Released in 2014, Ex Machina took a tiny budget, three actors and one very remote Norwegian hotel, and turned them into one of the smartest science-fiction films of the decade. Domhnall Gleeson’s Caleb wins a week with reclusive tech genius Nathan, played by Oscar Isaac, only to find himself testing whether Nathan’s creation – Alicia Vikander’s robotic Ava – is truly conscious. The result picked up an Oscar, launched Garland’s directing career, and gave us a dance scene that nobody who saw it has ever quite forgotten (certainly not us, anyway).

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1. The idea had been brewing in Garland’s head since childhood

Long before he was writing screenplays, Alex Garland was an eleven-year-old learning to program on a computer his parents had bought him, and turning over the question of whether a machine could ever really think. That preoccupation followed him into adulthood, where a friend who happened to be a neuroscientist took it upon himself to argue, repeatedly, that conscious AI was simply impossible. Computers, the argument went, start from a fundamentally different place than humans, and that gap can never be bridged.

Years later, while writing Dredd (2012), Garland picked up a book by cognitive roboticist Murray Shanahan called Embodiment and the Inner Life: Cognition and Consciousness in the Space of Possible Minds, and a new idea began to crystallise. Around the same time, producer Andrew Macdonald, head of DNA Films and a long-time Garland collaborator on the likes of The Beach (2000) and Sunshine (2007), gave him a challenge: write something nobody else would want to direct, and you can direct it yourself. Garland came back with Ex Machina.

2. One actor got the part via a surprise email

Domhnall Gleeson already had two Garland-written films under his belt, Never Let Me Go (2010) and Dredd, so the two were on friendly terms. Even so, he wasn’t expecting the email that landed in his inbox one day, with the entire script for Ex Machina attached. He read it in an hour, headed straight round to Garland’s house, and was told he was wanted for Caleb, but with a catch: this was a studio movie, so he’d have to audition like everyone else.

Gleeson didn’t need much persuading. “Alex is one of my favourites. I think he has a lot to say. Ex Machina was one of those films I’d always wanted to be in. I read it and thought, ‘I can’t believe I’m going to be in this.’” He was drawn, he said, to a script that was psychologically taut rather than just trying to be a cool sci-fi film. Which, in fairness, is what makes the whole thing work.

3. The second male lead had been on Garland’s radar for years

Oscar Isaac’s very first audition out of drama school was for science fiction thriller Sunshine, written by Garland and directed by Danny Boyle. Isaac didn’t get the part, but he became so obsessed with the script that, even after the rejection, he considered getting back in touch with Boyle just to suggest songs for the soundtrack. Mercifully for his career, he didn’t.

Garland never forgot him though, and when casting Ex Machina years later, he flew Isaac in to test for Nathan. The audition stuck, and the role of the brooding, alcoholic tech mogul went to a man who, on paper, was nothing like him.

4. Nathan was modelled on a chess prodigy and an iconic director

Garland has always insisted Nathan isn’t based on any real-world tech billionaire, and Isaac’s preparation backs that up. Rather than studying Silicon Valley CEOs, he watched hours of footage of legendary American chess grandmaster Bobby Fischer, and even took the game up himself for a while, looking for that combination of obsessive focus and total social weirdness.

The character’s look came from somewhere even more surprising. The shaved head, the heavy beard, the slightly Bronx-tinged delivery, all of that was Isaac channelling Stanley Kubrick. “When I think of a genius, I think of Kubrick,” he said. Garland fed him further reading too, sending across videos of public intellectuals Noam Chomsky and Daniel Dennett, both of whom have spent decades wrestling publicly with the question of consciousness.

5. There’s a practical reason Nathan looks the way he does

Costume designer Sammy Sheldon had her own theory about Nathan’s appearance. He’s been holed up in the mountains for years, completely fixated on his robots, and has long since stopped caring what he looks like. The skinhead, in her version, isn’t a style choice. He simply hadn’t cut his hair in years, and when he found out he was about to have a visitor, the easiest thing to do was take it all off in one go.

The beard, presumably, was a job for another day. Garland saw something else in Nathan too, namely a kinship with Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando) from Apocalypse Now (1979), Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam epic about a soldier who has gone fully off the reservation. Both men have isolated themselves from civilisation, both have started to see themselves as god-like figures, and only one of them, in fairness, was being played by an actor who could be bothered to learn his lines.

6. The actress portraying the AI turned up to her audition looking like a robot

Producer Andrew Macdonald said Alicia Vikander’s audition as Ava was on a different level entirely. She arrived with her hair scraped back, a full bottle of sunblock smeared across her face so her skin looked ghostly white, and a slash of brightly coloured eyeliner. She was, in her own words, “channelling her inner machine.”

It’s hard not to see a touch of Pris in there too, the unsettling replicant played by Daryl Hannah in Blade Runner (1982), all chalk-white skin and theatrical eyes. Whether or not it was deliberate, it worked.

7. Garland gave Vikander a simple note

The actress asked her director the question every actor playing an AI eventually has to ask: how does Ava actually feel inside? Does she feel like a woman, or is she only performing one in order to manipulate Caleb? Garland’s answer was characteristically slippery. He told her she could decide for herself, but added that whatever else was true, Ava definitely wants to be a woman.

Garland’s other key piece of direction to Vikander came early on. Don’t play her as sexual, he said. Play her like a newborn doe, something the audience will instinctively want to protect. It’s why we fall for Ava so completely, and why the film’s final stretch hits as hard as it does. Looking back, though, you’re left wondering how much of that vulnerability was ever real.

8. Vikander’s background as a dancer shaped every movement

Before she ever stood in front of a camera, Vikander spent years training as a classical dancer, and that discipline turned out to be perfect preparation for playing a machine. She could hold herself eerily still when she needed to, and could make her movements just slightly too clean and controlled to pass as fully human.

Watch the way Ava glides across a room, or the moment late on when she sprints down a corridor with absurdly perfect form, like an Olympic gymnast doing a floor routine. None of that is acting in the conventional sense. It’s muscle memory from a lifetime at the barre.

9. Nathan’s house isn’t in Alaska, and isn’t really one house

In the film, Nathan’s glass-walled compound sits somewhere in the wilds of Alaska. In reality, the exterior is the Juvet Landscape Hotel in Norway, a remote retreat that proudly advertises itself as being in the middle of nowhere, with the closest airport a full sixty miles away. They don’t even bother serving lunch, and instead encourage guests to raid the breakfast buffet for portable supplies.

Production designer Mark Digby actually used two separate buildings for Nathan’s home, but cleverly chose two that had been designed by the same architectural firm, Jensen and Skodvin, so the cuts between them feel seamless. As such, you’d never know it was two different locations stitched into one.

10. The Ava sessions weren’t shot in Norway at all

Garland’s original script had Caleb and Ava’s conversations playing out either side of a thick glass barrier, more or less the way prison meetings get staged in films, with both characters speaking through telephone handsets. Mark Digby pushed for something less restrictive, suggesting a larger room divided by a screen so that Ava could move around freely.

It was the right call. Those sessions were actually shot on a set built at Pinewood Studios in England, with the spectacular Norwegian backdrops added in later as digital extensions of blue screen plates. Confining Ava behind a single pane of glass may have made the whole film feel airless. Letting her pace the room makes her feel like a creature with somewhere to go.

11. The colour scheme is a hidden tribute to computers

Pay attention to the lighting and you’ll notice the same three colours keep coming back. Red floods the corridors during every power cut. The forest outside is a deep, saturated green. And the keypads on Nathan’s doors glow a cold electric blue. None of that is accidental, it’s a nod to the RGB colour model, the red-green-blue trio that every computer screen on Earth uses to render an image.

12. The title is a riff on a very old theatrical trick

Garland has said the film is set “ten minutes from now,” close enough to the present that if Google or Apple announced tomorrow they’d built Ava, we’d all be surprised, but not that surprised. The title comes from the Latin phrase “deus ex machina,” meaning “god from the machine,” which dates back to ancient Greek tragedies.

The original deus ex machina was a literal piece of stagecraft. An actor playing a god, or a prop standing in for one, would be lowered onto the stage by a crane to resolve whatever impossible mess the plot had got itself into. Calling something a deus ex machina ending these days is usually meant as a criticism. In Garland’s film, it’s the whole point.

13. The three lead characters all have biblical names

The names aren’t there by accident. Ava is a variant of Eve, the first woman in the book of Genesis. Nathan was a prophet from the book of Kings who had a habit of telling powerful men exactly what they didn’t want to hear. And Caleb was one of the spies sent by Moses to scout out the Promised Land. There’s also a sly nod to computing history in there, with Ava said to be a tip of the hat to Ada Lovelace, the nineteenth-century mathematician who worked with Charles Babbage on his Analytical Engine, generally regarded as the great-grandparent of the modern computer.

Then there’s Lily, the AI prototype Nathan built before Ava, glimpsed in that haunting later montage. In Jewish folklore, before God created Eve, there was Lilith, the first woman, who was banished after she refused to be subservient to Adam. Garland is not exactly hiding his references.

14. The film is haunted by Robert Oppenheimer

Pay attention and you’ll catch a recurring thread running through the film about the atomic bomb. Caleb, early on, quotes Robert J. Oppenheimer, the American physicist who led the Manhattan Project that built the first nuclear weapons, when he tells Nathan, “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” Later, when Nathan is several drinks deep, he begins reciting from the Bhagavad Gita, the Hindu scripture from which Oppenheimer himself reportedly drew that exact line after watching the Trinity bomb test in 1945.

Garland is making a fairly pointed argument here. The invention of artificial intelligence, in his telling, sits in roughly the same moral territory as the splitting of the atom. A leap forward so enormous that the people making it can’t quite see what they’re unleashing until it’s already in the world.

15. There’s a very deliberate piece of music playing when Caleb arrives

When Caleb first lands at Nathan’s compound, listen carefully to what’s playing as he gets ready. It’s “Enola Gay” by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, the British synth-pop band better known as OMD. Released in 1980, the song takes its name from the B-29 bomber that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in August 1945.

So in the space of a single needle drop, Garland is connecting his quiet little chamber piece to the most consequential weapon ever built. It’s a bleak thematic flag to plant five minutes into your movie. (It’s also, in fairness, a great track.)

16. Nathan’s search engine is named after a philosopher’s notebooks

Nathan’s wildly successful search engine company is called Blue Book, and on first watch you’d be forgiven for assuming it’s a glib reference to Google or Facebook. The truth is more interesting. It’s a nod to Ludwig Wittgenstein, the Austrian-British philosopher of mathematics and language whose work in the early twentieth century reshaped how we think about meaning itself.

In the 1930s, Wittgenstein dictated a series of lectures to his students at Cambridge, and the notes from those sessions were later compiled and published as The Blue Book. For a film about whether language can ever truly capture what’s going on inside another mind, it’s the most loaded company name imaginable.

17. The thought experiments Nathan name-checks are real

When Nathan starts firing philosophical riddles at Caleb, he isn’t making any of them up. The story of Mary in the Black and White Room comes from Australian philosopher Frank Jackson, and asks whether someone who has only ever experienced the world in monochrome could ever truly know what colour is, even if they understood every scientific fact about it. The Chinese Room is the work of American philosopher John Searle, who argued that a machine could only ever simulate understanding, never genuinely possess it.

Searle’s position, in other words, is that something like Ava could never really exist. A great many scientists disagree with him. And so, obviously, does Garland.

18. The art on Nathan’s walls is doing a lot of work

The painting hanging in Nathan’s room is a portrait of Margarethe Stonborough-Wittgenstein by Austrian symbolist Gustav Klimt. Margarethe was the sister of Ludwig Wittgenstein, the same philosopher Nathan’s company is secretly named after. And when Nathan starts musing about automatic art and the moment before conscious thought kicks in, the painting he gestures at is No. 5, 1948 by Jackson Pollock, the American abstract expressionist who turned drips and splatters into one of the most divisive art movements of the twentieth century.

There was originally another Pollock beat too. In a deleted scene, Nathan tells Caleb he bought the original No. 5, made a perfect replica, then burnt one of them at random and now genuinely doesn’t know which is which.

19. The composers came to the film via a project they got fired from

The score for Ex Machina was written by Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury, an unusual pairing on paper. Barrow is a founding member of the British trip-hop pioneers Portishead, while Salisbury had built a career scoring nature documentaries. Ex Machina was their first feature credit together, and they ended up working with Garland because of a job that had gone disastrously wrong a couple of years earlier.

Garland had been put in touch with Barrow during pre-production on Dredd, after someone mentioned Barrow was a huge fan of the Judge Dredd comics. Barrow brought Salisbury along, the two of them wrote a complete score, and then the studio stepped in. Several elements of the film had to change, the music among them. Barrow and Salisbury were quietly replaced by composer Paul Leonard-Morgan, but Garland felt awful about how it had ended and promised them his next film. He was as good as his word.

20. Their Dredd music ended up as a cult album

One small consolation prize for Barrow and Salisbury was that they’d retained the rights to the music they’d written for Dredd. Rather than let it sit in a drawer, they polished it up and released it as a standalone album under the title Drokk: Music Inspired by Mega-City One. It’s genuinely terrific, all cold synths and creeping dread, and it has gone on to develop a devoted following among soundtrack collectors who never got to hear it in the film it was made for.

Sometimes the best revenge is just releasing the album anyway.

21. The cinematographer was hired off the back of a TV movie

Director of photography Rob Hardy was on his thirteenth feature when he came aboard, but it was the first time he’d ever worked with Garland. He landed the job because of Red Riding: 1974 (2009), a stark, rain-soaked British TV thriller he’d shot a few years earlier. Garland watched it, was floored by the visuals, and offered Hardy Ex Machina on the strength of that one piece of work.

Their visual references were unusual too. Hardy and Garland looked closely at Russian artist Kazimir Malevich, the early twentieth-century pioneer of geometric abstraction, and at American photographer and painter Saul Leiter, whose intimate, soft-focus colour street photography from 1950s New York has aged into proper masterpiece territory. Leiter’s influence is the easier one to spot, in the way the film keeps playing with focus and lets foreground objects blur into impressionistic colour.

22. Ava’s look came from a comic book artist

The basic visual design of Ava was the work of Mark Simpson, a Scottish comic book artist who works under the name Jock and built his name on titles for British anthology weekly 2000 AD, the same magazine that gave the world Judge Dredd. Garland had hired him as a concept artist on Dredd, the two had hit it off, and when it came time to design Nathan’s creation, Jock was the obvious call.

The brief Garland gave him was unusually specific. He wanted something that made sense in a “post-Apple world,” as he put it, a robot that felt like a high-end consumer product rather than a clanking metal man. The very last thing he wanted was something that looked like C-3PO from Star Wars (1977) waddling into shot.

23. The other designers were chosen for surprising reasons

Garland’s habit of hiring the right people from unexpected places didn’t stop at Jock. Costume designer Sammy Sheldon got the gig because of her work on superhero films like Kick-Ass (2010) and X-Men: First Class (2011). The skin-fitting suit she had to design for Vikander wasn’t all that different, mechanically speaking, from a superhero costume.

Visual effects supervisor Andrew Whitehurst, meanwhile, took the most counterintuitive approach of all. He banned his team from looking at any pictures of robots whatsoever, and instead handed out reference images of Formula 1 car suspension and high-concept motorbikes. The point was to get away from anything that already looked like an existing robot, and toward something that felt engineered from the ground up.

24. Every shot of Ava needed visual effects work

The London-based effects studio Double Negative, the team behind the heavy lifting on the likes of Inception (2010) and Interstellar (2014), had to work on every single frame Ava appears in, transforming Vikander’s actual costume into the see-through mesh body we see on screen. Complicating things further, the film was shot on a Sony F65 with an anamorphic lens, which meant Ava was subtly distorted in the frame whenever she drifted slightly out of focus.

The solution was to use motion-control cameras and shoot every Ava scene twice, once with Vikander in the frame and once on an empty set, so the digital body could be added in cleanly afterwards. What you see is a stitched-together hybrid: Vikander’s face, hands and feet are real, while the semi-transparent torso and skull are entirely the work of Double Negative. You’d swear she was real.

25. There were some properly old-school practical effects too

For all the digital wizardry, plenty of Ex Machina’s most squirm-inducing moments were done in camera. The shot of Caleb slicing his arm open to see if he himself is a machine, the moment Nathan is stabbed, all of that was achieved with practical effects on the day. Vikander’s makeup was the most punishing job of all. The illusion of skin folding back over the rear of her skull required a roughly three-hour application every single morning.

26. There’s a buried reference that almost nobody will spot

In the moment Caleb sits down at Nathan’s computer and starts typing code on screen, the program he writes is something called the Sieve of Eratosthenes, an ancient algorithm for finding prime numbers, named after the Greek mathematician who first worked it out around 200 BC. The prime numbers it spits out aren’t random. Lined up in order, they form the International Standard Book Number of Embodiment and the Inner Life by Murray Shanahan, the very book that helped inspire the film in the first place.

Nobody is spotting that on a casual viewing. Nobody is spotting that on a careful viewing either, frankly.

27. The film originally had a very different final shot

Garland shot an alternative ending that he later cut. After Ava walks calmly up to the helicopter pilot in the closing minutes, the original plan was to switch to her point of view, so we’d see the world the way she sees it. The pilot’s face, in this version, would have been rendered as pulses and soundwaves rippling out into the air, a visual representation of how an AI parses sound rather than hears it.

Why it was cut isn’t entirely clear. The smart money is on budget, since the film was working with very little to begin with. It’s a shame, all the same. There’s something genuinely chilling about ending on a reminder that whatever just walked off into the world isn’t remotely like us.

28. The film’s box office punched well above its weight

Made for a slim $15 million, Ex Machina went on to gross $37.3 million worldwide. That isn’t blockbuster numbers, but for an indie sci-fi film with three actors, one location, and no recognisable franchise to lean on, it was a serious result. Combine that with the kind of word-of-mouth reviews most studios would mortgage their headquarters for, and you have a debut feature that effectively bought Garland the keys to whatever he wanted to do next.

29. It walked off with an Oscar nobody saw coming

Come awards season, Garland was nominated for Best Original Screenplay at the Academy Awards, only to lose out to Spotlight (2015). The bigger surprise came in the Visual Effects category, where Ex Machina, with its $15 million budget and a tiny in-house team, beat out the likes of Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015), Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) and The Martian (2015) to take home the gold. A reminder, if any were needed, that the size of your VFX bill and the quality of your VFX work are not always the same thing.

30. The legacy is as strong as the reception

A decade on, Ex Machina still holds a 92% critics’ approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with an audience score of 86%. On IMDb, it sits at a healthy 7.7 out of 10, which leaves it just short of breaking into the site’s Top 250. More importantly, it’s become one of those films people keep returning to as the real-world conversation around AI gets louder and stranger. The questions it asks, about consciousness, manipulation, and what we owe to the things we create, have aged terrifyingly well.

Garland’s debut still feels less like a film made in 2014 and more like a memo from the very near future. “Ten minutes from now,” as he put it, looks closer than ever.

That’s a wrap on Nathan, Caleb and Ava. If you enjoyed this trip through the making of Ex Machina, head over and subscribe to All The Right Movies on YouTube for more deep dives into the films you love.