How “The Creator” Creator Gareth Edwards Is Thinking About AI

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The backdrop to new sci-fi film The Creator is AI, which can be benevolent and could be evil. One AI manifests as a very cute young kid.

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“This film will challenge what you believe,” says actor John David Washington in a making-of featurette. “It’s hard to know whose side to be on.”

That’s exactly what director Gareth Edwards, who wrote the script with Chris Weitz, wanted. Although the future 50 years hence looks “as if someone made Apocalypse Now in the Blade Runner universe,” according to Ryan Scott at SlashFilm, Edwards doesn’t paint AI as black or white.

“Should we embrace it or should we destroy it,” he asks.

Releasing in cinemas on September 28, this is Edwards’ first film since Star Wars: Rogue One in 2016, around the same time he began writing the film. The starting point was to make an allegory about robots, “a fairy tale for people who are different, that look different from us, and that we treat as the kind of the enemy or the inferior, and that they do the same back to us,” he says in an interview with Joe Deckelmeier for Screen Rant.

He’s kept the robots but added AI so that the robots are sentient. It was only as they were shooting the film in the first half of 2022 that the latest wave of AI technology became front page news.

“I thought I was making a subject matter that was like three decades away. Like, there’s no way we’re going to witness this. And then whilst we were filming, people are sending me links to news items about whistleblowers in big tech saying that the AI was sentient. And it was like, Whoa, what’s going on?”

“As we’re making The Creator, AI is getting better and better,” Edwards says. “It feels like we’re at that tipping point now and this movie questions what does that look like 50 years from now, when AI is more embedded as part of society.”

Equally presciently perhaps, the film also depicts half of the world having developed AI and the other half being actively against it, following a catastrophic malfunction. Interestingly, it is the West that wants to ban AI while a region of Southeast Asia fights to keep it as a force for good.

Scenes in the film depict an anti-AI movement “with people with protest signs, for and against AI,” the director told Collider’s Perri Nemiroff, thinking this was absurd. “And now, I live very near the Studios [in LA] and we drove past and that’s exactly what’s happening [with the writer’s strike].”

The movie is set in 2070 but Edwards told Nemiroff he should have picked 2024. “But I picked 2070 Because I didn’t want to make the mistake Kubrick made of 2001: A Space Odyssey [which was made in 1968 but the Jupiter mission it depicted remains distant even now]. “So I was like, I’m gonna pick something way downstream.”

Making a Smaller Budget Go Further

Distributed by 20th Century Studios, the film itself was shot on a relative shoestring budget of $80 million, but looks like a blockbuster costing significantly more. For Edwards this seems a welcome retreat from the huge budget he handled for Godzilla in 2014 and back to the more DIY approach with which he made breakthrough sci-fi-horror Monsters in 2010.

Counterintuitively the secret was to ditch CGI and LED volumes (though both were used) to focus on shooting more in actual locations with world-building production design added after the fact.

“What you normally do is you have all this design work and people say, ‘You can’t find these locations,” he explained during a Q&A session hosted by IMAX, and reported by Slash Film’s Vanessa Armstrong.

“[They’d say] You’re going to have to build sets in a studio against greenscreen. It’ll cost a fortune.’ We were like, ‘What we want to do is go shoot the movie in real locations, in real parts of the world closest to what these images are. Then afterwards, when the film is fully edited, get the production designer, James Clyne, and other concept artists to paint over those frames and put the sci-fi on top.’”

So they did, and the crew went to 80 locations, which is far more than one would normally use for a movie of this size.

“We didn’t really use any green screen,” he said. “There was occasionally a little bit here and there, but very little. If you do the maths, if you keep the crew small enough, the theory was that the cost of building a set, which is typically like $200,000, you can fly everyone to anywhere in the world for that kind of money. So it was like, ‘Let’s keep the crew small and let’s go to these amazing locations.’”

Edwards shot the film using Sony FX3 cameras, a budget choice but, as he points out, one that is barely distinguishable in performance from far more expensive so-called cinestyle cameras.

“The difference between the greatest digital cinema camera you can buy and a camera like the FX3 is minute, hardly anything,” he told Nemiroff.

The big advantage for the production was the camera’s ability to record in different light scenarios including the capability of shooting 12,800 ISO “so we can shoot under moonlight.”

That in turn enabled the production team to shoot with fewer lights, cutting costs and increasing mobility. The filmmakers developed a lightweight lighting rig that a crew member could move in seconds, rather than minutes, as Edwards explained to Armstrong.

“I could move and suddenly the lighting could re-adjust. And what normally would take 10 minutes to change was taking four seconds.”

This afforded room for the actors to improvise and for Edwards to capture more of a documentary feel. “We would do 25-minute takes where we would play out the scene three or four times and just give everything this atmosphere of naturalism that I really wanted to get, where it wasn’t so prescribed. You’re not putting marks on the ground and saying, ‘Stand there.’ It wasn’t that kind of movie.”

Edwards’ lighting operator would move with the camera, just as a boom operator would, he told Nemiroff.

“We’d do a little dance together in real time,” he said. “Normally [changing light setups] would take half an hour. So it just liberated us completely. And I’m never gonna go back, to be honest.”

He started the project with one of the world’s most in-demand cinematographers, Greig Fraser ASC, who won the Oscar for his work on Dune last year. As Edwards says tells Nemiroff, “Greig is one of the few people in the world I would trust to give a camera to and say, you shoot it, and just hand it over. He’s got an amazing eye. The whole world seems to know that now.”

Having done prep for the movie in 2019/2020, Fraser got the offer to shoot Dune and its sequel for Denis Villenueve, and suggested DP Oren Soffer take over behind the camera.

According to Edwards, Soffer was a protege of Fraser’s. “So I looked at his work, it was really strong. We chatted and I really liked him. And so basically, there’s this transition where Greig carried on remotely but Oren picks up the reins.”

In conversation with Armstrong, Edwards revealed that the visual design of The Creator was inspired by the simple idea, “What if the Sony Walkman won the tech war instead of the Apple Mac?”

“The way we tried to quickly describe the design aesthetic of the movie is that it’s a little bit retro-futuristic.”

Likewise for the insect-like robots in the film, which they tried to design as if an insect had been made by Sony. “We took products and tried to turn them into organic-looking heads. We took things like film projectors and vacuum cleaners and just put them together, deleted pieces and kept experimenting. It was like DNA getting merged together with other DNA, trying to create something better than the previous thing.”

“AI Democratizes Filmmaking”

When it comes to AI in filmmaking, Edwards is equally even-handed. He was surprised by what is already possible with AI tools.

“My initial thoughts were that AI will never be able to understand the beauty of an image but actually websites like Midjourney are pretty good. [So, then you think] soon it’ll be moving footage. And then maybe you won’t need cameras,” he told GameSpot senior editor Chris Hayner in an interview for Fandom.

“It’s going to change filmmaking so much,” he continues, way beyond the CGI-realism breakthrough of Jurassic Park. “It’s going to be a big seismic shift. My hope is that it sort of democratizes filmmaking, like it doesn’t cost $200 million anymore to go make something that’s in your head. You can kind of do it from your bedroom. But then the question is when everyone can make Star Wars from their bedroom, will there be any specialist [crafts] anymore?”