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The film is laden with resonant symbolism but evades simple interpretation; put plainly, its a real mindfuck.
Garland isnt inclined to dig too deeply into what it allmeans for his benefit or that of his audience.
Some are fairly literal: Hajime Isayamas hit anime,Attack on Titan, for example.
Or the sad-sack 90s rom-coms of screenwriter Richard Curtis.
Others are more abstract the impossibility of objective truth kind of abstract.
Below, Garland describes some of the images and influences that shapedMen.
But most of the Titans are drawn like political caricatures that you might see in a newspaper.
Its a bit like when youre in an edit and theres a very handsome actor onscreen.
Hes in mid-blink one eyelid slightly lower than the other.
His mouth is hanging open in a strange way.
Suddenly, hes not a handsome actor; hes just a human being.
I would periodically do research or drive up to a church that had one.
The more I started being aware of them, the more I realized how common they are.
Quite often with the Green Man, they made him benign.
He became a kindly forest god.
Id look at the carvings and think they looked angry like theyre screaming in pain.
And I thought,Im not going to go with a benign, cuddly Green Man.
As with all things, youre learning more about the person doing the interpreting than about the thing itself.
Im feeling skeptical about that at the moment.
A beautiful, green, perfect lawn.There was something hypnotizing about it.
I wanted the countryside and the house inMento have that bourgeois reassurance about it that comfort zone.
Somebody really does have a house like that.
Someone really does have a garden like that.
And for Jessie Buckleys character, Harper, its like,This is perfect.
This is what I dreamed it would be.
This is a place where I can be comforted, process, and get better.
Surrealism
Everything is surreal, and pretty much everything is open to interpretation.
Lawyers and judges their professional lives are based around the interpretation of sentences.
Laws are written to have a go at be clear, but we argue about their meaning incessantly.
And human life, as far as I can tell, is much more dreamlike than not.
Other people are surreal.
Things that happen to us in the course of our everyday lives have a deep strangeness to them.
We live in a much more imaginative space than we think we do.
Wehaveto believe thats all objective.
But we are all disagreeing constantly, strongly about almost everything, so clearly its notthatobjective.
I just think life is strange, and Im trying to reflect how strange life feels to me.
I dont feel that life is predictable and comfortable.
Its often unsettling and surprising, and it leaves me feeling uncertain about what is happening and why.
It always feels like surrealism is actually a pretty fair way of presenting a story.
It would be incredibly disingenuous to propose that the subject matter in this film is a modern phenomenon.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
