Gareth Edwards Reflects On ‘Rogue One’ & “The Unstoppable Machine” Of Studio Filmmaking

Gareth Edwards returns to theaters this weekend with “The Creator,” a sci-fi epic that’s his first feature since 2016’s “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.” But is a return to big-budget blockbuster filmmaking for the director? Kind of, sort of, but not quite. “The Creator” boasts an $80 budget, still a hefty price tag these days, but mild in comparison to the estimated $265 million for “Rogue One” and the $160 for Edward’s 2014 film “Godzilla.”

READ MORE: ‘The Creator’ Final Trailer: Gareth Edwards’ Sci-Fi Epic About The War Between Humans & A.I. Arrives This Month

And that’s how Edwards wants it. In a new feature with Variety, the director detailed how his new movie experiments with the epic scope of a blockbuster by maintaining an indie sensibility. Edwards explained his DIY approach by juxtaposing big scenes he shot with hundreds of extras and more intimate one-on-one scenes. “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,” Edwards said of “The Creator.” “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.”

So why do things differently? So Edwards doesn’t make a big-budget movie like everybody else. Adding a little personality to the blockbuster formula is something Edwards developed while working on “Rogue One.” Edwards likened to work on the “Star Wars” films as “an unstoppable machine” with a massive scale the filmmaking couldn’t avoid, even if he wanted to. But Edwards stumbled upon the same issue working on “Godzilla,” too. “I walked past row after row after row of trucks, just to get to the main area,” recalled Edwards about shooting on scene for his 2014 film. “We were shooting in a convention center, and I sort of joked, ‘What are the chances that the day we shoot at the convention center is the day they’re having a truck convention?’ I just couldn’t believe that we needed 100 trucks to shoot these scenes.” 

So Edward’s approach on “The Creator” could be described as a rage, of sorts, against that unstoppable machine of blockbuster filmmaking. “You have to work at the pace that the machine is working at,” Edwards explained about working on “Rogue One.” “There are times where you wish you could just stop everything and take a moment to just figure something out. And you can’t. It’s hard to talk about this in a way that doesn’t sound like I’m not grateful for getting the opportunity.” But grateful though he is, Edwards wanted his work on “The Creator” to push back against some of the limitations inherent in blockbuster filmmaking, harkening back to his indie film roots, like his 2010 movie, “Monsters.”

Edwards explained how he tried to blend both approaches to keep his latest film from being too machinic. “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,” Edwards says. “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.” And that process is super important for filmmakers, said Edwards. “We were just trying to figure out, how can you do this better?” the director continued. “The way you make a film is as important as its screenplay. I would take full control over the process and a mediocre screenplay over a really good screenplay and zero control over the process.”

Despite the creative differences on the set of “Rogue One,” which saw Edwards eventually leave the project and “Andor” showrunner Tony Gilroy take the helm, Edwards looks back on “Rogue One” fondly. “Look, the only thing I can say is I was incredibly lucky,” the director said of his 2016 feature. “I got to make a “Star Wars” film. I won the lottery, in that sense. The idea of someone as privileged as me in any way implying that it was anything other than the amazing experience that it was to some extent — like, I don’t have any empathy for that person, and I don’t want to be that person either.”

“The Creator” hits theaters everywhere this Friday. Read The Playlist’s review of Edwards’ latest here.