It looks like you’ve made a number of changes from the book to the film. What were those key changes?
GARLAND: It’s just a different set of preoccupations. I’ve worked on some very faithful adaptations that are like holding a mirror up to the source material. Never Let You Go – which I adapted a few years ago – was really a very faithful adaptation… I did another adaptation, Dredd, which was a semi-faithful adaptation. It was very faithful to a character but less faithful to the world. This is probably more of a free for all. It’s a very dreamlike, very beautiful novel and it worked well for my purposes. I loved what [author] Jeff [VanderMeer] had done but one thing I know… Years ago I used to work as a novelist and I know that novels & films are independent of each other.
The book is fairly open-ended. Does the movie answer any of the questions the book raises?
GARLAND: The movie has its own questions. Some of which… the fundamental questions that the film poses, it does answer. When I wrote this – I knew there was going to be a trilogy [of books] but I hadn’t read the other two books. They hadn’t been written so I saw this as a contained thing. I tend to think of stories as contained things, not necessarily requiring further stories. The novel, though, was written very consciously as the first part. It’s a short novel. Jeff very clearly had the intention that he would be unfolding the story as it went along. I had the intention of completing the story.
Now that there are two more [books], do you want to continue that story along with him?
GARLAND: I’m more interested in contained stories.