There are very few filmmakers who have as much experience with massive science-fiction as Gareth Edwards, who we recently interviewed through our partnership with AMC Theatres, where tickets for the movie are on sale. After getting his start on the lower-budget, 2010 creature feature Monsters, Edwards graduated to Hollywood storytelling with the 2014 resuscitation of Godzilla. And that film ended up being so impressive, Lucasfilm came calling with an offer to tackle a Star Wars film. The end result, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, still is considered by many Star Wars fans to be one of the finest movies made in the post-prequel era. Sci-fi fans couldn’t wait to see what he did next. But the wait ended up taking longer than expected.
Gareth Edwards follows up Rogue One: A Star Wars Story later this month with The Creator, and the film already is generating raves worthy of a Star Wars successor. The film tackles the complicated topic of Artificial Intelligence, and finds John David Washington tracking the development of a weapon that actually looks like a child (played by Madeleine Yuna Voyles). And you can see the influences of Star Wars, Sir Ridley Scott’s sci-fi classics, and even Apocalypse Now. When we got the chance to sit down with Edwards and discuss the creation of The Creator, he opened up about lessons he learned working on Rogue One and Godzilla, and how they affected the upcoming movie. Edwards told us:
This thing I learned from Star Wars, that George (Lucas) did so well, was to basically take things from the past – mythology, and spiritual, ancient stories – and then take things from the future – spaceships and robots – and have them blend together. But you don’t use anything from today. In a weird way, that’s kind of what Asia is. When you walk around it, Thailand or anywhere, you see this strange mix. Like Bangkok, with these insane, futuristic, sci-fi-looking buildings. It pretty much looks like Blade Runner. And just around the corner, or down the road, there’s a massive temple with Buddhist monks and this ancient tradition thing that dates back hundreds of years, fused with this futuristic technology. And nothing you recognize from your world in the middle.
If only it were that easy, everyone would be doing it. Finding that middle ground between the ancient past and the high-tech future can be very difficult, and this is part of the reason why Star Wars continues to split between both in shows like Andor (the distant past) and Ahsoka (the spiritual future). But as we continued to explore his process, Gareth Edwards revealed that the most important lessons he took into The Creator traced back to his first movie, and the “limitations” that came with it. Edwards said:
My very first film, before I got that opportunity, there was virtually no money that we had for the budget. And so you’d expect there to be loads of problems, having no money. And instead, it was this incredibly liberating creative process that I ended up loving. And then you get to have hundreds of millions of dollars! And you think, ‘Oh my God, we can do anything! It’s going to be amazing!’ And you find you actually can’t do anything, and that – in a weird way – there are more limitations, to a certain extent. … It was always this desire of, there must be a way of having all of the advantages of a blockbuster, and combining it of having all the advantages of having a very small, indie-kind of movie.
That’s exactly what The Creator accomplishes. By filming on location with a streamlined crew, Gareth Edwards tells a timeless story that will appeal to audiences from all generations, and even likely stand the test of time as a sci-fi feature we keep returning to, year after year. The Creator will open in theaters beginning on September 29. Tickets are on sale at AMC Theatres.
