The end of this week will see the release of The Creator, the next film from director Gareth Edwards (Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Godzilla [2014], Monsters) and Laughing Place recently had the opportunity to participate in a press conference with the filmmaker about the conception and making of the exciting new science-fiction movie from 20th Century Studios.
First Gareth was asked about the origins of the idea for The Creator. “There are lots of ways of trying to explain where the idea came from. The most unique one, which I remember very clearly, was that I had just finished Star Wars [Rogue One]. I needed a bit of a break, and my girlfriend [and I] decided that we're gonna go and see her parents who live in Iowa, which [is on] the other side of America. We do a four-day road trip, and the great thing about having finished a movie is your brain sort of deletes [the information]… formats the hard drive. So then you've got this blank canvas, and I wasn't expecting to think about the next film or get any ideas, but I'd just put some headphones on, I was looking out the window, and we went through this tall grass farmland area. There was this factory that went by and it had what looked like a Japanese logo on it, and I thought, just [because of] the way I'm wired, like in science fiction, I [thought], ‘I wonder what they're doing in there.’ Like, ‘Maybe it's robots or something cool. I doubt it.’ But then I was thinking, ‘Imagine being a robot built in a factory and you step outside the factory for the first time, and all you've ever seen is inside this building. Then suddenly you see grass and the trees and the sky.’ What would that feel like? I thought, ‘Oh, that's a cool little moment in a film, but I don't know what that would be.’ I threw it away and carried on thinking about other things, but it kept coming back the rest of the trip. And I was like, ‘Oh, you know what that could be?’ And 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. Normally you sit painfully for like a year trying to get a movie in your head. So I was like, ‘Maybe this should be the next film.’”
The conversation steered toward why Edwards thinks he tends to be drawn to science fiction as a genre. “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, and then you realize it's not true and that's not gonna happen. The second thing is, I'll become a liar, like George Lucas. I'll create these stories for kids to grow up with. But then the other main reason is my favorite TV show growing up was The Twilight Zone, the Rod Serling black-and-white TV show. 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, so you think everything you believe about the world is correct. And you can live and die and have the same views the entire time. But when you change some aspect of the world to be an extreme [difference], like one element just gets flipped on its head, whatever it may be, you suddenly realize a lot of the things you thought were true start to not work and be wrong, and it makes you question what your beliefs are. I think that's the best kind of science fiction. So in [The Creator], we were using A.I. as a metaphor for people who are different [from] yourself. 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.”
“I started writing this in 2018, when A.I. was up there with flying cars and living on the moon. It was something maybe you would see in your lifetime, [but] probably not. I sort of feel like every major technological breakthrough that's happened in the last century or so– electricity, computers, the internet– they always have seismic changes on industries, and there's a big bump in the road that we have to get over. But on the other side of it, when the dust finally settles, I think we all look back and go, ‘I'm glad we have electricity.’ You know, ‘I'm glad we have computers. I'm glad we have the internet.’ And I think [A.I.] will be another one. The next few years or more will probably be a little tricky, but I think the upside [is] it's such a powerful tool that's just gonna help so many things in the world, that I think the positives are gonna outweigh the negatives. I say that because when the robot apocalypse actually happens, they'll have this recording and they'll know. [laughs] And I'll be, like, left [alone]. I won't be enslaved like you guys, so… [laughs]
Gareth also talked about the casting of the young newcomer actress Madeleine Yuna Voyles as the central character of Alphie. “It was very very simple, because she was as strong in the audition as she was in the movie. But essentially, we did an open casting call for hundreds of kids around the world [who] sent in tapes– it was during the pandemic. Then [the casting department] got it down to show me, I don’t know, a hundred or two hundred videos of kids. It took a while, but then [we] eventually got to a top 10. Then I met with them, nd I was sort of paranoid, because I knew this was gonna be a crazy situation. We were going to the jungles of Thailand, it was gonna be really hot, it was gonna test whichever family naively agreed to do this film. So we actually met at Universal Studios so we could go around the theme park a little bit and see what the family dynamic was, just to check [that] everyone was okay [in that type of situation]. And the first person I met with happened to be Madeleine. She came in, she did the scene, and we were just trying not to cry. It was so emotional and brilliant, and I just thought, ‘Okay, this is too good to be true.’ Maybe the mom has played a trick on her… maybe she told her something just before she came in. I got paranoid that it was a one-off thing and it would never happen again, so a bit cheekily at the end I was like, ‘Hey, do you mind playing around and we just make something up?’ I invented this other scene and she did something even more heart-grabbing, and I was just like, ‘Okay, this is it. This is our kid.’”
Next Edwards discussed the unusual design process that the movie went through in post-production. “Normally when you make a film like this, what happens is you design the world [first]. You do all these cool pieces of artwork [and] you show [them to] a studio. They say, ‘You'll never find anywhere that looks like this. You're gonna have to build it in a soundstage. It's gonna cost 200 million [dollars], and you'll shoot it against greenscreen.’ And we were like ‘No, no, no, no, no. Forget the literal images. This is just the idea. We'll design it based on whatever we actually film. We'll do all the design when we finish the movie.’ We'd sort of make the movie in reverse. And so we ended up saying, ‘Just let us go make the film.’ 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. Suddenly, the idea of picking every single best location based on the scene became a reality. So we cherry picked the volcanoes of Indonesia, Buddhist temples in the Himalayas, ruins of Cambodia, floating villages, and all this. [We] went to eight different countries and shot the movie a lot more like an independent film, to some extent. Then when it was all finished, we had a big chunk of the budget for Industrial Light & Magic and some other vendors. Basically we edited the film, got frames from each shot in the movie, [and] gave them to the Production Designer and the concept artist. What normally happens a year and a half earlier was then happening during the edit. They were painting and designing all the sci-fi just on the shots we were actually using. You never paint to the left or the right of the frame, so everything's really efficient– you only use what you see. Everything that I like about the movie is a result of doing it differently. I just feel super excited. It basically feels like I never want to go back to the other way of making a film.”
And lastly, Edwards touched on the need for sci-fi movies to have an emotional heart at their core. “The film that probably had one of the biggest impacts on me as a kid was Steven Spielberg's E.T. [The Extra-Terrestrial]. As a kid, [when] I went [into the movie], all I was interested in [was] I wanted to see an alien and a spaceship… and BMXs. Then I got absolutely moved to tears on this emotional journey with the two of them [Elliott and E.T.].. And I feel like that's the goal [with] 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. So it's always the secret goal when you write a film– to do something that affects people emotionally. But it's up for other people to say if you are successful or not, I guess.”
The Creator opens this Friday, September 29th, in theaters nationwide.