What’s seven years to a director? In today’s fast-paced media ecosystem, where studios are regularly churning out new and existing properties like hot cakes, seven years can mean life or death in the industry. You can make movies that (hopefully) get you signed on to direct more projects, or you can fade away into the annals of Hollywood history.
But to filmmaker Gareth Edwards, time wasn’t necessarily something he felt pressured by. “I was essentially waiting for a film,” Edwards says. And his patience paid off. Following the success of his entry into the Star Wars universe with Rogue One in 2016, Edwards is back like he never left with his new, original sci-fi film, The Creator.
Led by John David Washington, Gemma Chan, Ken Watanabe, and the incredible newcomer Madeleine Yuna Voyles, The Creator is a high-concept movie that explores a dystopian future, where humans are fighting against the forces of artificial intelligence.
It’s appropriately timed, dealing with the issue of AI, something Edwards did not anticipate when creating the movie. “I thought this was something that was 50 years away,” Edwards reflects. “And it’s right now apparently.”
In an interview with Complex, Edwards shed more light on his decision to return to the big screen after seven years, creating an epic, original cinematic masterpiece with a budget of $80 million, and where he hopes the sci-fi genre will head in the years to come.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What would you say is the biggest reason you decided to pursue this project after a seven-year hiatus from directing?
Gareth Edwards: I was essentially waiting for a film. I think to me, the process in which you make a movie is kind of as important as the idea of the film. And we went about this in a very different way.
Normally when you do [a] high-concept science fiction film like this, you design the movie, you end up with all this brilliant artwork, you show it to the studio, and they say, “This is a $200–$300 million movie. You can't find these locations. We’re gonna have to build it all as sets in a studio against green screen,” and suddenly it looks like every other film ever made. And so I was like, “No, we're not doing that. We really don't want to do that.” So I had to sort of set out and prove it to them.
But basically we went out to eight different countries. We went to the volcanoes of Indonesia, the Himalayas, the temples in Cambodia, and the cities of Tokyo. We just went everywhere that was the best possible location for the film, and then shot the film, edited it, and once it was cut, we then designed the world.
So we sort of did it the wrong way around and gave each shot to the concept artists and the production designer James Klein, and he would paint over the shots and blend the real world perfectly into the science fiction, futuristic version.
It was a very efficient way of working, and it gave us a lot more freedom and we were a lot more organic, and I really think everything that's strong about [The Creator] is because of that process. And so I mean, if I ever make another film, I want to push that even further next time.
I know you have some VFX experience under your belt. Do you ever jump into the edit suite, just for old times’ sake?
GE: Oh, yeah. I did threaten like it was a joke, but it was when you would ask for something and they’d be like, “I'm not sure we got time.” I’d be like, “OK, I'll do it.” And then they'd be like, “No, we can't have you do it. That’d look terrible.” So it was a little trick to get my way.
I used to think I'd wasted my life doing visual effects. I always wanted to be a filmmaker, and I was like, “Oh, I spent 10, 15 years learning all those tools, and I should have just started making films.” But in a weird way, like with these kinds of big, epic sci-fi films, having that vocabulary and knowing how that process works means you can really steer it and help, and so I think it was the right choice retrospectively.
But yeah, I don't know how, sometimes knowing too much about something is a bad thing. It can make life a bit difficult for the artists working on it.
Ignorance is bliss in those situations.
GE: Yes, indeed.
What was the most surprising thing to you about working on blockbuster films like Godzilla and Rogue One—and what lessons did you take from making those films into developing The Creator?
GE: I did this very low-budget movie called Monsters, which we made for about $250,000, and it kind of did well. And I got to do Godzilla off the back of that, which was like a $170 million budget. And what’s weird is if you wrote what were the pros and cons of making a low-budget movie, when you get to do a high-budget movie, you just swap them over; everything that was easy becomes hard, and everything that was hard becomes easy.
It literally just flip-flops. And so I kept thinking, “There’s got to be like this sweet spot,” this sort of holy grail, middle ground, where you get all the benefits of an independent film and the creative freedom of being small, but with the epic scope and scale of having a load of money. And so a lot of the time it took to develop this film was just figuring out that process.
One thing I'm proud of with [The Creator], if anything, is that there's a sort of naturalism to a lot of it, where it's not like a documentary, but the crazier the science fiction in the movie is, the more important it is that the world feels totally grounded and believable.
So this film is very much—more than any other film I've done—it's definitely this hybrid of blockbuster, classical filmmaking and sort of indie, guerilla, lower budget kind of freedom.
You've described the film as “a melting pot of movies that you grew up loving.” What were some of the movies that influenced you the most for this project?
GE: There's some really obvious ones, but I think the one that gets talked about the least is a movie called Baraka. It's, um, it's basically this … I don't even know how to describe it. There's no storyline. There's no dialogue. It's like if God made a film.
A lot of it is in Southeast Asia, and it's just stunning and beautiful and about as epic and cinematic as a movie ever gets.
I always watched that movie and just thought, this style—mixed with films like a James Cameron movie or George Lucas or Spielberg film—I would just get goose bumps at the idea of that combination. Like something so epic as that. That movie was probably the most influential one that people wouldn't know about.
I know that you called the coincidence a total fluke, but when did it hit you that you were making a movie about AI today? Did that realization influence your creative approach at all?
GE: The way it started was this AI was used as a fairy tale device for the idea of someone who's different to us and exploring that kind of story about the other, and how we always want to destroy them and they want to destroy us. That was the starting point.
But then really interesting things, when you explore AI, start to bubble up to the surface. ike, what if you don't like what they're saying or doing? Can you turn them off? What if they don't want to be turned off? And so we really embraced that in [The Creator] about whether they are real or not. It kind of became one of the central feelings of the film—is this stuff real? Are these people really alive?
I’m always driving to set every day, frantically trying to plan my shots for the day. And normally there's only 30 minutes where I was left alone on the way to set, and so I’d be trying to plan all this stuff. Then one day, we were like in the jungles of Thailand, and I looked at my phone and someone had just sent me something about Google AI.
I looked and it was the whole whistleblower story, and the guy had posted a conversation with the AI where it seemed sentient. And I just got sucked into this whole dialogue, and suddenly we arrived at the set and I hadn't planned anything. But it was so engaging.
How can something that wasn't alive or conscious have said all this? Like it was frighteningly real, and you start to go, “I thought this was something that was 50 years away,” and it's right now apparently.
And it just got more and more timely as we kept going. It's strange because when I wrote the script with Chris Weitz, the notes that we'd always get back from everybody was, “But why would you ban AI? Why would anyone reject it? It seems like an amazing tool. They would help us with everything.”
Now that's totally the default saying of everybody; it’s like, “Should we ban this thing?” And so it's really interesting watching the movie now because without spoiling it for anyone, there is this little journey as to why AI might not be such a great thing. Now it's like preaching to the choir.
Are there any plans to expand The Creator universe—or is this a one-off type project?
GE: It's a one-off. My favorite thing about cinema is it ends. There's a beginning, a middle, and an end, and it's self-contained stories. My favorite moment in all films is the ending. You kind of wake up back in the theater and realize you were just sucked into this world. And so it's its own film.
I love the world we've played in with this movie. It is really enticing, you know? I mean, like, you know, there's a lot more we could have done. It was so rich with ideas, but I like my films as one thing.
It's not a stretch to say that fewer and fewer sci-fi movies are getting made nowadays. What do you think is behind that? Will they ever be back in full force—or is this something studios are moving away from?
GE: It's the billion-dollar question. I think it's a very primal thing for everyone to sit down. You know, we're very social animals. We used to sit around a campfire, and someone would tell you something that happened to them or some idea from 100 years ago, and we'd all listen to that story.
I think it's very hardwired in us to gather together and hear a story like that. And so for me, that's cinema, right? And so I hope whatever name it's given and however it evolves over the coming years and decades, I still think we will all gather together and hear a well-told story.
I think that's not going anywhere. But in terms of supporting original filmmaking, it is a problem because you go into these meetings and you pitch films to these studios, and they all feel excited about it and happy, but they say, “Look, people don't want to see this stuff. They want to see the sequel and the franchise and the IP.” And so I'd say to anybody, “Whatever film you like, whatever it is, it doesn't matter what it is, please go see it at the cinema.”
It's a democracy and you get to vote with your cinema ticket. Whatever you go see is what they'll make more of. The reason I got into filmmaking is I fell in love with films, where every film was kind of original in these big rich worlds, and you'd be immersed and transported somewhere.
And so I just felt like I wanted to see one of those films again. Like I did it kind of selfishly because it's just been too long.
