The Creator: how Gareth Edwards’ sci-fi epic film was influenced by Asian culture and the subject of AI – resulting in ‘Vietnam jungle warfare, but with robots’
- Rogue One director Gareth Edwards’ new endeavour, The Creator, marries his love of Asian culture with the current conversation around the dangers of AI
- He explains how he came up with the idea for the film, what he truly thinks about sci-fi and why working on Star Wars can feel ‘like playing in the Super Bowl’
 (1).JPG?itok=0BHk6odg&v=1665981271)
It will come as no surprise to learn that Gareth Edwards has a love for Asian culture.
Now Edwards is back with The Creator, a sci-fi as epic as any Star Wars movie and one entirely inspired by his love of Asia.
Set in 2070, in a world where the Americans have banned AI, the story follows a US soldier, Sergeant Joshua Taylor (John David Washington), who has been sent on a mission into the Republic of New Asia to find Nirmata (Hindi for “creator”).
The mysterious Nirmata has built a superweapon to help the AI-friendly New Asia defeat the Americans, who themselves use an aerial space station, Nomad, that zaps whole areas with its ominous blue ray.
With Taylor really in New Asia to find the woman he loves and believed was dead, the twist comes when he meets an AI-powered robot, in the form of a child, that he christens Alphie (newcomer Madeleine Yuna Voyles), who could lead him to Nirmata and possibly his lost love.
The idea of an adult-child pairing had been with Edwards for years, ever since he saw a movie clip from one of the Lone Wolf and Cub films – a series inspired by Japanese manga comics about an assassin and his three-year-old son.
“It was with this samurai and a little child. And it just grabbed me instantly, such an interesting dynamic,” he says. “Something about that image really stuck in my brain.”
“I love science fiction,” he says. “I actually don’t watch or care about or consume science fiction that is just drama set in a spaceship. I’m not into that. And I don’t really watch those TV shows that are that kind of thing.
“What I love about science fiction is it’s kind of an analogy, or an allegory, for something in our world today. And it uses science fiction to take an idea and crank it up to 11.”
The Creator does exactly that, adding its voice to the hot-button topic of artificial intelligence. Edwards did not set out, necessarily, to tap the zeitgeist, but he could not help but notice how the subject of AI was increasingly hitting the headlines.
“We’re really using science fiction as a metaphor for the other, the them-and-us thing. But once it became AI, there’s all these fascinating things that come up through it. And so we wanted to explore and pull in these threads and bring up those conversations.”
If anyone thinks Edwards is simply jumping on the AI bandwagon, he has been working on The Creator since 2017, when he took a three-week trip to Thailand and began thinking of setting his story there.
Want more after Alienoid and Warriors of Future? 10 Asian sci-fi must-sees
“We ended up doing this little whirlwind tour of Vietnam,” he says. “It was really infecting me, this idea of being in Thailand and Asia and mixing Asia with science fiction.”
One of the joys of The Creator is seeing such a fresh take on the genre. “I think a lot of filmmakers … when I try and figure out how they struck gold and where they got their ideas from, they’re usually like a combination of opposing inspiration.
“And so I guess it was Vietnam jungle warfare, but with robots and sci-fi – that was what was exciting me. And then there was this potentially emotional relationship at the heart of it.”
Originally, Edwards intended to shoot all over Southeast Asia, and he went on a whirlwind trip across Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Indonesia, Nepal and Japan to film test footage. He even braved an active volcano, Mount Bromo, in East Java.
But with filming delayed thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic, he was thwarted in his ambitions, and the shoot was restricted to Thailand – although he did eventually lead a tiny unit to Cambodia, Nepal and Japan to shoot dramatic background plates that could be spliced into the film.
The Creator is easily one of the most handsome films this year and the Thai locations are stunning, shot by the hugely talented cinematographer Oren Soffer and cunningly doctored with visual effects to look retro-futuristic.
From Railay Beach in the southern province of Krabi, where the film’s opening sequence takes place, to Bangkok, which doubles for the futuristic Lilat City, to the paddy fields in Noen Maprang, it seems like there is not an inch of Thailand the production did not visit.
They even shot around the famous Uttamanusorn Bridge, which spans the Songaria River, for the film’s show-stopping sequence – a visceral tank battle, as Taylor and Alphie get caught up with AI insurgents including Edwards’ Godzilla star Ken Watanabe.
What is even more remarkable is that Edwards shot the film on a lower budget (reportedly US$80 million) than most blockbusters – with the aim of making a film with a smaller footprint. His first movie Monsters had been made with a crew of just five.
“Then you go do something like Star Wars or Godzilla and they do get that big wide release and they are the movie for that week or so. And that’s like playing in the Super Bowl if you want to be an NFL footballer or something.
“But when you’re in those situations you are looking back at that first film you did and going, ‘God I wish some of it could be like that because we got so much better stuff working that way.’”
Whether this approach will revolutionise the making of blockbuster movies, only time will tell. But there is no doubt The Creator is just what the industry needs. At a time when Hollywood is obsessed with franchises, content and IP, here is a wholly original movie that plays out on a vast canvas and cost a fraction of most studio tentpole movies.
“I was just trying to figure out how to do a guerilla but beautiful and cinematic film,” Edwards says with a shrug.
