Gareth Edwards burst onto the film scene with the fantastic Monsters back in 2010. The low-budget, high emotional tale of a couple connecting during an alien occupation caught the attention of the big studios. Edwards was quickly rushed into the corporation machine. He followed up Monsters in 2014 with a reboot of Godzilla before directing Star Wars prequel Rogue One in 2016. After that the filmmaker took a well earned break, but returns this week with new sci-fi action epic, The Creator.
Starring John David Washington and Madeleine Yuna Voyles, The Creator is set amidst a future war between the human race and the forces of artificial intelligence. Joshua (Washington), a hardened ex-special forces agent grieving the disappearance of his wife (Gemma Chan), is recruited to hunt down and kill the Creator, the elusive architect of advanced AI who has developed a mysterious weapon with the power to end the war… and mankind itself. Joshua and his team of elite operatives journey across enemy lines into the dark heart of AI-occupied territory… only to discover that the world-ending weapon that he has been instructed to destroy is an AI in the form of a young child (Voyles).
Last week THN were present at the virtual press conference for the film. What follows is everything that we learned about the project.
The Idea Came During a Trip to Iowa
When asked how the idea came to be, Edwards said that there were many ways of explaining the origin, though the one he remembers most clearly is tied to a trip to Idaho. He shared that he and his girlfriend decided to do a roadtrip to visit her parents. At the time he wasn’t expecting to think about a new film, but the tall grass and farmland areas around him got the creative juices going:
“We went through this tall grass, sort of farmland area. There was this factory that went by and it had what looked like a Japanese logo on it. I thought, just ’cause the way I’m wired, in science fiction, I wonder what they’re doing in there? I was thinking, imagine being a robot built in a factory and you step outside the factory for the first time. All you’ve ever seen is inside this building. And then suddenly you see grass and the trees and the sky. What would that feel like? I thought that’s a cool little moment in a film, but I don’t know what that would be… It kept coming back the rest of the trip. I started building on the idea. By the time we got to my girlfriend’s parents’ house, I kinda had the basics of the whole movie mapped out, which is really rare.”
The reason The Creator is America versus New Asia over any other county
The Creator places America and New Asia on opposing sides, but what was it about the continent of Asia that made it fit the story? It wasn’t an immediate set-up that Edwards thought of, confirming during the press conference that he did “try lots of different permutations,” but this dynamic was the “most simple, clearest way to split the world in two.” Edwards clarified his reasons:
“I had been on holiday as a little kid to Asia and it blew my mind. One of the big tricks that I think George Lucas did so well, and I learned a lot from Star Wars when we were doing that, was that he takes things from the distant past, spirituality, religious stories, mythology, and then puts them with things in the far future, like spaceships and robots. And there’s nothing in between. It’s literally like the far past, the far future, and he kind of wedges them together. And more than anywhere else in the world, I think where that happens the most is in, like, Southeast Asia.
You essentially end up in these places like Hong Kong or Bangkok or Tokyo, where you’re in, like, a metropolis that looks like something from Blade Runner, but if you just go down that street and take a left, there’s a little temple and a Buddhist monk. And I love those polar opposites, those visual contrasts. I just find them super exciting. There’s sort of energy in that, like a battery, like a positive and a negative. And you’re always looking for that as a filmmaker, in stories and visuals.”
The Creator was built around real-life locations, rather than imagined ones
Usually during pre-production and development of a movie, artists design the look and feel of the world of the film. Then it is the task of the crew to find or, more commonly build, those locations. Edwards though made The Creator in reverse order. Rather than spend millions on creating soundstages that would work, Edwards instead went to real world locations, shot the film, and then sent that footage to FX houses for them to populate. It’s a very different way of working, but also cheaper, Edwards explained the freedom this method grants:
“If you get the crew small enough, the cost of the crew is so little that it’s cheaper to fly them anywhere in the world than it is to build a set. And so, suddenly, the idea of picking every single best location based on the scene became a reality. And so, we cherry picked the volcanoes of Indonesia, Buddhist temples in the Himalayas, ruins of Cambodia, and floating villages.”
Why science-fiction stories excite Edwards
Throughout his film career Gareth Edwards has clung close to the science-fiction genre. But what is it about the genre that fascinates him and keeps bringing him back? During the press conference Edwards shared two contrasting reasons, explaining how each of them informed The Creator:
“I think it’s probably two main reasons. One of them is growing up with Star Wars and being promised this amazing world with spaceships and robots. Then you kind of realise it’s not true and that’s not gonna happen and so, the second-best thing is, I’ll become a liar, like George Lucas, and I’ll create these stories for kids to grow up with.
But then the other main reason is my favourite TV show growing up was The Twilight Zone. What’s so good about those stories is they change one aspect of real life. Basically, you can live your whole life and have certain set beliefs. They never really get challenged because nothing really happens out of the ordinary. And so, you think everything you believe about the world is correct. But when you change some aspect of the world, one element just gets flipped on its head, whatever it may be, you suddenly realise a lot of the things you thought were true start to not work and be wrong.
It makes you question what your beliefs are. And I think that’s the best kind of science fiction. In this [The Creator] we were using AI as a kind of metaphor for people who are different to yourself. And that’s how it started. But then obviously in the last year or so it’s become quite a reality. And it’s gotten very surreal.”
Emotion Matters
No matter the story, all of Edwards’ films contain a lot of emotion. In the world of big spectacle science-fiction, this is often overlooked. Edwards shared how intrinsic the importance of being able to move an audience is as a filmmaker:
“I feel like that’s the goal, every movie you make, you don’t say this out loud because you set yourself up for failure. But, if you don’t make some people well up or cry, then you’re not really abusing the power of cinema. It’s always the secret goal when you write a film, to do something that affects people emotionally.”
The Creator arrives in cinemas across the UK from 28th September 2023.
