After “Godzilla” and “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story”, Gareth Edwards is back with “The Creator”. This spectacular feature film on artificial intelligence, which has all the makings of a back-to-school blockbuster, was designed as an independent film.
What is it about ? In the near future, humans and artificial intelligence (AI) are waging a merciless war.
An American soldier infiltrated in Asia, Joshua is separated from his wife Maya during an assault. Assuming that she has died, he returns to the United States, completely devastated. Five years later, the army asks him to return to the field, fearing that a powerful artificial intelligence has created a weapon that will allow the East to win the war it is waging against the West. Sensing its near use, she wishes he would find it and destroy it.
When Colonel Jean Howell tells Joshua that Maya may be alive and could be in the combat zone, he suddenly finds a new challenge in this mission that he had initially reluctantly accepted. . However, shortly after his arrival in Asia, he discovers that the weapon in question is none other than a 6-year-old girl named Alphie. From then on, Joshua begins to question his beliefs about AI: Where is the truth? What have we hidden from him?
An ultra ambitious independent film
Gareth Edwards began his career with Monsters, a very low-budget sci-fi film. He then tried his hand at big productions with Godzilla and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. With The Creator, he wanted to create an original work of science fiction but was aware of the difficulty of financing such a project. To achieve this, he decided to make a modest feature film but with a strong visual style. He contacted the producer of Monsters and tried to explain to him that“we weren’t shooting a low-budget blockbuster, but the most ambitious independent film ever produced!”
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“Reverse” production
The Creator was produced “in reverse”, as the director explains: “Usually, with a blockbuster, you start by getting together with the artists and imagining the whole universe. Then you realize that you can’t find the necessary filming locations and that you have to build gigantic sets in the studio and shoot entirely on green screens. As I didn’t want such a shoot, we did everything the other way around and placed our cameras in real countries, on real sets, with real actors.
It was once the film was edited that I planned to meet with the station managers and paint on the plans to create the science fiction universe. The studios were skeptical and the bet seemed a bit crazy.” Thus, the film was shot in complete destitution, allowing the artistic department to imagine the sets in the post-production phase.
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Locations in the form of a short film
To convince the leaders of New Regency of his approach, Gareth Edwards left with his producer Jim Spencer and cameras for South-East Asia at the end of 2019 to shoot a short film.
“We traveled to the best filming locations in the world for each scene. James Clyne, one of our production designers, painted over the images and luckily Industrial Light & Magic agreed to add all the effects so that it had a testing value. We did all this extremely quickly and for much less money than the image result would suggest. The studio was blown away: we got their agreement and we went on filming…“, reveals the director.
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Shooting
To bring Gareth Edwards’ vision to life, the production traveled more than 10,000 miles and visited 80 different locations in eight countries: Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Nepal, Japan, Indonesia, United Kingdom (at nearby Pinewood Studios). in London) and the United States (in Los Angeles).
Genesis
After Rogue One: A Star Wars Story finished, Gareth Edwards needed a break and took a road trip with his girlfriend to visit his parents in Iowa. As they crossed the fields of the Midwest, the director was surprised to see in the middle of the farms a strange factory bearing a Japanese logo.
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He wondered what could be made there: “Being a fan of science fiction, I immediately thought of robots. Imagine that you are an android made in this factory, that you have only ever known this environment, that one day something malfunctions and you found yourself outside for the first time, forced to set out to discover the world and the sky. If that happened, what would happen?”
This was the beginning of a scenario, of which he had almost the entire plot once he arrived at his in-laws: “It’s very rare. I interpreted it then as a positive sign, and I said to myself that maybe it was my next film.”
The Creator, currently in theaters