While Pete Travis got the directing credit for the badass 2012 action film Dredd, it’s been long-rumored that its screenwriter Alex Garland also had a hand in directing it, and now Garland seemingly confirms it.
Fans and insiders have long suspected that Garland, best known for writting 28 Days Later and Sunshine, stepped in to steer the ship behind the scenes.
Now, in a recent interview with GQ where he walked through his career, and this iis where Garland let something very interesting slip. While he outright say it, it’s pretty clear what project he was referring to:
“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.”
Garland doesn’t explicitly mention Dredd, but that’s as close to a confirmation as we’re going to get, and there are insiders that are backing this up.
Dredd is based on the long-running 2000 AD comic, and it starred Karl Urban as the grim, no-nonsense lawman of a dystopian future. While the movie tanked at the box office, pulling in a modest $41 million globally, it has since become a cult favorite, praised for its stylish ultraviolence, grounded sci-fi worldbuilding, and Urban’s pitch-perfect performance.
The movie was awesome! Pete Travis, who received sole directing credit, reportedly had limited involvement in post-production. After Dredd, his career largely shifted toward television.
Meanwhile, Garland went on to make his official directorial debut with Ex Machina two years later, which won an Oscar and launched a run of bold, cerebral genre films like Annihilation, Devs, and the recent A24 war thriller Warfare, which he co-directed with Ray Mendoza.
Filmmaking is a messy business, and sometimes things go off the rails. But it’s now fair to say that Garland deserves credit for helping shape Dredd into the movie fans still rave about. The same fans who’ve been begging for a sequel that’s never come.
While this new information doesn’t change Dredd itself, it does reframe it a bit. That gritty, neon-soaked world of slow-mo bullets and brutal action had Alex Garland’s fingerprints all over it. And now, more than ten years later, he’s finally (sort of) owning it.
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