20th Century Studios’ The Creator, in theaters today, is an epic sci-fi action thriller set amidst a future war between the human race and the forces of artificial intelligence (AI). Directed, produced, and co-written (with Chris Weitz) by acclaimed filmmaker Gareth Edwards, the story is eerily prescient in that it grapples with questions about what it means to be human, whether humans should embrace or fear AI, and whether the two can coexist. “I’ve always been interested in those sorts of questions,” Edwards says. “My favorite science fiction films always have meat on the bone. The genre takes in aspects of the world and twists them slightly, and so it certainly makes you question all your beliefs and previous assumptions.”

The Creator is set in the year 2070, after AI has decimated the city of Los Angeles. Western governments respond by wholly banning AI, while Eastern nations continue to develop the technology to the point where robots have become sentient and embraced as equals. The story picks up when Joshua (John David Washington), a hardened ex-special forces agent grieving his missing wife, Maya (Gemma Chan), is recruited to hunt down and kill the Creator, the elusive architect of advanced AI who created a mysterious weapon with the power to end the war—and mankind itself. Joshua and his team of elite operatives cross enemy lines, into the AI-occupied territory, only to discover that the world-ending weapon he’s been instructed to destroy is AI in the form of a child, Alphie (Madeleine Yuna Voyles).

To bring Edwards’ vision of the future to life, the production traveled more than 10,000 miles to 80 different locations across Cambodia, Indonesia, Japan, Nepal, Thailand, Vietnam, the U.K., and the U.S. “I wanted it to feel as realistic as possible—not use green screen, not use motion capture suits, but go to real villages and temples all around the world and shoot the actual journey the characters go on,” Edwards says. “When you do that, you don’t want to delete everything you’re seeing, because it’s so rich, beautiful, interesting, and sort of alien, in a way. You want to let the world into the shots. Something I learned from [Disney Legend] George Lucas is that you want to change about 25% at most and let the rest stay as is. We tried to keep the sets open as well; we didn’t close the roads or the beaches. We let villagers come and go. It’s not a documentary, but it has a naturalism to it.”

Rather than design the film up front, Edwards­—who spent the first decade of his career as a visual effects artist—took the unconventional approach of saving the post-production design work until after filming had wrapped. “It’s actually way easier to do it backwards,” Edwards explains. “Here’s my bad analogy: People normally make a film by painting a target on a wall. Then, they stand back with a bow and arrow and try to hit a bullseye—and they usually miss. What I was trying to do was stand back, fire an arrow at a wall, and wherever it hit, paint a bullseye around that and make it look perfect. To do that, we shot lots and lots of material. The first cut was about five hours, but then we could edit the movie without caring about the effects or the design. It allowed us to see the most beautiful things that worked the best. Once you’re there, you can start to design the film.”

Admittedly, after Edwards finished directing Lucasfilm’s Rogue One: A Story Wars Story (2016), he became “kind of obsessed with camera technology”—and that obsession led him and director of photography Greig Fraser to develop a revolutionary lightweight camera system for The Creator that has multiple configurations, allowing them to shoot on the go and still deliver a high-resolution image. “This camera can shoot at 12,800 ISO, so you can see in moonlight,” Edwards says. “With a camera this sensitive, you can use very small lights to light your scenes.” This meant the LED lights didn’t need to be affixed to giant, heavy equipment that often required hours to set up and later rearrange. Instead, the best boy would simply hold the light on a pole (much like a sound recordist would hold a microphone)—and as the actors would move around, the lighting would instantly adapt. “We had to do a little test to prove it to the studio,” Edwards says, laughing, “because obviously it sounds a little crazy.” After Industrial Light & Magic polished Edwards’ test footage (“They were surprised by how efficient it is”), New Regency greenlit The Creator.

Edwards’ big bet paid off, with critics calling The Creator “breathtaking” (Forbes), “a masterpiece” (Screenrant), and “the best sci-fi film of the past decade” (ComicBook.com). With the film now playing in theaters, Edwards hopes it will inspire audiences to ask themselves the very same questions that inspired him to write and direct it. “I think we’ve all got it wrong. We spend 99% of our lives worrying about food and money and nonsense,” he says. “Now and again, you’ll have a drink with a friend, and you end up chatting about the universe. Films are great opportunities to take those really profound ideas and put them in a story in a way that won’t overwhelm you but will make you think.”

By Emily Hewitt

Director, producer, and co-writer Gareth Edwards went through quite the filmmaking process to make the sci-fi action thriller The Creator. The film, set against a future war between a human military and AI robots, is about ex-special forces agent Joshua (John David Washington), who is recruited to hunt down the Creator, the architect of advanced AI who has developed a weapon with the power to end the war and mankind itself. Instead of the formidable weapon he expects, Joshua discovers an AI robot in the form of a young child, whom he dubs Alphie (Madeleine Yuna Voyles). He soon comes to believe Alphie holds the secret to a tragedy from his own past, which takes him on a journey between their two worlds.

In anticipation of the film opening September 29, only in theaters, here are eight facts you didn’t know about The Creator:

1. Gareth Edwards got the idea for the plot when driving by a factory.
After finishing Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), the director took a break by going on a four-day road trip to his girlfriend’s home state of Iowa. Not expecting to think of any film ideas on this trip, he simply put on his headphones and looked out the window. That’s when he saw a factory with a Japanese-looking logo on it, situated amid the tall grass and farmland.

“I wondered, ‘What they’re doing in there? Oh, maybe it’s robots or something cool,’” Edwards recalled during a recent press conference. “And then I was thinking, ‘Oh, imagine being a robot built in a factory and you step outside the factory for the first time.’”

The idea took ahold of his imagination, and by the time he got to his girlfriend’s parents’ house, he had the basics of the whole movie mapped out.

2. An open casting call found the young actress who plays Alphie.
After seeing hundreds of kids from around the world who sent in audition tapes to the open casting for Alphie during the pandemic, Edwards met with Madeleine Yuna Voyles. At her in-person audition, he said, “We were just trying not to cry. It was so emotional and brilliant. And I just thought, ‘Okay, this is too good to be true.’… And I got paranoid that it was a one-off thing and it would never happen again.” To challenge the young performer, “I invented this other scene and she did something even more heart-grabbing. And I was just like, ‘Okay, this is it. This is our kid.’”

3. Certain scenes were purposely held until the end of the shooting schedule.
Edwards left the most emotional scenes until the end so Voyles could build a strong relationship with Washington. “Madeleine’s a very quiet, shy girl,” Edwards said. “It’s really hard to become her friend. I tried the entire movie, and I think she let me a little bit in, but not fully. But [John David] cracked the code and became like a big brother to her—and her best friend.”

The two were “inseparable,” Edwards said. After wrapping a take, when Washington would walk off set looking for some quiet time alone—“trying to keep in that headspace before you do the next take”—Voyles would simply “run after him, hold his hand, and start talking about a toy she really likes. And he’s such a sweetheart, he’d go down to her level and start getting really excited about what she was saying.”

4. Many of the actors were local to the regions the film was shot in.
Many of the supporting performers and background actors seen in the film were from near where the shooting was taking place. In Nepal, people from a little town by the Buddhist temple were used as actors.

“Some of the kids agreed to shave their heads and play some of the robot monks,” Edwards said. “It was kind of surreal. They all got really excited about being in a Hollywood movie.”

Rather than shoot in a studio, against green screens, and then creating the sets and landscapes with pricey CG effects, Edwards decided it would be more cost-effective—and more visually compelling—to film on location in Asia. The production visited eight different countries, where they handpicked each location based on the scenery and the script needs.

“We cherry-picked: the volcanoes of Indonesia, Buddhist temples in the Himalayas, ruins of Cambodia, and floating villages,” Edwards said, listing just a few of the film’s many stunning locales.

5. Edwards creates a visual bible for each of his films.
Edwards said his favorite moments in cinema are the “things that are nonverbal, like music and sound design and cinematography.” So, for his own films, he creates a visual bible for these elements that don’t always stand out in a script. This also helps people he brings onto the film to understand his artistic vision better.

“For each scene in the movie, there’s a stack of imagery [I’ve put together] that’s like, this is what this scene is going to feel like,” Edwards said. “And then there’s music. I create a playlist of music”—existing recordings that capture the mood of each scene.

6. Instruments from Asia were used to make composer and Disney Legend Hans Zimmer sound less like himself.
“I really wanted it to feel like if someone played this soundtrack not knowing anything, they might not guess it was Hans Zimmer,” Edwards said—an idea Zimmer and his collaborator, Steve Mazzaro, loved. The resulting score was inspired in part by western themes, but “using instrumentation from Asia.”

7. AI is used as a metaphor for people different from you.
A big reason Edwards adores the science fiction genre, he said, is that “when you change some aspect of the world… suddenly a lot of the things you thought were true start to not work and be wrong. It makes you question what your beliefs are. And I think that’s the best kind of science fiction.”

For The Creator, reality started to catch up to the fiction while the film was in production. “We were using AI as a kind of metaphor for people who are different to yourself,” Edwards said. “But then obviously in the last year or so, [AI has] become quite a reality. It’s gotten very surreal.”

8. Edwards has no plans for a sequel.
“I really like endings,” he said. “My favorite part of a story is how it ends. It’s like the best part of a joke is the punchline. And so, when I’m trying to figure out a story, I’m always working backwards from the end to try and get it to [reach] this climax [I’ve envisioned] as much as possible. Everything sort of leads to that moment. So this [story] is self-contained.”

Of course, one can never say never in Hollywood. “It’d be a high-class problem to have the studio come up and tap you on the shoulder and say, ‘Hey, Gareth, you gotta think of something. We need a sequel,’” he said. “But that’s not on my agenda. So… fingers crossed.”