expanding on everything mentioned today, including the FT’s review of Civil War by Danny Leigh, who did not like it as much as we did. Every link that goes to the FT gets you past the paywall. Also in the show notes is a link to buy tickets to the US FT Weekend Festival in Washington DC. It’s coming up. It’s on Saturday, May 4th at the REACH at the Kennedy Center. I will be there hosting panels. A lot of friends of the podcast will be there. A lot of big name guests will be there, like Marilynne Robinson who’s incredible, Bradley Whitford, Nancy Pelosi, and we hope to see you there. We have a special discount code for podcast listeners in the show notes.

I’m Lilah Raptopoulos, and here is my talented team. Katya Kumkova is our senior producer. Lulu Smyth is our producer. Our sound engineers are Breen Turner and Sam Giovinco, with original music by Metaphor Music. Topher Forhecz is our executive producer and our global head of audio is Cheryl Brumley. Have a lovely weekend and we’ll find each other again on Monday.

[MUSIC PLAYING]