Gareth Edwards Reveals Rogue One 'Tricks' He Used In The Creator - Exclusive
"The Creator" is an original new sci-fi epic from director and writer Gareth Edwards, whose last movie was "Rogue One: A Star Wars Story," released back in 2016. In "The Creator," artificial intelligence has advanced by the year 2065 to the point where sentient, humanoid AI are prevalent in the East and even treated as equals, while the technology is banned outright in the West after AI entities allegedly detonated a nuclear device in Los Angeles years earlier.
As a result, there's an ongoing conflict between the two sides, and American intelligence agent Joshua (John David Washington) is recruited to return to Asia — where his wife (Gemma Chan) went missing five years ago during a mission gone wrong — to find and neutralize a new AI weapon that could tip the scales in the East's favor. The so-called weapon, however, is an AI made to look and act like a six-year-old girl.
Edwards, by many accounts, did not have a fantastic experience on "Rogue One." The film went far over budget and required extensive reshoots, with veteran filmmaker Tony Gilroy brought in to rework the screenplay, help edit the film, and reportedly direct some of the reshoots as well. As Edwards tells Looper in our exclusive interview, he did apply some lessons from "Rogue One" to the making of "The Creator."
"My first film ['Monsters'] was very low budget, and it was a very creative experience," Edwards explains. "Then you go to a big budget movie, and essentially everything that was easy and hard, you swap around. Things that are easy become hard, and vice versa. I was looking for a way to make a film where you get all the positives of an independent small movie with all the positives of a giant blockbuster in terms of scope and scale ... That's what I was trying hard to pull off."
Gareth Edwards shot The Creator like an independent movie
Gareth Edwards says that he took "every little trick" that he learned on the $200-million-plus "Rogue One" and tried to apply those to "The Creator" and its more modest $80 million budget. For example, instead of filming on massive soundstages in front of LED panels and green screens, Edwards shot much of "The Creator" on location.
"When we went to real places [on 'Rogue One'], it worked really well, and I wanted to do a whole science fiction film like that. If you get the crew small enough, the amount of money it costs to move them anywhere in the world, it's less than building a set."
Edwards estimates that the production of "The Creator" went to eight different countries — including filming in 80 locations in Thailand alone — and journeyed an approximate 10,000 miles to obtain all the footage they needed. "If the world-building in the movie is any good, it's because we actually went to the world to build it," the director says. "There's stuff that happens for free, that cost a fortune to recreate in a normal film, that was in front of us and it's like, let's capture all that."
The other innovation deployed by the director was laying in all the visual effects and designs after editing was completed. "Normally, that happens before you even start pre-production," Edwards reveals. "We saved it until the end so that we could have all these happy accidents, find these crazy locations. Then, once it was edited together, we did the designs based on the footage we had. Everything blended more seamlessly, and we embraced whatever we found and blended that into the design. Everyone's a winner in that capacity, because you get more realism. It looks better. It's cheaper ... if I get to do another film, I want to push that stuff even further."
"The Creator" opens this Friday, September 29.