Wrecks on the beach

Alex Garland doesn't care to have his photograph taken. In fact, you get the impression he doesn't enjoy any part of the PR process surrounding the release of a movie. The neat, quietly-spoken 29-year-old author of The Beach - one of the most commercially successful debut novels of the last few years, and now, as they say, "a major motion picture", is sitting with the film's screenwriter, John Hodge, in the Shelbourne Hotel, musing on his experiences of the last couple of years.

"It has been a steep learning process, and it's far from over," he says. "It seems that a lot of the cliches that you've heard, at first they don't seem to be true, then they seem absolutely true, with a surreal edge to them as well."

If you haven't heard of The Beach by now, then you obviously haven't been paying attention. Stacked high in airport bookshops, Garland's cautionary tale of utopia-gone-wrong on a remote Thai island has shifted millions of copies and become as indispensable a part of many holidays as sunscreen and shades - a sort of John Grisham for the chemical generation. "In the first 10 months it sold about 12,000 copies, then with the paperback release it took off and sold that much in a day," he recalls. "It was word-of-mouth. Once that starts, it's the most powerful thing."

With its Zeitgeisty pop-cultural mix of drugs, movies, video games and music, its exotic tropical locations and, crucially, its young, male hero, The Beach was always going to attract the attention of the film business. "I was getting approached, bizarrely, before the book even came out," recalls Garland. "There are people who make a living out of just standing by the photocopier in publishers, and sending things off to some scout. That was the start of the learning process - the first thing I found out was that an option was worth about £2,000, so that sort of lottery ticket dream you might have about movie rights doesn't really apply.

"Then you start to be faced with the sort of excesses involved in changing a book into a film. You'd have conversations with people who said they'd love to make the film, but that all the characters would be changed to American. They'd need to have some sort of subplot, to explain this bit, or they didn't want to include that bit. Given that we were only talking about £2,000 it wasn't that hard for me to wait; in fact it was quite easy. Trainspotting was a phenomenon around that time, so when I got a call from those guys, that sounded a lot better."

Hodge, director Danny Boyle and producer Andrew MacDonald were just completing A Life Less Ordinary, their third film together (and first flop) after Shallow Grave and Trainspotting. They were looking for a project with "international appeal", something to move them further into the mainstream, and The Beach fitted the bill perfectly.

Although Garland is always polite about the resulting movie, he doesn't give the impression of being ecstatic about it, and there's a touch of wistfulness in his voice when he admits that he would have loved Taiwanese director Ang Lee to have made the film. You can see what he means - where Lee, with his concerns with human relationships and social ritual, might have been expected to concentrate on the idealistic but flawed community which comes together on the secret beach, the Hodge-Boyle-Macdonald team have focused on the central character to the near-exclusion of everything else. Not a surprise, really, especially since a certain Leonardo DiCaprio is in the role. As the character teeters on the verge of mental collapse, DiCaprio's performance becomes increasingly over-the-top, and the film's style gets more extreme, culminating in a fantasy Vietnam war sequence in the form of a video game.

"That sequence was Leo's idea," says Hodge. "His principal concerns with the script were always to do with taking his character to the limits of his possible behaviour. He was interested in exploring what this character, isolated up there on the hilltop, might do. We were a bit worried it might end up like something in Natural Born Killers, but I think it ends up working within the context. It is a strong cultural reference for all young males of that generation."

Garland's book is deeply sardonic about the whole backpacker culture in south-east Asia, its shallowness and obsession with instant gratification. Having been in Thailand myself last year, and observed that every second tourist seemed to be toting a copy of The Beach, I wonder what he thinks of the fact that the book, and now the film, are now prime artefacts of the tourist industry he despises.

"I used to berate myself for not making some of the more cynical aspects of the book clearer," he says. "And then after a point I realised that to make it so clear that everybody got the point, you would invalidate everything else you were trying to do. So I stopped berating myself. I certainly don't think most people would see it as a celebration of the travel scene."

Hodge argues that "you can credit readers and viewers with some intelligence. They're perfectly capable of saying: `Yeah it's about us', but at the same time no one's suggesting we should all stop going to Thailand. I don't think the tourist culture makes much of an impact on Thai culture." Garland agrees. "The Thais are incredibly good at compartmentalising things. They will allow within reason anything to develop in an area, as long as it stays in that area, and if it spreads out of those areas, they'll come down like a ton of bricks. That's why if you go to the prison in Bangkok, you'll find lots of white faces who've transgressed or stepped outside of those boundaries."

The subculture of Western backpacking in Asia is something Garland is very familiar with. From the age of 17, he says, travelling was the focus of his life for years. "That's not to say that most of every year was spent there, but most of my time was spent figuring out how I was going to get the money and how I was going to get there. That would have been a daily preoccupation while I was in university in England. I could work through Christmas and get away at Easter, and the summer break was very long so I could work for the first while and make enough money to get there. Term time was spent writing about where I'd been."

"At the time, I remember feeling very strongly that I wouldn't be able to do this in 10 years, when I was 30, because I'd be married or whatever, so I had to do it now. That would have been true for me if I hadn't written the novel . . . I was lucky in that respect, but now, ironically, I spend a lot of time trying to avoid those countries." He still spends a lot of time in the Phillippines, the setting for his second novel, The Tesseract.

"The first place in Asia I went to was India, and I've noticed a completely different breed of backpackers there. They were interested in slightly hippy ideas of spirituality and discovering themselves. The cliche in India was going to Goa or an ashram and discovering yourself for a couple of weeks with a guru. In Thailand, it was either going on to Vietnam or Cambodia, or taking E at a full moon party. It was more edgy, more adventurous."

And more overtly hedonistic? "Absolutely, but it seemed when I was 17 that hedonism was a buzzword. Suddenly every 16-year-old understood what that word meant. I remember thinking that the kind of backpackers you get in Thailand were influenced by that rather than hippy spirituality. To me it grows out of Thatcherism. I know that sounds pretentious, but I do actually think that's where it's from. The rave scene was about lots of little Thatcherites pretending that they had a sense of individualism, but it all being really about consensus.

"One of the things that the film really got was when you see Bangkok at the start and it looks kind of exciting and fun. Then you see that sort of party scene later in the film, and the pulsing basslines and all that ugliness make you recoil. To me it explains very successfully why these people will go to such lengths to protect this place."

The Beach is on general release from next Friday