“The pressure doesn’t come from the money. It comes from the fact that you’re asking people to trust something that, on the face of it, doesn’t look very trustworthy.” He gives, as an example, sitting in a car park outside Atlanta, asking his Civil War cast to believe that one day the VFX blue screen behind them will be a night sky lit up by mortar fire. Or on Ex Machina where, “Alicia [Vikander] and Sonoya [Mizuno] are trusting that nudity is going to be dealt with thoughtfully and respectfully … [when] cinema leans towards not doing that.”

This is the deep sense of responsibility to cast and crew that “literally keeps me awake at night”.

He is always considered in his responses, typically offering up several alternative answers to a single question, and then self-reflexively evaluating the relative accuracy of each.

Garland’s sombre, anti-war stance doesn’t prevent Civil War from producing some awe-inspiring spectacles of US military might, with helicopters a recurring motif. “They’re very visceral objects and experiences,” he explains. “They make much more noise than people expect, and the noise has a kind of fast, heartbeat pulse in it, that your own pulse rate matches. I’ve done a lot of flying in helicopters for one reason or another. Not least work, actually.”

The film’s warning against our descent into dystopia is urgent and sincere, but it simultaneously declines to map out the specific arguments and ideas that might take us there. Why is Garland both-sidesing like this?

he recognises this as a potential misinterpretation of a film that posits “polarisation” as cause – not a symptom – of our current malaise

“What I’m usually doing in films is presenting more than one opinion, so it’s more like a conversation, rather than: ‘Do this, think that’. So there are several ways you could look at Ex Machina; as a film about sentience, or where gender resides, or objectification. The same is true of Men. And somewhere, coded within that, I will be taking a position. But I’ve tried to do it in a way that isn’t interrupting the conversation.”