The Creator: A hyper-ambitious sci-fi film made… in utter destitution!

What is it about? In the near future, humans and artificial intelligence (AI) are waging a merciless war.

An American soldier who has infiltrated Asia, Joshua is separated from his wife Maya during the attack. Assuming he dies, 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 close use, it wants to find and destroy it.

When Colonel Jean Howell tells Joshua that Maya might be alive and in a combat zone, he suddenly finds a new challenge in a mission he initially reluctantly accepts. However, soon after arriving in Asia, he discovers that the weapon is none other than a 6-year-old girl named Alfie. Since then, Joshua begins to question his beliefs about artificial intelligence: where is the truth? What did we hide from him?

An ultra-ambitious independent film

Gareth Edwards started 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 knew 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 it to him“We weren’t making a low-budget blockbuster, but the most ambitious independent film ever!”

“Reverse” production

The creator was created “in reverse”, as the director explains: “Usually with a blockbuster, you start by getting together with the artists and imagining the whole world. Then you realize that you can’t find the necessary locations and you have to build giant shots in a studio and shoot them all on green. Because I didn’t want to shoot like that, we did the opposite and put the cameras in real countries, on real sets, with real actors.

After editing the film, I planned to meet with the station managers and draw plans to create a science fiction world. The studios were skeptical and the bet seemed a little crazy.” Thus, the film was shot in complete destitution, allowing the art department to introduce the sets during the post-production phase.

Locations in the form of a short film

To convince New Regency leaders of his approach, Gareth Edwards traveled to Southeast Asia with his producer Jim Spencer and his cameras in late 2019 to shoot a short film.

“We traveled to the best filming locations in the world for each scene. James Klein, one of our production designers, drew on the images and luckily Industrial Light & Magic agreed to add all the effects so that it had test value. We did it. It was all very fast and much For less money than the image results suggest. The studio was amazed: we got approval and continued shooting…“- the director tells us.

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, the United Kingdom (at Pinewood Studios near London) and the United States (in Los Angeles).

Genesis

After finishing Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Garrett Edwards needed a break and took a trip with his girlfriend to visit his parents in Iowa. As they crossed the fields of the Midwest, the director was surprised to see a strange factory with a Japanese logo in the middle of the farms.

He wondered what could be done there. “When I was a fan of science fiction, I immediately thought of robots. Imagine that you are an android made in this factory, that you only ever know this environment, that one day something goes wrong and you find yourself outside for the first time, forced. A journey to discover the world and the sky. If this happened , What would happen?”

This was the beginning of the scenario, about which he had almost the entire plot after he came to his relatives: “It’s very rare. I took it as a positive sign at the time and told myself that this might be my next film.”

The Creator, currently in theaters