If you couldn’t keep up with film news this past weekend, we’re not going to blame you—that is, if you spent time with your mother, instead. Now that the long-distance phone calls and Sunday brunches are over, check out the indie film news that you probably missed. This weekend saw a lot of casting rumors and next projects for up-and-coming indie and genre filmmakers and comedians, as well as an opportunity to contribute to film history.

Indiegogo Campaign Created to Complete Orson Welles’ The Other Side of the Wind

On the celebrated 100th birthday of the great auteur Orson Welles, The Hollywood Reporter announced that there was some hope for his final, unfinished project The Other Side of the World. A group of producers, including Filip Jan Rymsza, Jens Koethner Kaul and Frank Marshall, have started a crowd-sourcing campaign to raise the funds in order to complete the film thought lost. Check out the Hollywood Reporter article for the amazing backstory on how this came together. If you wish to be a part of history and contribute toward the $2 million goal, see the Indiegogo page. Like all Indiegogo projects, there are a number of tiered incentives, ranging from copies of the finished film, exclusive posters, your own 35mm print and Welles’ personal journal – the last one will set you back 50k.

Vincenzo Natali to Adapt Stephen King and Joe Hill

Last week we included a news story that Vincenzo Natali’s Cube was set for a re-visioning. Well now we know the genre filmmaker’s own next project—an adaptation of Stephen King/Joe Hill collaboration In the Tall Grass. Screen Daily first announced the news. The novella, which first appeared in Esquire, is a stripped down horror tale about a brother and sister who react to a young boy’s cry for help deep within a Kansas field. Natali typically works from his own scripts, but small-set horror with larger, metaphysical elements are right up his alley.

Paul Feig to Produce Film Penned by Broad City Co-Stars

Paul Feig is suddenly one of the hottest directors in Hollywood—early reviews of his upcoming Spy have been overwhelmingly positive and he has the lady-version Ghostbusters on the horizon. And now The Hollywood Reporter first reports that he will team up with two of the hottest young comedians for their film breakout. Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson, the duo behind the Comedy Central hit Broad City have sold an untitled script to 20th Century Fox, with Feig attached to produce. Not much else is known yet about the project, though it is not a Broad City feature and Glazer and Jacobson are not currently attached to star. We can only hope their first starring roles come soon, hopefully this is a step towards that.

Natalie Portman in Talks for Alex Garland’s Next Film

Alex Garland’s Ex Machina has performed well with both critics and audiences (a little more on that in a bit), making him a director to watch. His next project has already been announced as an adaptation of Jeff VanderMeer’s novel Annihilation, and now he may have a star attached. According to Variety, Natalie Portman is currently in talks for the leading role, with the likes of Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton vying to co-star. Since Portman’s Oscar win, she’s appeared in a pair of Thor films and not much else. A turn in serious sci-fi with this pedigree behind it could be a welcome return to form.

Indie Box Office Update

While Avengers: Age of Ultron continued to dominate the box office this weekend, it was relatively quiet on the indie end. In its fifth weekend, Ex Machina expanded to 2,000 theaters and rebounded after a drop the weekend before, earning about $3.5 million. It now has raised a healthy $24 million worldwide. Far from the Madding Crowd expanded to 99 theaters in its second weekend, with a $7,687 average. The Apu Trilogy revival and profile doc I Am Big Bird both opened in one theater and subsequently had the two largest per screen averages aside from the Marvel juggernaut, with $16,000 and $10,000, respectively.

Trailer of the Week: Unexpected

Cobie Smulders and Anders Holm get the chance to lead a film in Unexpected, a dramatic comedy about the (unexpected) effects of an (unexpected) pregnancy. Samantha is a teacher at a Chicago inner-city high school who strikes up a friendship with one of her students in the same situation. Unexpected is directed by Kris Swanberg, the wife of noted indie filmmaker Joe Swanberg—a big jump in production level from her previous film Empire Builder, a very good film that made festival rounds in 2012 but was difficult to see. Thankfully, you’ll be able to see Unexpected when it comes to limited release on July 24. Check out the trailer below!

Ex Machina is as much a nerd’s cautionary tale as it is a nerd’s wet dream. It’s about two tech experts (nerds) who conduct an experiment on the world’s first true sentient AI, a mesmerizing, beautiful thing made up of plastic and metal and sinewy wires in the shape of an attractive young woman. Her name is Ava. She walks and talks and flirts and makes small talk just like us, only her skin is synthetic and we can see her insides. (See? Nerd’s wet dream. I kid. Sorta.) But how smart is she? Her human captors try to test her limits as a sentient being, but what they discover is something not even men as ingenious as them could have prepared for.

Sounds pretty intense, right? Well, it is, but that’s not to say novelist-turned screenwriter Alex Garland‘s directorial debut is a piece of tech-panic horror. Rather, it’s a crafty piece of thinking-man’s sci-fi, a ponderous, level-headed exploration of the implications we’d face as a species should we birth true AI. There are more than a few fascinating ideas and themes floating around in the film, enough to make it one of the most thoughtful and idiosyncratic films about robots, well, ever. Still, the movie’s first priority is entertainment, and on that front it doesn’t disappoint.

The story’s mastermind is Nathan (Oscar Isaac), the muscly, intellectually imposing CEO of a Google-like search engine tech company. He’s Ava’s creator, and he’s found her a playmate in Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson), a lanky, timid programmer who’s won a company-wide lottery that’s gifted him the extraordinary opportunity to spend a week at Nathan’s secluded, ridiculously expensive home, nestled into a mountainside at some undisclosed location not meant for common folk. Upon arrival, Nathan springs the surprise of a lifetime on Caleb, informing him that what he’s really there to do is interact with Ava, performing a kind of post-Turing Test in which he’s to determine whether she can pass as authentically sentient, despite Caleb knowing with complete certainty she’s man-made. If the Turing’s imitation game is blind, Nathan’s removed Caleb’s blindfold.

There’s another, reverse Turing Test of sorts going on as well, outside the confines of what we see on-screen. Ava’s played by a person, Swedish-born ballerina Alicia Vikander, but she, with the help of Garland and his visual effects team, must convince us, the audience, through various forms of movie magic, that what we’re seeing on-screen is not flesh and bone, but a humanoid mass of electronics. The illusion is key, as it’s the foundation the rest of the movie builds upon. Thankfully, it’s as impenetrable a visual trick as I’ve seen in years; I was in a constant state of amazement at how believable Vikander looks as a robot with a see-through midriff and limbs. I was stumped, and it was awesome.

While Ava is partly a grand feat in digital effects and conceptualization, what truly makes her convincing is Vikander, whose body vocabulary represents a sterilization and streamlining of the human body in motion, the aches and pains, tics and stutters sanded away. It’s a bizarre thing to watch Vikander glide around the room, her mechanical joints purring softly, as you find yourself forgetting she’s, in reality, draped in digital confections. For her controlled, inspired performance, Vikander deserves all the praise we can muster.

Let’s not forget the boys, though; they get work done, too. A large chunk of the film is driven by the layered, between-the-lines game of wits and intimidation played by Nathan and Caleb. Ostensibly, Nathan seems to just want to be Caleb’s “bro dude man” rather than his boss’ boss’ boss. But there’s a bit of predatory menace lurking underneath Nathan’s “tech-bro” image that’s represented in his burly physique and un-blinking glare. (When Caleb first meets him, he’s walloping the shit out of a punching bag. Coincidence? I think not.) As Caleb clocks in more and more sessions with Ava (who’s kept behind a wall of thick glass, but is irresistibly charming nonetheless), he begins to see Nathan and Ava not as an inventor and his invention, but as a monster and his imprisoned damsel. The point is, Caleb begins to feel for this machine, to the point where he wouldn’t be above doing her some favors. Is he a pawn in Ava’s scheme…or Nathan’s?

Nathan is the best cinematic intellectual oppressor since Christoph Waltz’s Hans Landa. Isaac is as good as he’s been in anything, and his physical transformation is arguably on-par with Vikander’s. Gleeson’s great too as the shy, slouched Caleb; while Isaac and Vikander’s characters are fully-formed and stay on a steady path throughout the story, Gleeson’s given what’s easily the film’s most dramatic character arc. He’s the audience’s proxy, primarily, but he lends a complexity and pathos to Caleb that pays off in spades by film’s end. Though Ex Machina is a cerebral movie for sure, Vikander, Isaac, and Gleeson’s performances anchor the film and make it feel wonderfully chaotic and raw as opposed to clinical and sober.

Garland’s got balls to tackle so many controversial topics at once, and that he pulls it off so smoothly proves he’s got skill on top of his nerve. There are tons of ideas swimming around in the film, some of which could fuel a movie on their own. Ava, for example, isn’t only the embodiment of AI and its ramifications regarding humanity, but a walking question of gender identity (she’s made of synthetic parts; and yet, she’s a she). Nathan and Caleb’s intellectual sparring matches are an examination of male ego, there’s more than a whiff of Blue Beard and Pygmalion in the narrative, and on top of that Garland brings up the freaky reality that our search engines know more about us than our loved ones do. Needless to say, I’m still chewing on this stuff weeks later.

What’s really cool about Ex Machina is that, despite its high-brow inner-workings, it’s still an easily accessible, small-scale thriller that offers as many genre pleasures as it does philosophical head-scratchers. It’s stylish, sleek and intellectually stimulating, but most importantly, it’s a lot of goddamn fun.

Alex Garland, a novelist-turned-cinematographer, has written some of the most geeked-about movies of the past 15 years: Sunshine, The Beach, 28 Days Later, and even a terrific video game called Enslaved: Odyssey to the West (if you haven’t played it…play it). Now, with Ex Machina, Garland is making his directorial debut, and it’s an indie sci-fi doozy. The film follows Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson), a young coder at the world’s largest tech company who’s invited by his boss, Nathan (Oscar Isaac), to participate in the grandest experiment in human history, involving a robotic girl named Ava (Alicia Vikander), the world’s first sentient AI. Mysterious, smart, and full of surprises, Ex Machina is about as awesome a feature debut a director could have, and we had the privilege of speaking with Mr. Garland in a roundtable interview during his visit to San Francisco to promote the film.

Ex Machina is playing now in New York and Los Angeles, opens tomorrow in San Francisco, and expands wide next Friday, April 24th.

What’s sexy about the uncanny valley to you?
You inadvertently flatter me with that question. The uncanny valley in this movie is, for me, something that is exhibited within Ava specifically in her movements. The way Ava moves is not robotic; it’s like a too-perfect version of how humans move. And in the perfection of those movements it feels a bit “other”. It’s quite hard to say why. I just feels a bit off, a bit “other.” The reason I’m saying you’re inadvertently flattering me is that, that had nothing to do with me at all. It was something Alicia Vikander arrived with. She was a ballerina since age 11 and she’s got incredible control of her physicality. The uncanny valley was brought here by Alicia as a way to approach playing this robot, and as soon as she said it I thought, “This is absolutely brilliant.

I’m trying to have a conversation, partly, about where gender resides. Is it in a mind, or is it in a physical form? Is there such a thing as a male or female consciousness, or is that a meaningless distinction? Maybe the gender resides in the external, physical form, or maybe in neither. There’s a broader question about what you call this creature: Do you say “he”, “she”, or “it”? It would be quite easy to present an argument saying Ava has no gender. That said, calling her “he” just feels wrong, with the way she looks. To use the word “it” feels disrespectful. You end up with “she”, and you end up with the strange thing of, is she a ‘she’? And just to be clear, of the questions that are posed in the film, some of them don’t have answers. But that doesn’t mean posing the question is wrong.

When it comes to sexuality, there’s a different thing going on there. Essentially, it’s about the fetishization of girls in their early twenties. Now, that’s not about gender; it’s a completely separate issue. I know there appears to be a Blue Beard narrative and a savior narrative in the film, but basically what you have is both a seeming protagonist and an audience being tasked with something, which is, “Tell us what is going on inside the mind of this being. Is it thinking?” Then, obstacles are presented to both the protagonist and the audience, which effectively get in the way of the question, “What is Ava thinking?” In the end, the thing the characters fail to do is establish what she’s actually thinking, and that allows her to trick them.

I think people are a little anxious and fearful of artificial intelligence, but you actually think it’s a good thing, perhaps even an improvement on human beings.
I do, and I also think that a lot of the stuff that’s perceived to be anxiety about artificial intelligence has actually got fuck-all to do with AI. There are two separate things going on: You’ve got Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk saying artificial intelligence is potentially really dangerous, being possibly anti-AI. And I’m talking about strong AI, not video games and mobile phones. That’s potentially true and potentially reasonable, but you could say the same thing about nuclear power. It’s potentially dangerous, and that doesn’t necessarily stop us from using it. The question is [about] how it’s used. With humans, it tends to be the case that, when something’s possible, we then do it.

The question to ask is not, “Should we do it or shouldn’t we do it?”, because we’re going to do it no matter what if it’s possible. The question is, “How are we going to deal with it when it happens?” That aside, I think a lot of the anxiety doesn’t actually come from AI. There have been a lot of stories about AI in film lately, from Transcendence, to my film, to Age of Ultron. There are tons of them that suggest this zeitgeist in the air. Why is that? Has there been any real breakthrough in AI? Not really. I think it’s probably got nothing to do with AI. I think it’s to do with tech companies. It’s because of our laptops and our phones. We don’t really understand these things, but they know a lot about us. So what you get is a sense of anxiety, either consciously or unconsciously. I think these AI stories are a consequence of that anxiety rather than anything specifically to do with AI.

There are a lot of little things Oscar does with his face that convey a lot to the viewer without giving anything away. Was that a conscious decision on your part?
People say a director got a performance out of an actor. I didn’t get any performances out of any actors. This is something Oscar brought because he’s an incredibly gifted actor. What I think you seek from an actor is that they will elevate everything to do with their character and find things that you never even thought of, improvements and stuff like that. That’s true of the DP, the production designer, the brilliant composers…and true of Oscar.

Does that suggest that you give your actors free rein on-set, or do you like to have some sort of collaboration?
The way I see it, I perceive myself as being a writer, primarily. I write the script and present it as a blueprint to people. Then, I’m not looking to control anybody. It’s almost like what you’d ideally want anarchy to be: a group of people, quite autonomous but also collaborative, working together with a shared goal. That’s my approach to filmmaking, broadly. I don’t like auteur theory. I find it boring and misleading and inaccurate a lot of the time. It’s definitely not what I am. I’m part of a team, and I like that. Years ago I used to work on books. You sit in a room, and you write a book. That’s “auteur.” There is no real comparison to working on a film with a lot of other people. Actually, the thing I dig about film is that it’s collaborative. That’s the pleasure in it.

Can you tell me more about the relationship between Oscar and Domhnall’s characters?
There are two things going on there. One is, [Nathan] is deliberately winding this guy up, presenting himself as something from which this machine needs to be rescued. He’s presenting himself as a bullying, misogynistic, predatory, violent man so this kid can rescue the machine from him. Now, there’s a question: Is that a complete confection? Is that just an act he’s doing? Or is he amplifying something that’s within his own character? That’s one of the hovering questions going on in the story. There’s another thing he’s doing, the “dude, bro” stuff. For me, it’s slightly trying to represent the way some tech companies try to represent themselves. It’s kind of like going, “Hey dude, hey bro, we’re pals! We’re a bunch of hipsters listening to music! By the way, can you give me all of your money and all your information? Thanks, dude!” That kind of speak cracked me up a bit.

So Domhnall’s character is administering a Turing Test…
Sort of. It’s pedantic, but it’s sort of a post-Turing Test. It’s a blind test. A Turing Test is really a test to see if you can pass the Turing Test. You can pass the Turing Test and not be sentient. What he’s saying is, this machine would pass the traditional form of the Turing Test; I want to know if I can show you it’s a machine, and you still think it’s sentient. It’s a step up.

There’s a kind of Turing Test going on between your team and the audience. You’re trying to convince the audience, through Alicia’s movements and visual effects, that she’s a synthetic thing walking around on-screen.
Initially. And hopefully, people are forgetting that.

Most of the legwork for the illusion is done by Alicia, but the visual effects are pretty incredibly. They had me stumped.
The effects are really brilliant, and they were run by this guy called Andrew Whitehurst, with a big team under him. I’ve met some really smart people in my life, [but with Andrew,] I did sometimes think, “You are literally the smartest guy I’ve ever met.” He has enormous creative instincts. I remember him saying early on, “I want to hang these plastic strips inside her torso that will diffuse light and make these structures inside her look slightly more mysterious.” It was a really subtle, nuanced idea that was very typical of him. Very late in post-production, there was a problem to do with the way the camera rendered pixels. It was going to cause us a huge problem, and he said, “I’ll fix this.” He wrote a bit of code that basically reworked the pixels and fixed it, and it fucking blows my mind that he’s able to do these things.

Can you comment on any movement for a Dredd sequel?
Not really. Not because it’s one of those coy things, like I’m demurely going to say “no.” It’s because there isn’t, as far as I can tell, going to be a Dredd sequel. The basic mechanics of film financing say, “If you make a film that loses a ton of money, you’re not going to get a sequel,” and that’s basically what happened. I understand and appreciate the support the film has had, the campaigns that have existed for it, and it’s extremely, genuinely gratifying. I love it in all respects except one, which is when I hear about people buying copies of the DVD in order to boost sales and change the figures. What I want to say to them is this: Don’t do that. Keep your money. The people who are making the decision are much colder and harder than that. The graphs they’re looking at aren’t going to be sufficiently dented by it. The support for the film is truly appreciated, but if there is going to be a sequel, it’s not going to be from me and the team who worked on the previous film. It’s going to be another bunch of people, and good luck to them. I hope it happens, and I hope they do a better job than we did.

A trailer for the directorial film debut from Alex Garland (writer of Sunshine, 28 Days Later, and the upcoming Halo film) is now up. Looks like Terminator: Genisys won’t be the only robot movie in theaters next year. Coming out next April, Ex Machina stars Domhnall Gleeson as Caleb, an internet programmer who wins a competition to spend a week at an out of the way mountain compound to meet with Oscar Isaac‘s robot scientist Nathan Bateman. Nathan has chosen Caleb to test his latest AI specimen, Ava, played by Alicia Vikander (with some Her-like smooth talking).

From there it looks like this ultra intelligent, and emotionally cognitive, robot messes with the minds of the men as Caleb tests (falls in love with) her. The movie looks to be filled with some great technicolored tension.

Check out the trailer below