Director: Gareth Edwards, The creator stars John David Washington in the role of a special forces agent tasked with killing a particularly advanced form of artificial intelligence.
The scenario
Co-written by Gareth Edwards and Chris Weitz, the director got his first taste of the story while in the American Midwest. “We had just finished Rogue One. Since my partner’s family lives in Iowa, we decided to drive across the United States to visit them. As we drove through the Midwest we could see all this farmland with tall grass. I looked out the window with headphones on and saw a factory in the middle of the tall grass with a Japanese logo on it. Because of my love of science fiction, I thought they built robots there. And I imagined a robot coming out of the factory and seeing the field and the sky for the first time,” he said in the pages of Collider. Over time the idea was refined. In the year 2070, Joshua (John David Washington) is a former special forces soldier whose wife (Gemma Chan) is presumed dead. He is recruited to find the creator, the inventor of an advanced artificial intelligence (AI) that has developed a particularly destructive weapon. And what is his surprise when he discovers that the AI is in the form of a child (Madeleine Yuna Voyles).
An allegory
If Gareth Edwards loves science fiction so much, it’s because the genre allows him to approach serious social issues in a roundabout way. “We live in a world in which we are afraid of others, of people who are different from us. Today we are increasingly polarized. I wanted to try to explore the kind of situation where the character has huge prejudices against people that he has to learn to live with. Here we have a protagonist who takes a journey through a futuristic war and begins to question whether what he believed is true. As a society, we are on a shared AI journey, whether we like it or not. Is it real? Are we really talking to a person? And while the film raises many questions about technology and AI, “The Creator” is also a fairy tale at its core,” he explained during filming.
Convince the studios
Gareth Edwards knew he had to sell his project to the studios and, above all, convince the bosses that he could make the film for a fraction of the usual budget of around $300 million. He secretly asked some of his friends who are artists to create about fifty paintings, “conceptual art,” which he then showed to the studios. He then told them: “We want to shoot in as similar locations as possible, then we will ask the post-production team to add the visual effects.”
Filming around the world
“We shot in 80 different locations, although we’re usually lucky if the studios allow us to go to a handful of locations. Our team was tiny and we shot without a big green screen. A large film set can easily cost $200,000 to build. There we traveled to Nepal, the Himalayas, Indonesia, Cambodia, Vietnam and Tokyo on this budget. We also shot some stuff at Pinewood Studios in England and Los Angeles,” explained Gareth Edwards. And The Creator’s budget is estimated at… $80 million.
Sources of inspiration
Gareth Edwards, a staunch cinema lover who doesn’t shy away from citing James Cameron, Steven Spielberg and Ridley Scott as role models, emphasized that he had drawn on several feature films for “The Creator”. Film fans will therefore find references to Apocalypse Now by Francis Ford Coppola and Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness on the construction of the universe, as well as Baraka, Blade Runner and Akira. Rain Man, ET the Extra-Terrestrial and Cotton Candy inspired the relationship between Joshua and the AI.
“The Creator” hits theaters on September 29th.