Colm McCarthy has the future on his mind. The director of the new zombie picture, The Girl with All the Gifts, may be celebrating his feature film debut, but the veteran of prestige British genre television (his credits include the second series of “Peaky Blinders” and “Sherlock”) has a clear idea of where he thinks we’re going—not just where the film industry or certain genres are headed, but the human race collectively.
I spoke with McCarthy over the phone recently. What began as a discussion of the nitty-gritty parts of his film quickly shifted into something broader, like how human consciousness will one day be stored on computers.
In McCarthy’s upcoming film, humans in the United Kingdom (and presumably abroad) who encounter a new spore-like fungus become feverish to the point of mindlessness. They become rabid zombies, which the uninfected members of the military call “hungries.” But these hungries are changing, blurring the lines between what is human and what is zombie. They’re becoming something else entirely. There’s a new race represented by a second generation of human-zombie hybrids led by preteen Sennia Nanua as Melanie, a bright and eager-to-please little kid who nonetheless wishes to eat human flesh. She bridges the gap between the dying humans and the ascendant hungries.
“I think the thing we wanted to investigate was what it means to be a human being, of what being a human means,” McCarthy said. “Would the creatures having a symbiotic relationship with this fungus, would they be humans? Can we call them humans? How does that work? That was kind of the idea we were investigating with that: What it would mean.”
The surviving humans in The Girl with All the Gifts’ main cast aren’t too concerned with philosophical questions about evolution when they’re running for their lives during a frantic sequence at a military base/scientific research center. The action scene seems to have been shot in a long, unbroken take, much like the work of Alfonso Cuarón. McCarthy said that was on purpose, but he and his crew were able to meld emerging technology with intensive planning (it capped three weeks of rehearsals) to pull off the magic trick.
“Children of Men was a big reference for me in terms of the unblinking eye and all of that stuff—the long, continuous takes,” McCarthy said. “With that big scene at the base, we didn’t have the resources that you see in the final cut. An awful lot of the people onscreen are digital constructs or recorded elements that have been added to the shot. All of the gunshots in the movie are virtual. We still required a lot of rehearsal time just to get [lead actress] Sennia [Nanua], who’s a 12-year-old girl, into the mode of being able to activate, behave like this kind of wild creature.”
Wild creatures fighting back against humanity is a staple of sci-fi and dystopian fiction, and McCarthy’s film does not shy away from an environmental message. The main threat to humanity in the movie is a giant spore colony suddenly bursting and infecting the rest of the people who hadn’t already been turned by hungry bites. McCarthy said society’s lack of response to climate change shows we’re not too far off from something like his movie happening in real life.
“I think it’s a little bit of a worry at the time, the environment, in terms of what’s happening. America’s a leading force in the rebalancing of the environment. That’s changing currently under the new administration there. It’s a worrying time. I think the fundamental mistake that people make when they’re talking about environmental issues is they talk about taking care of the planet.”
But McCarthy said he has a kind of hope for life to go on—even though it may not necessarily be human life.
“One of the ideas that we express in the film is, the planet will be okay,” he said. “It’s the human race that we’re likely to damage with what we’re doing. What we’re likely to do is make the planet uninhabitable for us, not destroy planet Earth.”
McCarthy’s ideas about evolution extend to his vision for the future of genre storytelling, which he said was cyclical in its popularity.
“I think that you look at the ‘60s and ‘70s Westerns and that was like a revival of a form that’s heyday was the ‘20s and ‘30s,” he said. “The same with gangster films. You know, gangster films were very popular and died out, came back in the ‘80s. I think zombies provide a good base to tell particular kinds of stories we want to tell. At the moment, I think dystopian films, of which zombie films are a subgenre of that—the apocalypse—the ends of the world stuff are going to continue to be popular as long as that’s something that people are stressing about.”
McCarthy said that he doesn’t necessarily see artists as the ones driving conversations. They respond to the mood of society at the time they create stories.
“Storytellers will desire to tell stories that investigate that world in which the audience will want to hear them,” he said. “As long as something’s in the public imagination, the general consciousness, as it is at the moment because we’re flirting with annihilation.”
He sees a lot of parallels between the world he saw as a youngster and the world of today.
“I grew up a teenager in the ‘80s,” he said. “What me and most of my friends thought was the most likely thing to happen was nuclear warfare between America and Russia, the Cold War ending in Armageddon. There were a lot of stories and films—Terminator, whatever—playing with that idea. It was a very popular idea in the public consciousness at that time. We’re back into those kinds of stories now in a big way. Stories that the end of the world, where the world won’t exist anymore, are popular right now because we live in a world right now where the threat, the temperature is rising on global tension.”
But you know what? Tensions cooled for a while as McCarthy and his friends went to college and entered adulthood. It’s always possible things can calm down again in the near future, right?
And if things get worse? We’ll just put our brains into robots, McCarthy said.
“It’s only a matter of time before the human consciousness is downloadable onto a hard drive and able to be set up with an operating system working the way the human mind does,” he said. “Fundamentally, the level of understanding of the human mind is essentially a binary computer. Synapses are either on or they’re off, they’re a one or a zero. So, it depends on what you hope for. I think if you continue Aristotle and have those ideas continue to hold over by some form of consciousness, that’s a continuation of human thinking and that’s a continuation of the human race.”
“Not everybody would see it that way, maybe,” he added. But hey, if McCarthy’s proven right about our computer brains, it sure sounds like a better fate than the human race in his zombie nightmare film, which is available now.
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