Hello and I'm Chris and I'm joined by Dan this week and we also have a very special guest in the shape of Alex Garland.

Welcome to the podcast, Alex.

Thank you very much.

Let's give Alex a bit of an intro.

He's the writer of The Beach, the Tesseract, The Coma.

He wrote the video game Enslaved and also movie-wise 28 days later, Sunshine, Never Let Meckinah, which is coming out in the UK next week on January 21st.

Dan and I have had the privilege of seeing it and thoroughly enjoyed it, so let's kick off by talking

about that.

Alex, where did the inspiration and the idea for this one come from? I think way way back it probably

came from having a ZX spectrum and doing very simple programs, you know, line 10, print hello, line 20, go to line 10 or

something like that and trying to make a computer say something and realizing it's not saying anything and just sort of puzzling over that and

maybe doing a very simple sort of Q&A type program and making the computer feel slightly

more alive but also realizing it might feel more alive but the gulf between that and actually being what we are is still

sort of impossibly huge.

And I think that never really left me.

I stayed interested in,

or I became interested in AIs,

and if you're interested in AIs you also end up being interested in brains

human consciousness because the problems of AI and the problems of consciousness are

basically the same and or at least very related.

And eventually I was in prep. I was working on the previous film I worked on

Dredd. I was in prep and and previous film I worked on Dread.

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