The Big Picture

Gareth Edwards shares insights on innovative filmmaking techniques in his Oscar-nominated film, The Creator.
The Director explains how practical effects and editing processes revolutionized the movie-making experience.
Edwards teases about his possible involvement in the upcoming Jurassic World movie and his excitement to work on the iconic franchise.

[Editor’s Note: The following contains spoilers for The Creator]Continuing our FYC screening series with Landmark Theatres, Collider had the opportunity to spend an evening with Gareth Edwards to pick his brain ahead of the Academy Awards. Edwards is a director who’s proving to be a pioneer in modern day sci-fi with blockbusters like Godzilla (2014), Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, and now his Oscar-nominated feature, The Creator. The AI epic being nominated for Best Sound and Best Visual Effects is made all the more special considering Edwards’ innovative approach.

After the screening, Edwards joined Collider’s Steve Weintraub for an extended Q&A to discuss the co-writer and director’s unusual filmmaking techniques. The Creator takes place in a not-too-distant future where AI and humans coexist, though this existence is not without its flaws. An ex-soldier, Joshua (John David Washington), is tasked with locating and destroying a weapon that has the potential to end mankind, but his mission is thwarted when he discovers that the weapon is a child (Madeleine Yuna Voyles). In addition to Washington and Voyles, The Creator also stars Gemma Chan, Allison Janney, Ken Watanabe, and Amar Chadha-Patel.

Check out the full conversation in the video above, or in the transcript below, to learn how Edwards and his crew created an Oscar-worthy sci-fi without breaking the bank. Find out how he worked alongside Industrial Light & Magic and his editing team to film all over the globe efficiently, creating scenes in days that could often take weeks. We learn his methods for saving on expensive film equipment, how to shoot stunning shots on an iPhone, and why these Academy Award nominations are extra special for the cast and crew of The Creator. Read on to find out Edwards’ ending explanation, why the title had to change, why he dropped everything to work on the next Jurassic World film, and tons more.

The Creator Against the backdrop of a war between humans and robots with artificial intelligence, a former soldier finds the secret weapon, a robot in the form of a young child.Release Date September 29, 2023

COLLIDER: Since you’ve made this film, we all talk about AI but it feels like each day AI is getting stronger, more powerful. I look at the videos of AI from a year ago with movies and what they’re doing now, so how do you feel about AI now versus when you first made it, and are you also nervous about AI in Hollywood?

GARETH EDWARDS: I’m not nervous at all because when AI takes over humanity and kills everyone, they’re gonna leave me alone because I made a movie that was very empathetic. They’ll be like, “He’s okay. He gets us. Leave him. He’s good.” So that’s the main reason I made the film. Look, I’ll say the positive side of it, right? If I was a young filmmaker starting out my career wanting to make films with this technology appearing, I’d be so excited. It looks like it’s gonna be a very liberating thing for a lot of filmmakers, even more so than CGI in the early ‘90s was for filmmaking. But anyone who tries to predict what that’s gonna actually do for the industry right now, if you play back any thoughts in three years, you’re gonna look like an idiot because it’s gonna unfold in ways you can’t possibly tell. Even just the open AI stuff that came out two days ago, whatever it was, was like, “Oh, here we go. This is it. There’s no going back.” Because the other stuff you could kind of go, “Well, there’s problems and it doesn’t quite…” You could pick it apart and say, “Maybe it’ll never get beyond usable footage.” Now it just feels like that graph of dots, each week you expect it to plateau, and just every single week it’s like, “No, it’s still going. It’s still going.” And it’s gonna probably go to where everyone predicts, which is, it’s gonna just change the world.

Related Is ‘The Creator’ Pro-Artificial Intelligence? Yes, but It’s Complicated ‘The Creator’ may come down on the side of artificial intelligence, but, don’t worry, it’s not the same A.I. that exists in our world.

It’s crazy, and it’s such an exponential growth in its ability to learn, unlike how you look at the original iPhone and how long it took to get to where we are at now. With AI, it’s gonna be 10 times the speed.

EDWARDS: Yeah, I don’t know. I mean, there’s so many things to say. It’s like when the automobile was invented. People who owned stables were like, “It’s gonna be okay because now we can get the hay delivered quicker,” and you’re like, “No, no, no. There’s not gonna be horses. It’s gonna change so drastically.” And so, I just hope what it mainly does is one of the things stopping great storytelling, to some extent, is because films are so expensive to make. You have to be very broad with your appeal to get back the $100 million investment of something. And so, typically films with this sort of scope and ambition have to please everybody in the world pretty much, and if it only costs you $10 to make a film that looks like Star Wars, that will change everything. Do you know what I mean? You’ll be allowed to take the kind of risks that it feels like the filmmakers from the ‘70s were allowed to do, but with blockbuster-style subject matter, and I just get excited about that.

There’s lots of ramifications, but there always is. With any, you know, electricity, the internet, computers, you pick your technological breakthrough, there’s massive repercussions, and then the other side of it, we all look back and I think no one would wanna go backwards and not have electricity, you know what I mean? And not have computers. So I hope it’s gonna be like that. It will be difficult for a while for a lot of people, and probably even me. I do think it looks like it’s doing the sort of thing I do for a living by just typing something, so maybe I’m out of a job, too, at some point.

What you did with this film and the visual effects and what you were able to pull off with the budget, it really changed what I think Hollywood movies can do. I’ve joked about this with you in the past, but I’m being serious now, how many people, other directors and studios and whoever, have said, “How did you do this? Can you please show me how?”

EDWARDS: And I say there’s some really good DVD extras on the Blu-ray that you can check out now. It’s only $12.99 in Amoeba Records. That’s the only place that sells Blu-rays anymore, so good luck with that. No, basically, it wasn’t so much me but my producer and the visual effects artists have had a lot of calls and had to go to a lot of meetings and talk about it. But I haven’t, really. Nobody loves me.

Gareth Edwards Explains How to Make a Blockbuster on a Budget
Image by Annamaria Ward

That’s shocking to me, but I would imagine you must have done meetings with different studios or talked to people because you made this at a fraction of what it should cost with the visual effects. It looks like just such a bigger movie than what the cost was, even though the cost is still a big number.

EDWARDS: So we did loads of different approaches to make this film, and I’ll list a bunch of them real fast as fast as I possibly can. So we shot it on a camera that’s only $4,000, and we didn’t do that because of the price tag, we did it because it’s the only camera in the world that is lightweight and also can shoot in moonlight. It’s so sensitive to light.

It’s the FX3 by Sony, and you can buy it at Best Buy.

EDWARDS: Do they sponsor you?

No, but I just wanna tell people you can literally buy this camera at Best Buy.

EDWARDS: Yeah, but it had a 1970s, what you call an anamorphic lens on the front, so a lens that’s basically used with films from the era that I grew up living in because I wanted to have that look. As soon as you do that, you can then have lights that are really small to light big scenes, and so we had LED lights that were battery-operated. As soon as you do that, you don’t have to have them on stands, you can have someone holding them on a pole like you do with the guy recording the sound. So you could move around with the camera and instantly they could relight the scene, or in the DOP we’d be talking to them through a little microphone and earpiece and they would quickly reorientate. So we would shoot, like, 45-minute takes and do an entire coverage of a scene in one go rather than stopping and starting, which is more of a classical way of doing it. Even the dolly shots, you didn’t have to ride the dolly. There’s an iPhone that can be stuck to a monitor, and as you move the iPhone or the monitor, the camera does exactly what you’re doing, so you don’t have to sit on it and operate it. Now it’s really lightweight so you can put it down on the ground, do a dolly shot, and then be like, “Okay, let’s move over here and do one.” So 10 seconds later you’ve got a brand new dolly shot, and typically, that’s 10 to 15 minutes on the film set. So it was all these little silly things when we were making the film.

Then in terms of the visual effects, the same sort of stuff was going on in that I didn’t want anybody with those, what I’d call pajamas with dots on them. You know when you watch the behind-the-scenes stuff and you’ve got motion capture suits and things like this? The problem with those, for me, is that unless you’re making a film about a pajama party, you’re sort of committing to that guy being a robot. Then, you tend to watch that footage back at the end and in some shots it’s just their shoulders in shot or their little elbow, and now you’ve got to spend $20,000 or whatever it is to make this out-of-focus elbow become a robot that no one’s gonna notice. So it’s like, “Okay, what if we don’t have anybody with dots on and we just shoot everybody as if they’re human?” Then, in the edit we will decide who’s gonna be a robot, who’s gonna be AI, and we’ll do that months from now.

We did the same thing with all the design. Every single scene in this movie, we went to a real-world location. So we never did, like, in a studio with a load of green screen stuff. So for instance, the scene with the lab, underground lab where they find Alphie. We were in Thailand and I was like, “Where is the most technological-looking location in Thailand?” “Well…” you know, they’d give a few examples, and I was like, “There must be something a bit more…” And they were like, “Well, there is a particle accelerator,” and they were like, “But you will never be allowed to film there, especially what you wanna do.” And I was like, “Can we go visit it? It might be inspiring.” And they were like, “No, no, no.” They could see what was unfolding, and they were like, “No, you can’t go. There’s no point in going. You won’t be allowed to film there.” But anyway, eventually they were like, “Okay, you can go look around it.” So we go ‘round the particle accelerator and we’re talking about what we wanna do, and they’re like, “Well, we have really expensive equipment here. It’s millions of dollars. What exactly is it you wanna film?” And we’d be like, “Well, kind of soldiers shooting lasers and explosions, and loads of scientists dying and stuff.” And they were like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not gonna happen.” And as we were leaving, you could see the cogs turning, and they were like, “What film did you say this guy had done?” And this is when I realized that everyone who works in nuclear physics is a sci-fi fan, right? And they were like, “Oh, we did this Rogue One Star Wars movie,” and they were like, “Oh, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.” [Laughs] They were like, “We’ll let you film on one condition,” and it was like, “Okay?” And they were like, “We are in the movie.” So everybody that’s wearing a white coat in that whole section, they’re nuclear physicists, for real, from Thailand.

Is it the person who’s talking and swearing?

EDWARDS: Okay, I exaggerate. The people saying scripted lines, so the lady who’s screaming at them, she was an actress and the guy who took the fall was a stunt guy. But everybody else, the people behind that are grabbing things, they work there. They work in a particle accelerator on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, but on Tuesday they were dying from AI escaping their lab.

ILM Couldn’t Be Scared Away From ‘The Creator’

The thing I really want to talk about is the fact that movies before this were not been able to do what you’re talking about, which is just shooting practically in Thailand and then deciding in post, “That will be a robot. We’re just gonna erase that. We’re gonna add this.” Movies don’t do that. This is the first one that’s done on this scale and this kind of scope.

EDWARDS: Well, it just takes a lot of faith from the visual effects team, as in whatever company you’re using. I’d worked with Industrial Light & Magic on the Star Wars films, and I have a lot of friends there, but there was no part of me that thought they would ever agree to do this. So we were talking to other visual effects places and trying to think, “Do we start our own visual effects company? What do we do? How are we gonna do this?” And then ILM contacted Kiri Hart, who was the producer on the film, she’s best friends with the lady that runs it, and was like, “How do we get to do this movie?” And she was like, “You won’t wanna do it. It’s crazy.” And they were like, “No, we wanna do it.” And so I went in and tried to scare them off, and I was like, “We basically don’t wanna tell you what any of the shots are, right? You need to blindly agree. We’re gonna go off around the world to seven different countries, like Nepal and Indonesia and Japan, and shoot this movie, and then we’re gonna come back, edit it and then design it then, and decide what the visual effects are. But you’ve got to say you’re gonna do or else the studio won’t greenlight it.” And they were like, “Okay,” like crazy idiots. So then that’s what we did.

So a lot of all the design, James Clyne was the production designer, I would literally print screen on the Mac, and I was doing that loads with the playouts from the edit, and then I’d be giving it to James and go, “We’re gonna paint over that shot.” And so then we’d be just adding, like, monolithic, crazy buildings to things. We found that, basically, what they tend to do on these big films is they get nervous that the director is gonna change their mind or change the camera angle, so when they build a crazy thing, they build it for real in 3D from every possible angle just in case, and it costs, like, 20 times what it needs to. On this, we were like, “I guarantee we’ll never see it from any other angle than this shot, and it’ll look like this.” So then they would just basically take that image and basically up-res it, basically make it look photoreal, and then project it onto simple geometry, and that would be it. So shots that would normally take a month were happening in a few days. They were like, “Oh, this is good.” And then everyone believed more and more in the process a bit more.

We went to show the movie to Industrial Light & Magic. Because it’s always a gamble as a filmmaker, we did an edit of the film, the assembly edit, and before we then do another six months of editing, we were like, “Should we show ILM the movie so they get invested in it and care and understand what they’re doing? It would make all conversations a lot easier. But what if they hate it? Then it would really backfire because we need them to, like, go for broke.” So I went up to San Francisco and we hit play on a version of the film that just had text for everything. It was a really nice font. It was Futura, which is the best font you can have. Yeah, it wasn’t Arial — spared no expense kind of thing. And then, essentially, it ended and they all turned around, and they’d been crying. And I remember thinking at the time, like, “Oh my god, it’s worked.” These were the first people I’d shown the movie to. I was like, “Oh, it’s working. This is fantastic.” And then as I was going home, I was like, “Wait a minute, were they crying about the number of visual effects shots?” So it was at the end of the movie there were, like, family reunions, people hadn’t seen their kids for like six months and things like that. It was very heartwarming.

I don’t know if the version you showed that day was the five-hour cut. Was it the five-hour cut?

EDWARDS: No. So the assembly was five hours, which makes it sound like there’s five hours of stuff worth watching. There isn’t. There’s a reason it’s not in the movie. But at about two-and-a-half hours it got difficult. It’s like a game of Jenga where we’ve got to pull stuff out. You do test screenings and basically you show it to 500 strangers, and then they tell you a load of things that you don’t wanna hear, and then you have to try and make it better for the next screening. One of them was, “It’s just a bit too long,” and then it was a bit like, “So what would you take out?” I mean, every time you ask someone, “What would you take out?” They’re like, “Oh, I don’t know.” And you’d be like, “Should I take that out?” And they’d be like, “Nah, you need that bit.” But somehow we had to get it down to two hours.

I understand there’s a lot of people out there that love a 90-minute movie. There’s a lot of people that are like, “Two hours is pretty good.” Every minute after two hours for some people is too long. And then you have people like me, and I’m sure people in the audience, that are like, “Fuck, let’s have the three-and-a-half hour cut.” So my question is, was it your decision to do two hours, was it the studio saying it’s better if it’s two? How do you feel about ever doing an extended cut?

EDWARDS: I’m in the camp that 90 minutes is a great amount of time to tell a story. There’s a great quote by a film reviewer in the UK, Mark Kermode, who said, “Stanley Kubrick managed to tell the story of the beginning of mankind to us evolving into a god in two hours, 10 minutes. If you can’t tell your story in the amount of time, you’re just not trying hard enough,” right? So the studio was very supportive. They were a dream to work with. It was more these test screenings. We just had to get a certain level of thumbs-up, and it seemed to be duration. But I think once the film came out, they asked us, “Do you wanna put deleted scenes on the Blu-ray and all that stuff?” And I said no because if we ever do an extended edition, I don’t want people to have seen that stuff. Do you know what I mean? I want it to be fresh. I don’t want it to be like, “Oh yeah, I’ve seen that scene.”

I was really gonna come at you tonight for not including deleted scenes that I know you have, but I will accept it if there’s a possibility of an extended cut at some point.

EDWARDS: But people have to want to buy it. That’s the problem.

How about a special one-off screening with Collider at some point in the future?

EDWARDS: If you sell every ticket for $100,000, the studio will agree. They’ll be right up for that.

My question is, you had a two-and-a-half hour cut that you seemed happy with that you need to pull down. Was that a two-and-a-half hour cut that was basically done, where you don’t have to do much work to it, or is that a cut that you still have to finish certain VFX, so it’s not really done?

EDWARDS: There were a bunch of the effects towards the end that did get cut out that were done. It’s a painful Zoom with everyone. You have to tell them, “I’m really so sorry.” But it’s a typical thing that happens on these big movies because it’s a moving target and everyone’s trying to just build the thing whilst it’s still wet. They’re trying to sculpt the concrete, and you’re gonna make mistakes and stuff.

Gareth Edwards’ Editing Process for ‘The Creator’ Was Brutal
Image via 20th Century Studios

The two-and-a-half hour cut that you had, that you showed, how close was that to a done cut?

EDWARDS: It wasn’t because there’s no music on it. We had temp music on it. Basically, you couldn’t just release that thing. You’d have to give it some love and finesse it. Also, the second you decide a scene’s not in the movie, you just dump it. You don’t go into the dailies and try and get the best version of that scene. So there are scenes that, if they came back in, you’d wanna spend some time really — this is a pointless conversation because it’s never gonna happen.

This is the nerdy shit that I like to dig deep on because at some point, in five years, if there’s not a longer cut, someone is gonna research, “Well, what did he ever say about the deleted scenes?” I’m fascinated by that kind of stuff, and maybe two other people in the audience. But anyway, what was the last thing or two that you cut out before picture-locking and why?

EDWARDS: I’ll tell you the brutal way we did it. This is all way too much information. You shouldn’t know how the sausage is made. Let’s just pretend, for argument’s sake, you’ve got a two-and-a-half hour film that’s got to become two hours. I was blessed with Hank Corwin and Scott Morris were my editors. Hank Corwin was my hero. If someone said to me, “What’s the best edited film ever made?” I’d go, “I can’t answer that because there’s two. One is, to me, JFK and the other one is The Tree of Life by Terrence Malick,” and he edited both of those. So, he’s a bit of a god. But we would sit there and we’d do a pass. “Okay, let’s try and take stuff out. Let’s go through each scene and take stuff out. Oh no, I can’t take that. I can’t take that.” You do it and you get through a scene, five minutes, say, of stuff, and you go, “How much have we taken out?” “10 seconds.” And you’re like, “Oh man, it’s impossible.

So then we were like, “You know what? We gotta do this a different way. Let’s just build the film from scratch.” So without looking, ever, at what the film is, just start saying things to put in. So we built it from like a trailer to like a 10-minute and then a half-an-hour, and then eventually we got to an hour and 45, and we were like, “That’s the movie.” Then it was like, “We’ve got 15 more minutes we can put in. Oh, thank God.” And then we were like, “Don’t look, because if you look, you’ll just think of a million things.” Without looking, what do you miss? We all went ‘round, there was three of us, and I’d say, “Look, these are my things I really miss, and I miss that. I miss that.” And we put them all in and got really close to two hours, and they were like, “Okay, let’s just watch it.” Then, if there’s any big regrets, and there were like about five shots that we really regretted and we put them in, then we were like, “I think that’s the lock.” We showed that at a test screening and those are the best ones we’d had. So that was the movie. And also, it’s not like we had another month to play around. There’s deadlines. It’s like a sport, and the referee blows the whistle and that’s the score.

Image by Annamaria Ward 

What does it mean to you, with all this work you put in, that the film was nominated for Best Sound and for Best Visual Effects?

EDWARDS: Genuinely, we had an interesting journey with this film, we’ll call it, in that when we filmed the whole world was in a pandemic. So there were a lot of things we wanted to do that we couldn’t. Everyone’s wearing masks and you’re having tests, and you can’t just grab people and use them, you’ve got to do a test four days earlier, or whatever it is. Then it came to the premiere, and it was like, “Oh, it’s gonna be a great celebration,” and then the strike happened and the actors couldn’t come and they couldn’t do any publicity, so I didn’t get to see them. Normally, you have a big gathering again and you’re on this little world tour and it’s a nice little fun reward at the end of the film. So there’s none of that. And then I was like, “You know what I’m gonna do? I’m gonna buy 50 tickets at the Chinese Theatre on the opening night and I’m gonna invite all the actors to come, and we’re just gonna sit and watch it with a normal audience and just hit. So I did that, and then I was all excited. It was a Thursday, I think, and then I landed from the publicity tour and I was like, “My throat’s a bit sore,” and then I did a test and it’s like, “Fuck, I got COVID.” And then I just started to feel worse and worse and worse. So basically, I was in bed all week the opening weekend of the movie.

It’s like this frustrating thing, so having this happen at the end now, like I just feel really good about it for everybody. And it’s also both sides of the spectrum. It’s the visual effects, which I think is basically the visuals of the film, and over here is the sound, and so it’s not just one element. So, I’m very happy for the whole crew. I think everyone should take ownership of that because everyone worked really hard and we could never have a party. So I’m hoping everyone gets really shit-faced at the Oscars.

I saw a photo of you and your cast at Disneyland.

EDWARDS: Oh yeah! Madeleine, it was her birthday, and I can probably say this now — I didn’t want to admit it at the time — but basically I was with Disney doing publicity stuff, and it was Madeleine’s birthday, and I said to her, “What do you want to get? Anything.” Because she was so good. “Just tell me what you want, you can have it.” And I was like, “Just don’t ask for a horse.” And she goes, “I wanna go to Disneyland, and I wanna go with my family and everything.” So I was like, “Okay, great. We can totally do that.” So it’s like, “Okay, we’ll organize that.” And I mentioned it to the Disney people, just like, “Oh, we’re gonna go at the weekend and go with Madeleine. It’s her birthday.” And they were like, “Well, we can sort that out for you. We’re Disney. You can have the whole VIP everything.” And so basically, we had this amazing day where it was like John David and Madeleine and me and their family, and we just went around on all the rides and we were allowed all backstage. It was a really magical thing, and they hadn’t seen each other since the film, so it was very, very sweet. And I’ve never been to Disneyland. That was my first time.

You got spoiled.

EDWARDS: Yeah, it’s always like that, right? You just go straight on the ride? Just push past people. That’s normal, right?

Did you get to go on Rise of the Resistance, and what did you think?

EDWARDS: Yeah, we did. [Laughs] I only get recognized in context. If I am out of context, out of this room in a minute, I never get recognized. It doesn’t happen. Never, ever, ever. When I was in Galaxy’s Edge, people were like, “Are you Gareth?” And it was just a really weird thing where I guess they’re in a Star Wars frame of mind. It’s amazing what they did. It’s stunning. Absolutely stunning. I love it.

But I am also a sucker for the original stuff. I really like Pirates of the Caribbean and all the old school things. My favorite TV show is The Twilight Zone, the black and white ones, and I have an old vintage television that can take a HDMI lead, and I have it on in the corner and it plays MeTV. Do you know that channel? It’s basically all vintage television from the ‘60s and ‘70s, whatever it may be, and I love it. It’s like a window into another world, and it feels like better storytelling because it doesn’t feel like it’s from my life. It’s from some other time, like another place, you know?

Image via Disney World

I think it’s funny that you never went to Disney and then you experienced Rise and then Pirates because they’re just so polar opposites. But I’m really blown away by the technology and what they did on Rise. I mean, the park is amazing.

EDWARDS: Are you sponsored by them, as well?

I wish! I really wish. That would be amazing.

EDWARDS: We were outside and he’s like, “Look, I’ve gotta hit Best Buy. It’s my kid’s birthday at the weekend, I get free tickets if I can mention Disneyland.”

If only. My kids consist of cats, and if I could bring them to Disneyland, amazing. So listen, you get a lot of credit because you are the creator of The Creator, but there’s so many people that worked on this that don’t get the limelight. You can’t talk about all of them, but who’s an unsung hero, someone that was instrumental in the making of the film?

EDWARDS: Oh my god, there was loads. We’d be here all day. You cut the end credits short.

You cut the end credits, sir.

EDWARDS: He was like, “Do you wanna do the end credits?” But they’re like 10 minutes long because there’s so many people that work so hard. There’s loads. So Jim Spencer was the producer on the film. Kiri Hart helped develop it. James Clyne was the production designer, who basically everything that’s pretty damn good in this film visually went through his fingers at some point. The whole of the ILM team, the whole of the other vendors, as well. Maybe this is worth pointing out, there were nine visual effects companies, maybe 10, that came in at the end. There was a very naughty director that worked on this movie, and he promised he would only have X number of visual effects shots and he went over. Can you believe that? So we had to get some help in right at the end, and all around the world, it looks like every single continent and country, people would do, like, 50 shots or so, and I ended up Zooming with them all and getting to know them all. They all did a phenomenal job and they all matched the quality of what ILM had done. ILM did the majority of it, and so maybe they’re the unsung heroes, is all those VFX vendors.

So, James Cameron and Terrence Malick Walk Into a Bar…

So when you think about the shots in this, there are so many visually stunning shots in this, which is the one that was the back-breaker? The one that you kept going back to or the one you felt like, “We can just do a little better here?”

EDWARDS: So everything that is in the movie that’s got a piece of footage that it started with, it was never like, “Here’s a storyboard, try and figure it out,” or, “Here’s some green screen.” It was always, “Here’s an actual piece of footage from the jungles in Thailand or Cambodia, wherever, and we want it to look like this.” And so, the most successful ones, the ones that I really love were kind of really easy to do in a weird way. So you’re only really, like, cracking a whip on the ones that are really hard to do, and they’re usually hard because we didn’t give the right foundation for the shot.

What I absolutely love, the things I’m most proud of in this film, are shots like the little old robot that’s giving a little kid chocolate at one point, or sifting through some seeds, some grain, or the stuff you would never see in a movie normally because when you put the price tag on that shot and then everyone’s trying to like make the budget cheaper, they’re like, “What is that giving? That’s not part of the story. But in my opinion, it’s the world-building, it’s the texture. In a drama, you would never hesitate to do something like that, but in a sci-fi, everything becomes really contrived and specific. We always joked that the film was supposed to feel like James Cameron and Terrence Malick had had sex and had a little baby. They would never do that.

That could be the headline of the Collider article. Joking.

EDWARDS: It’ll be the article two copy and pastes from your website.

Thanks. Lovely. One of the reasons I think that the movie looks so incredible is because you did so much practically. Do you remember the movie Real Steel?

EDWARDS: Yeah.

One of the reasons why the robots look so incredible in that film is that some of the robots were built practically and they would CGI the arm moving. So you can’t tell that the arm is CGI and the rest of the body is practical.

Gareth Edwards Spills His Secrets for Blockbusters on a Budget
Image via 20th Century Studios

With your movie, so much was done practically that when you’re doing some CGI in the scene, it looks amazing because everything else is really there. Basically, I’m just bringing up the importance of having such a practical base for this film. It makes the unbelievable believable.

EDWARDS: Well, I’ll say thank you. But I do feel that we get a lot of credit for the world-building of the film, and really half of that is just going to the world to start building, rather than being in a studio and doing it all against green screen. There’s so much you get for free that you would never think of. Half the deal with the crew was when we go to a village or we go to the beach or somewhere, don’t close it, don’t stop people. Let people come and go. Let them be. We were such a small crew visually, there was a lot of people hidden around the corner, but if you saw us, we were like five people with a camera. It looked like we were YouTubers or something.

I was really paranoid the whole time we were filming this. I was paranoid people were gonna be taking pictures and putting it on Instagram and going, “I think I’ve spotted a Hollywood film being shot in Thailand,” and it would spoil it. We got not one post from anybody because everybody just looked at us and went, “Well, this looks like a student film or something.”

Five people is a student film, and it’s not even a student film. A student film could have 20 people.

EDWARDS: Yeah, it was kind of just trying to keep all the realism, all the detail that you get for free. Like there are shots of a guy on a bike who’s a robot in our film, right? He goes past and it’s just a little montage. If you try to organize that, it will cost a fortune. You’ve got, “Okay, which bike do you want, Gareth? Here’s 10 bikes.” And you go, “Oh, that one probably.” “Okay, we got a stunt guy to do it. Cast the stunt guy. We’re gonna close the road and we’re gonna film it.” And instead, the way we would do it is we would just stick the camera outside the car and we would drive on this straight road, and we would just look for bikes, and there was really a guy with bananas just driving somewhere, and it was like, “Okay, catch up with him.” The driver would just catch up alongside him, we would just film him, and we didn’t need an NDA signed because he’s gonna be a robot. He has no idea he’s in a film. So then he would just drive off. He didn’t know he was filming him. He didn’t look around and see us.

So, there was stuff like that a lot. When you don’t direct something and you’ve got someone smoking or just half asleep or bored, I get really excited, like, “Oh my god, if we can make them a robot, I’ve not seen that before.” You know what I mean? Robots in films are always front-and-center, or being robotic, or AI-ish, and I just wanted them to be sat and like a little bit fed up, and, “Why are you filming me?” Some of my favorite shots are like Alphie just playing with other kids, and she’s obviously a robot thing, but they’re just having fun and joking. Because we would really go to a real village in Cambodia and have her just play with the kids and shoot it, and then you’d find this little beautiful moment and go, “Okay, ILM, make her AI.” But the problem when you do a big movie is they’d want that 10-second moment to be contrived, and it’s like, “And action,” and there’s the 10-second moment, and, “Laugh, Madeleine.” You know what I mean? “And cut, we got it. Moving on.” Whereas, you can’t get a real authentic moment like that. The better way is, “Okay, kids just play. Figure out a game. Why don’t you play this game?” Then just film them for, like, 15 minutes. In a minute, something beautiful will happen. “Oh, there you go. There it was.” You’re not telling them what to do as it feels false, and I don’t think it’s very hard to do anything original in science fiction or with visual effects like this. But I think that’s probably the bit, I can’t quite think of a film that was really doing that before.

Related How ‘The Creator’ Prioritized Real Locations When Building Its Sci-Fi World Gareth Edwards and company took a backwards approach to their set building.

I’m sure that you learned as you went in post-production, like the first day of visual effects and when you started versus where you are at the end. It was a huge learning process, I’m sure, for the animators, for you, for what you could accomplish. Did you notice that the VFX and what you were doing at the beginning versus the end were different or better? How did the learning curve go, or was it always the same from beginning to end?

EDWARDS: There are certain shots where it’s a long time before you get a good, one and then you’ll get good ones from then on. The obvious one to talk about would be Alphie. It took a long time. They have a schedule, which is like, “Look, to hit the release date you need to have all of our visual effects by this day. We’ve got 400 shots of Madeleine/Alphie, therefore, we have to approve them on this day.” Basically, you have a VFX producer, Julian [Levi] on our team, who has a massive chart, and it’s like you have to final 200 shots this week. It’d be things like this, which basically means you have to say, “They’re done. Put them away. That’s it.” And so there’s this pressure every week. As well as editing the film, it’s like, “Shit, we gotta do 15 finals today.” We’ve gotta so solidly sign off on 15 shots and we gotta do that every day for the next six months kind of thing. And that is on top of, “What is the film?” This is like the track is going right in front of the train all the time. It’s exciting, I guess, is the maybe a nice way to say it, but it also gives sleepless nights to a lot of people.

When you’re editing like that and you are in the trenches, is that a six-day week thing? A five-day week? Is it a seven-day week?

EDWARDS: It’s a seven-day week thing. Honestly, it’s like you get home about midnight and then you have to leave about eight the next day. For a whole year, it’s like that. If you get a day off, it means you’re at home doing work versus you’re in the studio, in the edit suite doing work.

Is that the way it’s been on all of your movies?

EDWARDS: It goes a little bit like that, yeah. Because there’s never enough time and you always feel like you end up — these are all bad analogies that are going on the internet, so I have to be really careful — but there’s always something more you could have done. You never finish a film and go, “If I had another week, I wouldn’t know what to do because it’s perfect.” You’re always like, “Oh my god, there’s like 100 things I wanna change or get better.” And so it’s really hard to just go and just watch a film or have a pizza. When you’re sitting there, it’s like being a surgeon knowing there’s people dying, and you’re like, “I gotta go back to the hospital. I’ve gotta go save someone.”

George Lucas is famous for going back to Star Wars and making adjustments. Are you the type of person that, if you could go back and look at Rogue One or Godzilla or any of your previous films, if you had the ability and money, would you go in and make tweaks or do you feel like, “It’s done. It’s out. That’s the movie?”

EDWARDS: No, I can’t watch my films. I don’t do it. Sometimes they turn up on the TV for some reason, and I go, “Oh, well, that’s nice. Oh, that’s cool.” And I watch a scene and then go, “Oh god,” and I turn it off because it’s just like, I don’t know, you always just see all the things that are wrong with it. I’m gonna use an American analogy here. It’s like going up to Tom Brady and saying, “Are you happy with that result? What if you could go back in time and have a different result?” Like, yeah, but it doesn’t work like that. It’s a sport.

Well, with digital editing, I mean, Lucas is again famous for going back and adjusting Star Wars. My thing is, in five years, honestly, if in five years New Regency, whoever said, “Hey, do you wanna go in and do something with that extra footage,” would you say, “Yeah,” or would you be like, “The movie’s the movie?”

EDWARDS: I would be very open to some of those ideas, but the problem is that it would take like a year of your life, and then you have to go, “Do you wanna do that, or do you just wanna make a new film?” So there’s always that dilemma. Like, “Do you wanna spend that year finessing this thing that you’ve done before or…?” But maybe with AI it’s all gonna get a lot quicker, and AI will just go, “I’ve done it for you, Gareth. Here it is.”

Boston Dynamics Reached Out to ‘The Creator’s Gareth Edwards
Image via 20th Century Studios

You look at James Cameron’s The Terminator and I truly believe that the military is thinking about Skynet in a positive way and not in the negative way of what could happen. I think these movies that are made for entertainment are also warning lessons for the planet as to what can go wrong with AI and with science and stuff. Do you think enough scientists have thought this through?

EDWARDS: I think it’s a symbiotic relationship. Especially with science fiction, I think science fiction inspires scientists and science, and I think science inspires science fiction. Blah, blah, blah. So it’s this feedback loop. And I think at a certain age, you watch a film like Star Wars, and you go “Okay, am I gonna try and join NASA or become a filmmaker?” You have a dilemma, and you pick one, right? If that’s what you love. One of the highest compliments at the end of the film — I think it’s okay to say this — is I got a really sweet email from Boston Dynamics, who are the people that do the really advanced, the most advanced robotics, and they were just very sweet about the film, and said they really like the fact that it was a positive robotic AI story because Hollywood always does, usually, the opposite. We talked about Boston Dynamics so many times whilst making this film and wondered what they would think of it. When they sent me that email, I called my production designer up. There are little things where you go, “If that ever happened, it would be worth it.” And that was one of them.

I read that you did your own sound effects when you were shooting The Creator, going, “Pew pew,” or whatever. Can you please demonstrate some of the sound effects you make?

EDWARDS: Yeah, I mean, I used to play with little Star Wars figures when I was a kid. Everybody did, I hope, that’s my age, maybe. Still do.

Demonstrate it.

EDWARDS: Yes, and so I would always do the sound effects when I’d play with them. Our sound design team, Erik [Aadahl] and Ethan [Van der Ryn], E², did an amazing job with this. Sometimes, when briefing them, I would just do the sounds because I didn’t know how to explain it, and then they’d be like, “Stop, stop. Wait, wait, wait.” And they’d wheel in a microphone and go, “Do it again.” And then I would do it, and I found out some of them were in the movie. It’s really bad stuff.

Can you please tell us what one of the sounds is?

EDWARDS: The robot police. I was like, “Yeah, they should talk to each other, like they’re saying little things to each other, but it should be, like, binary, but it should be kind of like a language but it’s like a dial-up modem.” And they were like, “What do you mean?” And I was like, “I don’t know. Something like, [imitates robotic, binary, dial-up modem noises].” So they used some of that. They messed around with it and did other things, but some of that’s what they’re kind of saying to each other. If you actually understood binary, it’s like really bad swear words.

Image via 20th Century Studios

First of all, I cannot believe you just did that. That sounded great. I can understand why they recorded it.

EDWARDS: I can do a good Darth Vader, but I need a bottle for it.

Gareth Edwards Explains ‘The Creator’s Ending
Image via 20th Century Studios

How did you decide on the ending, and was it always the ending that’s in the movie?

EDWARDS: It was always the ending. Well, hang on. There is material that’s not in there, but it was always that storyline. For me, what it was supposed to be — and I thought it was really clear and obvious, but I found out it maybe wasn’t — it was that essentially the child is trying to understand death and heaven, and the idea of heaven, and asks Joshua about it, and he says, “It’s this place in the sky.” She looks at NOMAD and thinks, “Oh, is that heaven?” And then later in the movie, you realize that Dian Dang, the place they’ve been heading to, is actually heaven, and that that’s where mum is. If you switch her off, she’ll go to heaven, i.e., in the kid’s mind, NOMAD. And so when they go to NOMAD, the kid is like, “Oh, brilliant. Mum will be there.” So then, when she looks around and then sees mum, it’s like, “I knew. Yes, it is heaven, and there’s mum.” And so then the idea with the biosphere, with the crops, is Joshua going to heaven at the end symbolically and being with his wife. So that’s the whole reason this movie is doing everything it’s doing, so that can never ever change.

But we did have more material. Should I tell people? I’ve never talked about it. This might be the last Q&A I ever do for the film, so what the hell right? There’s a whole section with zero gravity with Joshua on the outside of NOMAD trying to get back to the shuttle. We just cut him going back into the shuttle because it lasted about five minutes. There’s all this amazing wire work that the stunt team did, and God bless John David Washington, he did and suffered a lot doing it. It was really, really cool. You can all see it when we do the four-hour cut in, like, 2070 that AI will generate for us.

So that’s a five-minute scene of him trying to get back in, but when you’re trying to cut a two-and-a-half hour to two-hour, that can be something that you take out.

EDWARDS: Yeah, it makes sense without it. The story works without it. So those sort of things are the things that have a target on their back to go, because why do you need them? There’s a lot of things like that, but that’s where we landed with it.

Image via 20th Century Studios

I can understand, though, why when you’re trying to cut it down. Even if you had not cut the whole thing down, that’s the kind of thing that’s five minutes on the page but in actuality, it might be one minute on screen, or you have a five-minute sequence but you cut it to one.

EDWARDS: It’s also like a rhythm that’s going on at the end. I don’t know, maybe it’ll turn up one day. They didn’t do the visual effects for it. They started on some of it and then we pulled it early because we knew, “This is really expensive stuff, and if we let this play out and then don’t use it those are other resources we’ve used up that we could use on the rest of the film.”

Originally The Creator was called True Love. Why did you change the title?

EDWARDS: The absolute truth is, it was True Love the entire life of the movie up until close to the summer it was getting released. You go to a big meeting about how we’re gonna market the film, and they had basically done research and found that people didn’t wanna go see a film called True Love, that they thought it was a rom-com. And even with the poster, with it written on it, they’d be like, “What do you think of this film?” And they’d be like, “Rom-com.” And they’d be like, “Would you go see it?” And everybody that we needed to see it, that group of people, didn’t sound like they were gonna go. So then they tested all these different other names, and The Creator was the one that we all felt like, “Well, we could live. That’s all right.” But it’s strange because I know this film is True Love, and so I stumble saying The Creator during publicity. It’s like your kid’s transitioned, and it’s like you now got a new, totally different identity.

By the way, Oren Soffer, who’s the co-DP on the film, he got a tattoo of “True Love,” and I had to tell him. I was like, “Oh, you know it’s not called that anymore.” But he was like, “This makes it even better because I’m the only one in the world that will have it.” So, he saw it as a positive.

Related Meet ‘The Creator’ Cinematographer Oren Soffer, The Most Exciting DP on the Rise in Hollywood Protégé of Academy Award-winning DP Greig Fraser, Soffer is bound to become one of the most sought-after eyes behind the lens.

You really changed the way movies can be made on this. I’m curious, how much are you gonna take what you learned making this film and the way you did visual effects and the revolution of what’s possible to all your future films, and how much is it gonna be like on a case-by-case on what the project needs?

EDWARDS: I think every film is its own unique thing. and you can’t just drag and drop. I mean, the whole point of this is, I didn’t want someone to drag and drop a process onto it. Because what can happen is it feels like there’s two spreadsheets, two Excel documents in the film industry, one is low-budget, independent spreadsheet and the other one is giant blockbuster, and on day one, they just change some of the names, and then that’s how it begins. So at the beginning of this, we were like, “Please start with the independent, low-budget spreadsheet and then we will feel like the richest film in the world,” because we had some money. We had good money. If we start with the other stuff, the other end, and then have to cut things out, we’re just gonna feel paralyzed.

So I just think every single film, given the circumstances, you just go, “Okay, how can we make this feel different?” The process is as important as the idea. It’s as much about how you’re gonna film something and how you work as it is what you’re doing to make it feel different. I mean, I’m always looking for that, always trying to have it feel like a different type of film when you can.

Gareth Edwards Dropped Everything for ‘Jurassic World’

Earlier today it might have come out that you could be directing the next Jurassic World movie. Can you say anything? What are you allowed to say?

EDWARDS: I honestly can’t really talk about it. I’m sorry. It’s the very, very early days, and I don’t know what I can and can’t say.

Were you a little surprised that it came out today or were you hoping it was gonna be, like, a week from now?

EDWARDS: No, I was given a heads up that it might come out very soon, and so I tried my damnedest to contact my mum and tell her before it got on the internet, and I did the same with my sister. I woke my sister up to tell her. I’ve left a message for my dad, but because of the time difference he’s asleep. So hopefully he won’t look on the internet when he wakes up. He’s not that kind of person that does that, so I can call him in the morning and let him know.

So you basically told nobody. Who in your life actually knew?

EDWARDS: Just my girlfriend. That’s it.

That’s crazy. I wanna ask more but I don’t know what I can actually ask. It came out that it’s starting to film in June. That’s what they reported. Can you confirm that? Can you say anything like that?

EDWARDS: I think the only thing I would say is I was about to take a break and I started writing my next idea for a film and this is the only movie that would make me drop everything like a stone and dive right in. I love Jurassic Park. I think the first movie is a cinematic masterpiece, and Steven Spielberg is 100% the reason I ever wanted to be a film director. So this opportunity is like a dream to me. And to work with Frank Marshall and Universal and David Koepp, who’s writing the script, I think they’re all legends. So I’m just very excited. We’ll save all the other stuff for a publicity tour at some point.

The Creator is available to stream on Hulu.

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