The future is here: Director Gareth Edwards on his ‘humans v AI’ film The Creator
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British film-maker and scriptwriter Gareth Edwards at the presentation of his movie, The Creator, in Madrid, Spain, on Sept 22 , 2023.
PHOTO: EPA-EFE
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LOS ANGELES – The Creator, one of 2023’s most anticipated science-fiction films, might also be the most topical, imagining a world in which humans find themselves at war with advanced artificial intelligence (AI).
Opening in Singapore cinemas on Thursday, the dystopian thriller stars John David Washington as a man hunting down a mysterious weapon that can destroy the human race – only to discover it is an AI that looks like a young child.
Speaking at a preview of the movie in Los Angeles, writer-director Gareth Edwards, 48, acknowledges the fortuitous timing of the film given the recent rise of AI technologies such as ChatGPT, and ongoing debates about the existential risk to humanity posed by far more advanced AI.
“I think the trick with AI is to get the timing of the story right. There’s a sweet-spot window where it’s before the robot apocalypse and not after, which I think is in November, maybe December, so we got really lucky,” jokes the British film-maker, who directed the science-fiction films Godzilla (2014) and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016).
“I tried to avoid putting a date in the movie, but at some point you have to, so I did some maths and picked 2070,” he adds.
“Now, I feel like an idiot because I should’ve gone for 2023 – because everything that unfolded in the last few months or year is kind of scary and weird.”
As an illustration of how much the thinking around AI has shifted in the last year, he says when he first pitched to studio executives the idea for The Creator, “everyone wanted to know, ‘Why would we be at war with AI? Why would you ban AI? It’s going to be great’.
He adds: “So you have to set up the idea that maybe humanity would reject this thing, and the way it’s played out in the movie is pretty much the last few months in real life, so it’s kind of strange.”
Madeleine Yuna Voyles in The Creator.
PHOTO: THE WALT DISNEY COMPANY
Edwards also spoke of how he came to cast American actor Washington as the lead, alongside British star Gemma Chan of romantic comedy film Crazy Rich Asians (2018) as his wife and American newcomer Madeleine Yuna Voyles as the childlike humanoid robot.
The initial meeting with Washington – the 39-year-old star of the science-fiction thriller Tenet (2020) and the son of Hollywood veteran Denzel Washington – was somewhat awkward because it took place at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, when “it was really hard to meet anybody”, Edwards recalls.
Washington agreed to meet him for a meal in Los Angeles, and “he walks in, he’s got his mask on, but it had the Star Wars logo on it”.
Edwards says: “And I initially thought, ‘Oh no, he’s doing this because I directed Rogue One.’ Then he sat down and admitted he’s a massive Star Wars fan.
“He was, like, ‘I’ve been wearing this mask every single day for the whole pandemic, and I thought about not wearing it to this meeting, but it felt false. So I thought it’d be a good icebreaker.’ So we hit it off straight away.”
John David Washington in The Creator.
PHOTO: THE WALT DISNEY COMPANY
The film-maker also explains how he made this futuristic action thriller on a relatively modest budget of US$80 million (S$109.5 million).
“You look at all that imagery and it’s incredibly ambitious, and the natural reaction is, ‘This is a US$300 million film’. And normally, you’re going to have to build sets in a studio, against green screen, and it’ll cost a fortune.”
But Edwards departed from the visual effects-heavy approach and instead chose to film at 80 or so real locations around the world – far more than is typical for a movie. He went to spots such as an active volcano in Indonesia, Cambodian temples and cities in Thailand, Vietnam and Japan.
“We wanted to shoot in real parts of the world that look closest to what these images are and then, when the film is fully edited, get the production designer and other concept artists to paint over those frames and put the sci-fi on top,” he says.
And Edwards managed to pull it off.
“If you keep the crew small enough, for the cost of building a set – which is typically, like, US$200,000 – you can fly everyone to anywhere in the world. And everyone said, ‘Sounds great’, but we had to go and prove it to them.”
The Creator opens in cinemas on Thursday.
