A few weeks ago, I reviewed NEVER LET ME GO – a film that seems to have slipped under the radar for audiences at large. One thing I found interesting in discussing the film further, was the way the conversation often came back to one particular plot point.

This brought a huge smile to my face when I listened to a recent episode of The Creative Screenwriting Podcast, in which screenwriter Alex Garland and novelist Kazuo Ishiguro discussed the story.

The plot point in particular is wickedly spoilerish, so I’ve hidden it below the jump. So if you’ve seen the film, or if you’re just insatiably curious, click below and check out what the writers have to say.

The question at hand was, “When Tommy and Kathy discover that there’s no way out of fulfilling their donations, why don’t they just make a run for it?

The answer goes like so…

Alex Garland: “In almost all cinema – across genres – they always escape. Once you become aware of it, it becomes like someone eating popcorn behind you (you can’t get it out of your head). It’s like a hypnotic need between audiences and filmmakers working together, again and again. It’s extraordinary how required it is by cinema.

In the real world, people don’t escape. It’s as simple as that. Some people do, brave people do, but a lot of people don’t escape from their marriage, or their job. Whatever it is that is holding them down, and internally if they’re honest with themselves they know it’s wrong, but they’ll stick with it. There seems to just be something very human about that.

I spoke with a doctor who works with cancer patients, and he said that you would think when a person is given a terminal diagnosis, that they’ll want to go see the pyramids, and bungee jump, but he said they don’t. they want their lives to continue as it was before for as long as it possibly can.

That struck me as being very true – I could feel the truth in it. I’m sure that it’s not true across the board, I’m just saying it’s a general truth. So it felt very important to me that this whole escape thing wasn’t acknowledged.”

Kazuo Ishiguro: “I suppose one answer is that i wasn’t interested in a story about people who ran away. I’m fascinated by the extent that people don’t run away. Perhaps we think people run away more than they do because we just get this repetition in stories. It’s almost as if we have to keep telling ourselves that the human spirit demands escape or rebellion all the time. But the sad truth is that when you look through human history, it tells completely the reverse.

Slavery went on for centuries, and it didn’t end because the slaves rebelled. The Holocaust didn’t come to an end because The Jews rebelled and fought back: It ended because The Allies invaded occupied Europe. People are remarkably accepting of their fate.

I wouldn’t want to say that (people running) is a lie perpetuated by cinema, but the accumulative effect of having story after story where we expect the spirit of escape to triumph I think is odd.

The other thing is, ultimately I wanted this to be a metaphor for human beings caught in the fact that they have a limited lifespan. We’re mortal, and that is the case for every one of us. there’s no escaping from that hand that’s been dealt to every one of us. If we’re lucky, we’ll make it to 80 or 90 years. That’s really what I wanted to address.

This story was supposed to be a concertina version of a natural human lifespan. How do you fit in love and friendship – what really matters – as time starts to run away and you realize you haven’t really got very much longer.”