Alex Garland explains how he ended up ghost-directing Dredd (2025)

Alex Garland is really cooking as of late. Over the last year, he’s dropped a provocative hypothetical scenario with Civil War and has just co-directed another unconventional war movie, Warfare, which he made in collaboration with Iraq War veteran Ray Mendoza. He also reunites with Danny Boyle for the now hotly anticipated post-apocalyptic sequel 28 Years Later. Garland recently sat down with GQ to reflect on his notable films and he would talk about a movie that he isn’t credited on as a director — 2012’s Dredd. Garland would reveal that he had actually directed a significant amount of the film for complicated reasons.

When talking about his directorial debut, Ex Machina, Garland revealed that it is a bit of a fib that the movie is considered his first directing job. Garland said, “In truth, what happened, just to be candid about it, look, a lot of time has passed, I did end up on some films essentially doing ghost-directing.” Fast forward to the segment on Dredd. Garland prefaces, “In TV, the writer/showrunner has the kind of authorship button handed to them, and in film, it’s the director who has that. They can’t both be true simultaneously.” Then, he continued, “Television is not so much different from film that magically it’s the writer/showrunner and now magically it’s the director, and some people I’m working with, their principle was ‘Well, why don’t we take that concept from television and use it in film.’ For complicated reasons that just didn’t work. It just created a bloody mess.”

In a roundabout way, Garland admits that he had to take over for Dredd‘s Pete Travis and conveys that he did it begrudgingly while giving Travis some due credit, “Within this is a disservice to Pete Travis, who is the credited director, who did some fundamental/crucial things, and he deserves that title. He was put in an absolutely impossible situation, and retrospectively, the longer I’ve worked, the more ridiculous I think it was. After the experience of making ‘Dredd’, what I said is I’m not doing that again. Just let me do that job, let’s simpify this.”

You can view this segment below with the timecode cued.

Source: GQ