With a budget of $80 million—a pittance compared to the budgets of most modern blockbusters— Gareth Edwards has made his long-awaited return to science-fiction on the big screen with “The Creator,” a provocative sci-fi adventure set roughly 50 years in the future, where Western society is devastated by and at war with artificial intelligence (read our review). Whereas the East, having not undergone a similar tragedy, has embraced and fostered the technology. John David Washington stars as a soldier assigned to hunt down and destroy the A.I.’s latest development: a weapon capable of wiping out all of humanity that just so happens to be an innocent child.
Filmed largely on location in stunning locales of southeast Asia, “The Creator” is one of the most visually arresting sci-fi films in years. Following our conversation with Edwards, we spoke with four key figures in combining its gorgeous location shooting with a winning assist from Industrial Light and Magic. Jay Cooper and Andrew Roberts served as VFX supervisors—with Roberts specifically serving as the film’s on-set supervisor—while Greig Fraser and Oren Soffer collaborated as Directors of Photography. Fraser is no stranger to shooting wondrous sci-fi vistas, thanks to his work on Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune” films and previous collaboration with Edwards. His obligation to next year’s “Dune: Part Two” necessitated Soffer’s addition to “The Creator” team.
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And, with only a fraction of typical blockbuster money, this team has produced sci-fi imagery that holds itself up with—if not above—any of the best, begging the question: why is “The Creator” so much better at this than most modern blockbusters? “Anytime that there’s a good reaction to how things look, it’s not just one department,” said Cooper. “There are a million different collaborators that help to that end. I think that primarily, it was Gareth’s choice to go to 80 different locations and lean into what was already there, not trying to turn these locations into something else. Our contribution was a singularity of Gareth’s vision of what he was looking for and the amazing contributions from James Klein, our production designer. Our goal always was to have as minimal a set presence as possible so that we could afford Gareth the amount of time he needed to get performances that he was comfortable with and to explore the framing as he was putting it together.”
Roberts reaffirmed this notion in the on-set approach to portraying the film’s synthetic humans and Simulants and mixing them in with real human characters. “In keeping with having a very, very small footprint and not wanting to be distracting to the actors, there was a small subset of actors that had a few tracking markers on their face,” said Roberts. “Makeup would come in with me each morning when we knew that a simulant would be on camera, and we’d identified a few areas like the tip of the nose and the chin and then along the temple. We had a visual template where we would add those to Alfie and Harun and a couple of other characters that would be simulants. But for others, it was very much figuring them out later as far as, ‘Okay, these people will be turned into robots.’ It was super minimal, which was how Gareth wanted it. There were no people in tracking suits or with ping pongs on or anything like that. It was, let’s capture as much in camera as possible. My role really was just to try and get as much information as possible so that when we were back looking at a shot, the team had the information to be able to add vehicles, or buildings, or robots to the frame.” Roberts proceeded to credit Edwards’ trust in the rest of the team. “He didn’t just kick the can and say, ‘We’ll just figure out where that building should be or what this thing should be like later.’ We would have very thoughtful conversations. He didn’t want the tail wagging the dog. Instead, he said, ‘I’m making a film. I really want it to be about the characters and our connection to the characters first. How can visual effects support me and ensure this thing looks awesome?’ It helped to put all of the work up on the screen.”
“He knows the lingo and understands the process, and I think he helps guide it,” added Cooper. “If you asked him to do a shot himself, he’s probably beyond that at this point, but it makes some things easier. At the end of the day, it’s our job to translate the director’s vision regardless of their knowledge and to put that on the screen. And I think that his greatest strength is that he knows what he’s looking for and can effectively communicate what he wants from a shot or in a sequence.” Speaking about the practical-centric location shooting, Cooper praised Edwards’ filmmaking ethos. “The thing that’s really nice about his approach is that anything that he can shoot in a real place, he will. And even things that we would normally do as a straight green screenshot or sequence, he tried to find something practical as a starting point, like when we shot the interiors for NOMAD [a massive orbital superweapon utilized by the humans in the film] at the Bangkok Airport, and another at a train station. It’s just trying to find something real to hook into as a starting point, even if it’s something that we know we’re going to replace a portion of. NOMAD was the thing that we started with more than three years ago. It took a few different forms, but Gareth wanted exactly that: something that was imposing, enlarged, and threatening. So, James Klein worked with several artists to develop that look. And then, it was the amazingly difficult task of our team in London to build it under Ian Conway’s supervision. We had to trick out all of these different surfaces and the ribbon structure where the missiles go along to the launching tubes. When you build something that’s more than a mile wide, there’s never enough time to build everything to the same level. So it was always a constant going back and plussing things up as the shots developed. Gareth’s aesthetic sense is one where he really wants to make these incredibly impactful images, and the models and the structures are all sort of derived from that.”
Soffer noted that the location shooting, as opposed to entirely using soundstages to shoot on, was, in fact, a cost-saving factor that contributed to how efficient the budget of “The Creator” became. “What was interesting was a key decision that Gareth made very early on about shooting on location,” said Soffer. “The way he’s described it in the past was like, when you’re budgeting a film, you budget out the cost of building a set. Let’s say it costs $500,000 to build a set to certain specifications and parameters. Well, $500,000 would cover a lot of plane tickets to basically any location in the world. So maybe instead of building the set, we’re going to take that money and fly the crew to Thailand instead, to shoot in 80 locations all around the country, and really embrace the naturalism of those locations and let that lead, as opposed to approaching a film with a prescribed idea of what you need to build.” But what makes shooting on location such a cost-saver? “Location work shrinks our footprint in terms of how much gear and equipment and crew that you need in order to make, for example, lighting work,” Soffer elaborated. “We could light the entire film with a relatively small package of lights that can plug into a wall socket. In turn, we didn’t need a huge crew to facilitate that because the approach was more about lightly augmenting and enhancing existing lighting as opposed to having to light a massive stage or set from scratch, which is very resource-intensive and time-intensive. Ultimately, that’s the ingredient to making a film that feels big but keeps the actual production footprint small and efficient.”
There’s a naturalism “The Creator” achieves—even in its most massive set pieces—thanks to Edwards’ guerilla, pseudo-documentarian approach to capturing the world around him; a combination of location shooting, only-as-needed crew, and malleable camera and lighting setups on the day. “I think documentary is a really great place to learn one’s craft as a filmmaker, whether it’s as a cinematographer, an editor, or a director,” said Fraser, who also worked in documentary when first starting out. “It presents us with reality first and foremost, whereas in a movie, you put people in front of a camera and you put a light on them, and there is probably nothing further from reality that you can find. We try to blur that line and get rid of all of the baggage that makes it not real. Going into a world that feels slightly found is not far from filmmaking at its purest, of finding the truth and the honesty in the performance and the characters and not having the camera or the equipment stand in the way. Whenever I’m making a movie, I’m always looking for the truth. I believe there’s always only one place that is the best place for the camera to be, and when you’re shooting a documentary, you try and put the camera there. It’s the same with film. The camera needs to be in a place where you can put the audience.”
Soffer shared similar sentiments as he outlined some of the influences behind “The Creator.” “A reference that might be less obvious to moviegoers but pretty well known for cinematographers is ‘Baraka,’” said Soffer. “It was a touchstone for ‘The Creator’ as it’s kind of an editorialized documentary. It has a presentational aspect to it, but it’s real. Our film doesn’t quite have that sense of documentary, but what it does have is the authenticity of place and the authenticity of character and emotion that ‘Baraka’ has. Gareth is really just incredible as a director, by far the most prepared and well-researched I’ve ever worked with. By the time I stepped onto the project, he’d already thought out a lot of the film before anybody even saw any of the material. The fun part of prep was being led into Gareth’s world a bit and looking at where he’s drawing inspiration from, what images he’s pulled from films, photography, and even just magazine cutouts. It’s a whole collage of imagery, and the end result is it creates a really broad tapestry. We wanted to evoke the feeling of the science fiction movies that we all grew up with and loved from the ’70s and ’80s. There’s something authentic and gritty about those films and a texture to say, ‘Blade Runner’ or ‘Alien,’ that makes them feel tactile, raw, and real.”
So how, for only $80 million, did “The Creator” become a reality, and why should future films adopt their model of filmmaking? “It really comes down to careful planning and very careful use of resources,” said Fraser. “Imagine you’re building a house. Every trade is on the site waiting for their moment. The electricians might not work for days, but they’re waiting so that the second that they are needed, they go in. There’s no time to waste. It’s the same way on set. Every resource that you could possibly want is there, waiting for their moment to shine. If you watch the credits, you realize that more people worked on this movie than a lot of other films, so it’s about the allocation of crew at any particular part of the process. We try to keep the camera-facing crew as small as possible, allowing for those resources to be put into areas that need them later on, like post-production or VFX. A lesson I’m hoping everybody who’s reading this will learn is this: it’s possible to completely turn the filmmaking process on its head, and when we do, there are massive cost savings to be done, but also quality improvements. Films work because every person knows the parameters of what their job is, and that’s why you don’t have people stumbling over each other. It’s an established relationship; it’s efficient from a personnel standpoint, but unfortunately, with those efficiencies and inverted commas also come inefficiencies that we’ve hopefully turned on their heads with this movie.”
Cooper shared a similar philosophy. Want to know how to circumvent the truncated and overworked VFX pipeline? Plan accordingly. Have a director at the helm who has a respect for the craft and a vision for what they want. “Visual effects is not an easy task. Fundamentally, from my perspective, it’s because with what you’re making, you don’t always know if it’s complete or incomplete. Maybe it’s one person offering an opinion, or three people offering an opinion, or someone changing their mind. We knew from the beginning that Gareth knew what he wanted, and we tried to give him the best movie we could for the amount of money he had. The visual effects artists in this movie really loved what they were doing, and we were as inclusive as we could be. Gareth was completely welcoming in that he wanted to know who was working on the movie. He wanted to talk with them and reduce as much of the hierarchy as we could, which is not necessarily the norm, but it makes for a happier crew and a more collaborative environment, and you get people who are willing to bend over backward for you. I know I felt that way. I didn’t want to let him down just because of who he is as a filmmaker and as a person.”
“The Creator” is now in theaters.
