[Interview] Gareth Edwards Thought Outside the Box When Creating THE CREATOR

Ever since his debut feature MONSTERS, audiences are used to filmmaker Gareth Edwards delivering out of this world work. His vision – usually geared towards sci-fi – is incomparable, as he’s gone from independent features to blockbuster studio IP, like GODZILLA and ROGUE ONE: A STAR WARS STORY. Now he’s back with THE CREATOR, a wholly original and inspired epic that tells of a man (John David Washington) wrestling with inner turmoil, but also physically dealing with the fallout of a war against AI technology.

Though Edwards gives a lot of credit to George Lucas and THE TWILIGHT ZONE as his general sci-fi inspirations, he feels this is the best genre to explore headier questions about our reality and our humanity. At the film’s recent virtual press day, he spoke of his love of the genre.

“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.

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 – 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. That’s the best kind of science fiction. In this, we were using AI as a kind of metaphor for people who are different to 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.”

Edwards was determined to not only keep his crew small to maximize the budget and free up spatial restrictions on set, he also wanted to make sure the technology he captured his vision with were as nimble as the crew and actors were tasked to be. He used lightweight cameras and lights mounted on poles.

“I hope it becomes an industry standard for cameras to get lighter. I don’t think there’s any cameraman in the world that enjoys holding this really heavy brick hours on end. It just so happened that just as we started filming, about a year before, things got really interesting with camera technology. For anyone who remembers film in the camera, I don’t know if you remember, but the way they measured the sensitivity to light, it was like a hundred ISO, or two hundred ISO. And if you were in an interior space that was a little dark, you’d have an eight hundred ISO. These new cameras shoot at 12,800 ISO. And so, you can basically film in moonlight.

And so, the second you can do things like that, basically lights now are so bright and the cameras are so sensitive, you don’t need all these giant cranes and lighting. You’d have on set, someone holding a pole with a microphone, we thought, let’s have someone with a pole and a light. That way, as the actors are given freedom to sort of go any direction they want, and I can quickly move with them, the lighting can quickly change in an instant.

Instead of waiting 10, 20 minutes to change the lighting all the time, we were waiting three seconds.  And so, we did 30-minute takes, where we wouldn’t stop for 30 minutes and got all this material as a result. That’s very naturalistic, at times, very organic, and doesn’t feel like your average blockbuster, which I think really helps all the science fiction of it all.”

THE CREATOR’s aesthetics are also uniquely refashioned and refurbished. Edwards says,

“James Klein, who is our Production Designer, should take credit for a lot of that. We wanted to put a tank in the movie that felt like something that should be in a anime film – like, one of these futuristic, crazy, over-the-top tanks. But if you just scale up a tank, it doesn’t look very exciting. It was like trying to create negative space and cut things out, where it still retains the basics of a tank, but has a shape you wouldn’t expect. Our secret hope was that, we wanted Bandai, which is the company who make all the toy models of Manga and anime characters, to release this as a model kit one day. We’d actually take Bandai boxes off the internet and put our tank on it, to see if it felt like something, if we were in the store, we’d go, ‘Oh, my God, I gotta get that!’ And until we, like, got really excited and jealous and wanted to buy this toy, we kept going until it looked great.”

To achieve a beautiful evocative score, Edwards tasked composer Hans Zimmer to augment the atmosphere – and he wasn’t about to accept any substitute.

“One of the reoccurring notes that we sort of joked about was I didn’t want ‘Poor Man Zimmer,’ is what I called it. Basically, when you edit a film, when you make a movie, you steal music from other composers as a temp track and then when you cut it all together, you then give it to your composer, and they have to listen to all these other composers’ music. Then, usually go, ‘Oh, we’re not gonna do anything like that.  I’m gonna do my own thing that’s gonna be, like, really original.’ But everyone always steals from Hans Zimmer, typically.  So you get all these other composers having to  imitate Hans – and I jokingly called it Poor Man’s Zimmer.

I was like, ‘Can’t have any of that in the movie.’ I really want it to feel like if someone played this soundtrack not knowing anything, they might not guess it was Hans Zimmer. Our influences were things actually like Bach and Mozart for the West and then we took basically those themes that they had written, and then they used instrumentation from Asia and had them earlier in the movie. So you sort of learn the theme subconsciously, and then you hear it in its glory later in the film.”

If you’re looking for a sequel or a trilogy, Edwards has some bad news for you.

“I really like endings. My favorite part of a story is how it ends and it’s, like, this mic drop moment. It’s like the best part of a joke is the punchline. When I’m trying to figure out a story, I’m always working backwards from the end to try and get it to be this climax as much as possible. Everything sort of leads to that moment. 

This is self-contained. As much as I love the world that it all exists in and it was amazing to sort of design and build everything and shoot it all over in these beautiful countries. But it’d be a high-class problem to have the studio come up and tap you on the shoulder and say, ‘Hey, Gareth, you gotta think of something. You know, we need a sequel,’ or something. But that’s not on my agenda. I’m not really interested in doing that. It’s a one-off movie.”

THE CREATOR opens on September 29.