The Creator follows Joshua, a jaded ex-soldier recruited by the American military to hunt down the enigmatic Creator, the architect of Artificial Intelligence whom he has a history with. As rumors have spread about a new weapon that could help A.I. win the war against humanity. However, after finding the weapon, a robot in the form of a young girl, Joshua begins to question everything he thought he knew.
The Creator is directed and produced by Gareth Edwards, who also co-wrote the script with Chris Weitz. The Creator stars a powerhouse cast led by John David Washington, Gemma Chan, Ken Watanabe, Sturgill Simpson, Allison Janney, and Madeleine Yuna Voyles. The movie has been nominated for two Oscars in Sound and Visual Effects, thanks to the highly immersive world built by its creative team.
The Creator’s Two Star Wars Easter Eggs Explained
The Creator is directed by Gareth Edwards who also directed Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, and he hid two Star Wars Easter eggs in the movie.
Screen Rant interviewed director Gareth Edwards and visual effects supervisors Jay Cooper and Ian Comley about The Creator. Edwards explained his preparation process and how he brings together the narrative with the technology he will be using. They also discussed the challenges they faced and how they collaborated on the movie.
Gareth Edwards, Jay Cooper, & Ian Comley Talk The Creator
Screen Rant: I love The Creator, so any chance I get to revisit this film is absolutely amazing. Gareth, how did your vision for the film’s narrative influence the direction and complexities of the visual effects in The Creator?
Gareth Edwards: Hang on, hang on. I have to turn this into Gareth speak. Make it a really simple question. Yeah, I mean, essentially it was a massive ask of ILM. I’ve previously been very, very lucky. I made a very low budget first film, had a lot of creative freedom. When you’ve got no money, you can do anything you want. I really enjoyed that process. Then I got to do two big Hollywood films. And basically, everything that was easy and hard gets flipped over to the opposite when you do a big movie.
And I was like, “Okay, I want to make a film now where both of the pros from both big blockbuster and indie guerilla film can go together.” And so essentially, it was like, okay, let’s go around the world to real places. Let’s not shoot in a studio. Let’s be organic, take a small crew, but then have this massive scope and scale to the movie in post-production.
So essentially you’re going up to the effects company and saying, “Will you blindly sign this agreement that you’ll do whatever we want when it’s too late to back out of it? And I won’t tell you what it is until we’re in the edit at the end, but you’re welcome to come along on the shoot. It’s going to be some nice beach resorts and things.” And thankfully, Industrial Light & Magic, idiots enough or suicidal enough to go. “You know what? Okay, let’s, let’s go.” So you can ask these guys why they signed up for it.
Gareth said that to get the studio on board, he shot some footage and sent it over. My question for you, Jay, is what did you guys do when he sent that footage to you to get this film greenlit?
Jay Cooper: Well, I would love to take credit for the green light, but Gareth was quite crafty. He used some money from the studio that was for a scout. He smuggled along a camera. I don’t know if smuggled. Took a camera with him. And came back with, effectively, a sizzle reel where he came to us and asked us to push in some visual effects work.
And so for about 50 shots, John Knoll, our creative director, led a team to add visual effects to robots and some environment work, and just to give a flavor of what the world was that we were going to create. And the hope was, I think, sort of twofold. One, that we could create this imagery with very little prep materials. In this case, no surrounding HDRI, no balls and charts, none of those sorts of things. No measurements.
So one, it was a technical exercise. And the other one was, I think, an artistic exercise of how we could take the idea of shooting in real locations, shooting with real actors without makeup or tracking markers or any sort of embellishment, and turn them into simulants and robots. And that’s what we did. We did 50 shots where we created some really cool environment work, and we sort of bashed it together as a test. And then Gareth, I guess, took it from there and worked his magic to free some dollars.
Gareth Edwards: Was it 50 shots?
Jay Cooper: Did you think it was more?
Gareth Edwards: No, no, no. But when you said it, you made it sound like you send footage to ILM and you get it sent back. This is a little known fact about ILM. If anyone sends footage to them, puts a self-addressed envelope, they get it back with robots on. Anyone can do it. There’s a small print on the website.
Ian Comley: It was an amazing little test. It won over the studio. I mean, that was the pitch that I was certainly shown coming onto the movie, and it was, “All right. I totally want to work on that one.” And in fact, as other artists came on early doors before we had official turnover and working on the main deal, we could show them this piece and it was clear it was a taste of the world and everyone wanted to leap on board. It was the kind of project like we had artists looking at our screens, not on The Creator, absolutely wanting to be.
Ian, what was the most technically demanding visual effect in The Creator? And how did you overcome that challenge that it presented?
Ian Comley: Yeah, we had such a range with all the characters, vehicles, prop sets, huge amount of stuff. And many things, actually, you get a little taste of and then you move on to the next thing. So in terms of volume of work and breadth of work, that was a big deal by itself.
But I would say the NOMAD in
act three of The Creator
was a particular challenge to try and get. It’s a presence throughout the movie, this menacing silhouette. You’ve got the fangs projecting the lasers on the ground. But then you get to act three having enjoyed this really beautiful naturalistic photography for two-thirds of the movie and suddenly we’re selling what is, in a large part, fully CG shots of this very detailed asset. But how do you elevate that to a point where it feels part of the same film?That was a concern, but we did a few things there. Design-wise, we absolutely drilled into the detail. The asset, the geometry is 1.3 terabytes. It’s insane. The amount of complexity in the thing. We leveraged as much as we could looking at the photography. Trying to replicate all the flares, astigmatisms, grains, the whole structure of the piece to ensure it had the same visual style in terms of camera work. And Gareth was super hot on this, having held the camera for much of the film itself. But ensuring that we had the presence of a human operator behind any CG camera that we were doing.
The philosophy was, well, maybe this op is on a fast moving plane, but that plane is probably going to stay relatively linear, or it’s a relatively low curvature kind of move. But on that, they’re out the window held on by a rope or whatever, and they’re trying to catch the action as it’s unfolding, these explosions and moments here, there, or Joshua are hanging onto the missile. So that was another layer of hook back into the first part of the movie. So yeah, insanely complex asset, the style of the plate, the camera work. Marrying that was a big ask.
Early concepts of the NOMAD very much had it in space. And we’ve got moments where you see it in high orbit. And internal discussion is, “It can be high or low. It can move around the planet. It can be where it needs to be.” But we were able to kind of nudge it a little bit lower, occasionally scraping the clouds. And that offered us an opportunity to tweak the composition of some of the shots where it needs to be a bit closer to the ground. You’ve got the jet copters and stealth ship getting considerably close, sharing the same frame. You want to look up and see it not too distant, just above the clouds. Yeah, NOMAD was an ask, but it’s a cool one.
On set, you guys also had Andrew Roberts there to help out with things. Gareth, was your background in VFX? Can you talk about how that advantage helped you prepare for The Creator and working alongside Andrew on this film?
Gareth Edwards: Yeah. These guys will tell you, I don’t know if it’s a good or a bad thing if you’ve got into filmmaking through visual effects. When you think you know what you’re doing, it’s probably quite dangerous. You’re either an expert or you don’t know anything. You just hand it over to people who are. But when you’re like, “I fancy my chances at knowing how to do this shot,” and then screwing it all up for everyone.
So basically, Andrew, the way we worked was we would shoot the scene. Often we would do very long takes. I wouldn’t say cut. We’d do 45-minute takes or something. Pretty much get the scene by moving the camera around real quick and moving the lights. We had lights on poles like boom operators have, because we had these really cool little sensitive cameras. And it meant that everyone had to stay away. We did a 360-degree view. “Everyone please get out of the way and we’ll do the whole scene.” And then when we were finished, sometimes without cutting, I would just give Andrew the camera and be exhausted, and go, “It’s all yours.”
And we would walk over to the next location, and he’d be allowed to just get anything that he wanted to get. And sometimes I wouldn’t really stick around to know what that was. I know I made their lives hell a little bit in that sense. But I think there’s a realism and organicness to the language of the film because of that process that is embedded in all the visual effects. You can’t un-intertwine it from that. So it made it more painful, probably, but it made it, I think, the final results more worthwhile. I hope. And they can tell you differently.
Jay Cooper: I think it was helpful. Yeah, it was different. I mean, Gareth knows way more than he lets on, I think. Sometimes, maybe, he skips over some of the detail work that we have to do, but he knows it’s possible. So I think that it’s nice knowing that someone… Well, I’ll say this. The most important part of Gareth working with visual effects as a filmmaker, I think, is that he likes the process and he honors the contribution that the visual effects team makes, and that I put above everything else.
In terms of whether it’s helpful or hurtful, it is probably a little equal parts of both, but probably slightly more helpful, I would think. Yeah, I think it’s more helpful.
Gareth Edwards: It’s a bit like when you do visual effects and you deal with a filmmaker, it’s sometimes a bit like talking to a child, where they have no idea how it works. And so you’re talking kiddie-speak about how. And when you do visual effects, it doesn’t work, and you end up going, “Yeah, but couldn’t you just… Yeah, but surely we could just… Why don’t we just get that and do…”
Jay Cooper: That’s the hurtful part right there. But it doesn’t help. We can’t tell you things are hard when they’re not hard. So you caught us. That was the part that was hard.
I feel like this visual effects team could have done anything. Was there anything Gareth asked you guys to do that actually reached the technical limitations of, “Maybe we can’t do this?”
Jay Cooper: No. No. We’re going to save that for the next one. We had it all in hand. I think.
I know ILM have their own stages. Were there any scenes that were all VFX driven that you were able to shoot with background talent or stuntmen, that weren’t on the physical location?
Jay Cooper: We had two sequences that were done in stagecraft at Pinewood Studios: the biosphere and the airlock. They weren’t shot with stunt men, or they were shot with our principal actors, but those weren’t shot on location. But those are exceptions to the rule. And the rule was, pretty much, if there’s a way for us to get this on location, that was our first and foremost goal.
Ian, what’s something that maybe you guys experimented with that was outside the box, that maybe you thought wasn’t going to work but ended up working well in the film?
Ian Comley: A technique that we leveraged. So you might be aware that Gareth shot the movie not telling anyone who was going to be a human, who was going to be a robot, which was a brilliant move, in the sense that it created very naturalistic performance. But it rolled some eyebrows in our tracking and paint departments, let’s put it like that, especially as it evolved who and how and where in the frame we were positioning these people.
But a technique that really helped us was we experimented with some real time robots as well. So we were able to sidestep whole swathes of pipeline and in Nuke in our 2D package, where offered the ability for compositors to do basic tracking of our hero robot. So we had a robot kit. We had seven different robot heads that all happened to share the same body. And we had multiple texture and color variants over the top.
But that kit was ported over to Nuke in such a way that the compositors could position heads, arms, get that on background extras, supporting cast members, who perhaps in a frame weren’t necessarily doing much, pointing a rifle or an action that was relatively still. They had controls for lighting. Kind of basic in a way. But it absolutely did the job and it elevated the count of robots in the film. Anytime where people were moving, it tipped a full pipeline. Again, the full tracking, the full clean plate, the full everything. But yeah, that was a bit of a lifesaver, ’cause we wanted to ensure that we had robots in a robot movie.
I actually want to talk about the robots for a second because I love the designs of the sims and the robots. Now, there’s sims with human faces with some VFX on their ears and neck, and then there’s also ones with complete robot heads. Can you guys talk about the logistics of creating those, both onset and in post?
Jay Cooper: The only component we had was some tracking dots on our simulant human actors. As far as the post component, James Klein, our production designer, and Gareth worked through the initial designs and came up with these amazing… Gareth, maybe you’d talk about how we started with the silhouettes and then worked from silhouettes and define different head forms. And we tried to build these in such a way that there was a product design component to them as they’re built.
So pieces fit into other pieces. And Gareth, I think at one point you said, “What would this world be like if Sony had the design wars?” And that was something that we were kept in mind as we were texturing and modeling these things. But they each had an idiosyncratic look to themselves. And I don’t know, maybe Gareth, you want to speak to those in a little bit more detail.
Gareth Edwards: Well, now, I think the way it ended up working, we had seven heads, right? The goal was like, okay, we can’t do a million things. We’ve got a limited resources, but if we could create seven different types of heads. And then we would reverse engineer, based on whatever the clothing was that the person we were replacing was wearing, we would put that color palette in the head. So it looked like when that robot left in the morning to go to work, it was coordinated and it felt like we dressed everybody with that in mind.
And then in terms of the heads, it was funny. When we started, it was like, “Oh my god, how are we going to think of a new robot head?” And then by the end it was like, “Oh my god, I wish we had more time because there’s so many options now.” We basically went down two different paths. We took insects. So we looked at macro photography of praying mantis, or just freaky little insects. And then we also took products from the 1980s, home projectors or the Nintendos and things. And basically we tried to make the insects look like products. And then we tried to make the products have anthropomorphic character traits, more like insects and people.
And as both of them came closer and merged together, the divide… And sometimes, because we ended up 30-odd heads we liked, we would take that head and that head and we would make them have a child. We’d merge them together and rub bits out and just kept trying to find things. It was one of the most fun things you could do as an adult, is design robot heads. And so people had to prize it out of our fingers to start making them ’cause we just didn’t want to stop. People are paying us to draw robots. This is pretty cool.
Jay Cooper: Yeah, it was fun.
Gareth, how did the relationship between directing and visual effects evolve with the advancement of technology, and how did that manifest in your work with The Creator?
Gareth Edwards: I think there was a lot of things. We couldn’t have made this film five years ago, maybe, definitely not 10 years ago. And the technology was across the board. From a filmmaking point of view, the camera, we had this very small camera that is cinema resolution, 4K. And had on it a gimbal, which never used to exist before, which smooths out. As bumpy as I might be holding it, baby smooth, like a steady cam kind of thing.
And it’s very sensitive to light. So you can shoot in moonlight. You can have very small battery-operated lights to light a scene. So we were very run and gun. That created an aesthetic, then, that is quite unique, that you don’t really see in movies so much. And then that made the whole aesthetic then carried over into the visual effects.
And it is called, I think the friendly term is machine learning, not AI. We don’t use that term. That’s wrong, right? That’s evil. But machine learning had come along a long way, and they were able to track a lot of this stuff, right, Jay, without dots and stuff.
Jay Cooper: Yeah, I mean, there’s a number of techniques. I’m not going to get sucked in the AI world. But there are a number of techniques that we’re using that are emerging right now. A lot of it is still hand artist driven.
But there are some tools where we do a diagnostic pass. It’s called motion analysis on photography, where we can see what the smaller movement of faces are, and we can use that in concert with our renders to push around the details of these faces, so we could connect the facial components of what is shot on set with our rendered components. And by using some crafty tools like that, we can get these things to connect. And it is a difficult process, but one that is made easier with a number of the tools that have come out in the last couple of years.
About The Creator
Against the backdrop of a war between humans and robots with artificial intelligence, a former soldier finds the secret weapon, a robot in the form of a young child.
Check out our other The Creator interviews here:
- Gareth Edwards
- Gareth Edwards at SDCC
- VFX Supervisors Jay Cooper & Andrew Roberts
Source: Screen Rant Plus
The Creator
The Creator is a sci-fi action film from Rogue One director Gareth Edwards. Edwards wrote and directed the movie, which centers on the human race’s war against AI. In the post-apocalyptic world, Joshua (John David Washington) is tasked with finding and killing the architect of the dangerous AI and the mysterious weapon they are developing.
- Release Date
- September 29, 2023
- Director
- Gareth Edwards
- Cast
- John David Washington , Gemma Chan , Ken Watanabe , Sturgill Simpson , Allison Janney , Madeleine Yuna Voyles
- Writers
- Gareth Edwards
- Studio(s)
- Entertainment One , McFarland Entertainment , Regency Enterprises
- Distributor(s)
- 20th Century
