Gareth Edwards’ New Blockbuster Is His Most Ambitious Project Yet, but Not in the Way You Might Think

After diving into franchise fare over his last few films (and doing a damn fine job of it), director Gareth Edwards (Rogue One, Godzilla) is set to return to the realm of originality with The Creator, the incoming sci-fi epic after his own imagination.

The film is set on a war-ridden future Earth where humans find themselves locked in a deadly conflict with AI-powered robots and follows the plight of ex-special forces agent Joshua (John David Washington) as he infiltrates the AI’s territory with the mission of destroying their secret, world-ending weapon once and for all. Things get more than a bit complicated, however, when he finds out that the weapon is a small, AI-powered child.

The rather heavy topicality of The Creator is undeniable, but Edwards hopes this doesn’t distract audiences from the rather unconventional path he was dead set on forging over the course of the filmmaking experience—a path whose unique fruits will hopefully blossom in the finished product. In a recent interview with Variety, Edwards offered up a small glimpse into his creative process, namely in how he stripped down the set to its bare essentials whenever he had the opportunity.

“If you stood where the actors were and looked around, you shouldn’t see the crew at all. It made total sense to have 300 people surrounding you when you’ve got tanks and dozens of soldiers running across the Golden Gate Bridge as monsters are attacking. It didn’t make as much sense to have 300 people around you when you’re filming in a room with two actors talking to each other. That’s the bit I wanted to try to do differently.”

He would go on to note that his more simplistic, resource-light approach to filmmaking—which also included shooting on location and forgoing digital character effects for practical costumes—tended to clash with “the machine” of blockbuster process, but he was nevertheless ready to fight tooth and nail in order to cultivate his minimalist style on set whenever he could. Although, sometimes, you just need a few extra bells and whistles to do those set pieces.

“I was trying to mash up all those processes together — sometimes have the big set-pieces where you need all that crew, and sometimes have just two people in a room and me and the sound guy. The machine so desperately doesn’t want to do that. If you don’t constantly fight it, you’re going to end up making a film exactly the way everyone always makes a film. To me, it was a deal breaker; if we weren’t going to do this process differently, I didn’t want to do it.”

It remains to be seen whether or not this will all pay off for The Creator, of course. Edwards has a strong, if short, track record in the realm of genre fiction, but the gradually-mounting pressure of being one of the year’s major studio blockbusters, coupled with its limited promotional options thanks to AMPTP greed, has stacked the deck against it the other way as well. Here’s hoping the grass is green for The Creator on the other side of its release date; we’re long overdue for an entirely original, action-packed sci-fi adventure that isn’t 65.

(featured image: 20th Century Studios)