Ex Machina Director Alex Garland Talks Artificial Intelligence And His Unsettling Robot Ava

If you were looking for love in Austin this weekend, you might have run into Ava — a chatbot on Tinder created to promote the South by Southwest premiere of a new science fiction film called Ex Machina.

Regardless of what you think about the campaign (I didn’t have a problem with it, but then I’ve always found Tinder chats to be awkward and slightly surreal), it certainly fit with the film’s plot. In Ex Machina, Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson), an employee at a large, Google-esque company, wins a contest and gets to spend a week with the company’s reclusive founder Nathan (Oscar Isaac).

Turns out, however, that Nathan has something specific in mind — he wants Caleb to interview Ava (Alicia Vikander), an artificial intelligence housed in a female, humanoid body, and determine whether or not she’s achieved true consciousness. Of course, there’s more going on than Nathan will admit, and tense, sexually fraught hijinks ensue.

Ex Machina is also the directorial debut of Alex Garland, who previously wrote The Beach (the novel) and 28 Days Later (the film). Garland was in New York City last week to promote the movie, and we spent a few minutes talking about the new film’s big ideas.

Garland was quick to say the movie is, in many ways, “a fantasy.” In other words, even though he believes it’s “quite likely” that strong artificial intelligences will exist at some point, the movie asks you to “just take a leap of faith” and accept it, and also accept that we’ll be able to build robots that can replicate the nuances of human expression.

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