Instead of going back and rereading it and underlining passages, I did an adaptation from my experience of having read it without going back to the book

If you start something strange, so not in suburbia — which let’s take suburbia as representing not strange, although of course it is — that’s a reach. What you find is that strangeness has a diminishing return. We’re sort of proximity-based creatures, and we get acclimatized to a state quite quickly. And so by the end of the film what was strange is no longer strange, it’s just the landscape in which you exist. And so it felt like it needed to be a progression from something.

Your screenplay and the book part ways. As someone who’s written screenplays that are faithful to the original material, like “Never Let me Go” and are semi-faithful like “Dredd,” you’ve said “Annihilation” was a chance to do a free-for-all. Why? Maybe freeform, rather than free-for-all. What I felt when I was reading the book was that reading it was a dream-like experience. In an adaptation like “Never Let Me Go,” I could cut and paste narrative. I couldn’t do that in “Annihilation.” It was the experience of reading the book that felt most relevant.

So I did something slightly odd with the permission of the writer — I hope I did — which was to do it as an adaptation that was a memory of the book. What that means is that sometimes the film correlates very closely and sometimes it doesn’t. So it really has a function of memory. And I thought that that was a way to be faithful to the thing that I experienced the most strongly, which was its dream-like nature.

This might sound strange, but think of a dream

There’s a debate about diversity and the role of women in a variety of industries. So I want to applaud you for saying it didn’t make a difference to you that “Annihilation” is about women scientists. It’s about scientists who happen to be women. It was an adaptation of the book and that is the case in the book. But it is true that it didn’t interest me. I thought that this was, to some extent, a reaction to “Ex Machina.” I thought the absence of the argument was the thing that was interesting. I don’t want to say more than that. It’s the absence of the argument that I found interesting.

I understand you did a lot of research for “Annihilation” and talked to geneticists about evolution, mutation. What’s the most important takeaway you want the easy Somerville payday loans people who watch it to have when it comes to the science? Not much. It’s not really science. It has an agenda, which is really about self-destruction. It’s more sort of metaphysical than science, I’d say. There is science in there to ground it. There is a principle. I’m saying that this film is dream-like. Dreams feel grounded in some strange kind of a way. So now this is a dream and to my right is a grand piano and a couple of moments later it’s a polar bear. And you don’t within the dream say, “Why is the grand piano now a polar bear?” It’s actually part of the dream logic, and it’s part of the dream you’re having, and it all makes sense.

And so, it felt important that the film had that strange sense of grounding in it. But it’s also like, not free-for-all, but freeform. It has that quality, as well. So It was a sort of mixture of the two. I wouldn’t really take the science too explicitly in some respects, although it’s there.