Gareth Edwards appeared on the show as a director, not writer, as the interview was conducted in the midst of the WGA strike.
Award-winning filmmaker Gareth Edwards’ timing with The Creator — a dystopian film centered on AI as a threat to humanity — feels eerily prescient, especially given its release in the midst of a heated industry battle dealing with many of the same concerns.
The Creator takes place in the aftermath of a devastating nuclear explosion. It follows the story of Joshua (played by John David Washington of BlacKkKlansman, Tenet, Amsterdam), an ex-special forces agent recruited to find and destroy a mysterious weapon with the power to end a war between humans and artificial intelligence… or, alternately, extinguish humanity altogether. Its story posits a world in which certain forces have allowed for the unchecked development of AI, blurring the lines between humanity and technology.
When Edwards first pitched the epic sci-fi thriller to Disney, the original screenplay implied that AI should be stopped. The executives were baffled by the concept.
“The simple explanation was like, ‘Something terrible has happened in America and as a result, the West has completely banned AI,’” Edwards recalls. “And the big note I kept getting back from the studio was, ‘But why would you ban AI?’ [Now] they're not asking anymore.”
‘We're kind of onto something’
The studios stopped asking because audiences began having questions of their own. The struggles outlined by WGA and SAG-AFTRA members have opened the doors to a more complex understanding of how AI can impact people’s lives.
“It's interesting, watching over the last few months what's happened in the media, because you're sort of preaching to the choir now,” Edwards says. “People are coming in with a default setting of ‘AI is bad,’ which is useful for the journey of our film.”
It’s a journey Edwards embarked on as well. When he started writing The Creator, it was called True Love. But Disney’s marketing research led them to The Creator.
“Back then, AI was like writing a film about flying cars, or living on the moon or something. It felt like a science fiction idea that maybe could happen in our lifetime, but also might not,” he says. “I really wasn't expecting it to turn up.”
As the project took shape, philosophical dilemmas also surfaced. While filming in the jungles of Thailand, Edwards read an article about a Google engineer who saw his company’s AI as "sentient.” Those concepts overtook the original idea behind the film, and he began exploring whether AI has the capacity to feel emotions.
“I really thought, ‘Oh, my God! We're kind of onto something with this movie,’” he recalls.
“The Creator” final trailer. Courtesy of 20th Century Studios via YouTube
Edwards’ innovative approach to the story extends to his filmmaking technique. Using a prosumer market Sony FX3 camera with the capability to film at 12,800 ISO, he created a portable system of lighting that allowed him to shoot in 80 different countries.
“We weren't really doing it for cost reasons. We were doing it for just creative reasons. We could just be more organic and less contrived,” he explains. “I felt with this science fiction film we were doing the best version of it, [and it] was going to feel as real and natural [as possible]. I didn't want to put marks on the ground, and say, ‘You walk here and you say this line.’ I wanted it to be a bit free, a bit more like a documentary at times.”
He believes that the guerrilla-style production, or, as he quips, “[the] tiny little student film,” also gave actors and his crew a more enjoyable and flexible experience.
“I think most actors would say it's good because you can stay in the zone. People aren't coming up to you with makeup and messing around, and people aren't distracting you,” Edwards says. “We never closed the roads and we filmed in these villages in the middle of nowhere in paddy fields. We just wanted all the local people to be able to come and go and to feel as real as possible.”
“Factory Farmed” film by Gareth Edwards. Courtesy of MovieFestUK via YouTube
How a VFX editor became a sci-fi director
The Creator is Edwards’ second feature film. Though he always aspired to be a director, he got “massively sidetracked” after college and spent the next decade working in computer animation for the BBC and The Discovery Channel.
“I kept saying that, ‘Six months from now, that's when I'd stop doing this, and I'll use all these skills and I'll go make some sort of sci-fi movie or something.’ Six months kept coming and going,” he recalls.
Edwards put his dream off until 2005, when he got his first brush with directing working on the documentary series End Day. It debuted on the BBC and was nominated for Best Visual Effects, Digital Effects by the Royal Television Society, UK.
In 2008, after cutting his teeth on a couple more TV series, he created Factory Farmed, a small-budget short film produced in a 48-hour challenge for a film festival.
“What was weird is, I was more proud of those two days of work than I was the previous ten years, because we were so rushed. We couldn't plan anything. I had to improvise our way through this little filmmaking exercise,” Edwards says.
“When you work with computers, you only get out what you put in. You get no happy accidents, it's very clinical. And then… suddenly, picking up a camera, when it normally takes you a whole day to render an image… it was happening instantaneously. It was this really liberating thing.”
“Monsters” official trailer. Courtesy of Rotten Tomatoes Classic Trailers via YouTube
From micro-budgets to blockbusters
Two years after creating Factory Farmed, Edwards wrote, directed, shot, and created the visual effects for his first feature film, Monsters, which gained widespread recognition.
The sci-fi horror had a $250,000 grant budget and was shot in Belize, Costa Rica, Guatemala, and Mexico. The film did well at festivals, and won 14 awards out of 15 nominations.
“It was how we thought a film should be made, rather than how they're supposed to be made,” he affirms. “I had one of the most creative experiences of my life. I found it really rewarding.”
Following the film’s success, Edwards was enlisted to direct the 2014 action-adventure blockbluster Godzilla, which cost $160 million and won seven awards. “It's kind of surreal,” he says.
“Godzilla” official trailer. Courtesy of Rotten Tomatoes Trailers via YouTube
Oh, and about all that Rogue One drama…
Following Gozilla, Edwards sat in the director’s chair for Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, the acclaimed 2016 anthology prequel to George Lucas’ original 1977 Star Wars trilogy. The film has since gotten its own prequel treatment with the hit Disney+ series Andor, though Edwards isn’t involved.
Rogue One grossed over $1 billion worldwide and received favorable reviews, but endured a number of production setbacks along the way. The highly-publicized issues raised concerns, and co-writer Tony Gilroy was brought in for last minute rewrites and five weeks of reshoots. Later, Gilroy described the film as being “in terrible trouble” and “a mess” when he took over.
Edwards, who resisted commenting on the situation for years, is finally speaking up:
“The stuff that's out there on the internet about what happened on that film… there's so much inaccuracy about the whole thing, and Tony came in and he did a lot of great work for sure, no doubt about it,” Edwards explains. “But we all worked together till the entire last minute of that movie… It's always a team effort making a movie, especially a big giant movie like that.”
“Rogue One: A Star Wars Story” official trailer. Courtesy of Star Wars via YouTube
He says he prefers not to talk about the situation in a negative light, and is just grateful for the opportunity.
“Someone who gets the opportunity to make a Star Wars film, and then starts complaining about it… I don't think many people have much empathy for that kind of person, so I don't want to be [one of] them,” he says. “It was a dream come true… and so [it’s a], ‘What goes in Fight Club stays in Fight Club’ kind of thing, you know?”
After the release of Rogue One, Edwards took a break from directing until it felt right again.
“This is my first film back out for seven years because it was so important to me that I got to build the machine and decide,” he affirms. “We've tried to make this film the way that made sense to us, because then the outcome is going to be more on target to how you picture the movie in your head, if that makes sense.”
The Creator is now playing in theaters everywhere.