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ritish director Gareth Edwards got his start when his debut feature, Monsters, a low-budget independent film, premiered at SXSW in 2010 and went on to screen at Cannes. The ac- claimed sci-fi thriller established Edwards as a multi-faceted filmmaker, who also worked as the movie's writer, production designer, cinematographer and visual effects artist. Hollywood quickly took notice. He was soon tapped to direct Godzilla, the hit 2014 reboot of the famed franchise, and then 2016's Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, the first installment of the Star Wars anthology series and a billion-dollar box office global blockbuster. His new film is another epic sci-fi ac- tion thriller, The Creator, which stars John David Washington (Tenet), Gemma Chan (Eternals), Ken Watanabe (Inception), Sturgill Simpson (Dog), newcomer Madeleine Yuna Voyles and Academy Award winner Allison Janney (I, Tonya). The film's screenplay, by Edwards and Chris Weitz, from a story by Edwards, is set in the middle of a future war between the human race and the forces of artifi- cial intelligence. Joshua (Washington), a hardened ex-special forces agent grieving the disappearance of his wife (Chan), is recruited to hunt down and kill the Creator, the elusive architect of advanced AI, who has developed a mysterious weapon with the power to end the war — and mankind itself. Joshua and his team of elite operatives journey across enemy lines, into the dark heart of AI-occupied territory, only to discov- er the world-ending weapon he's been instructed to destroy is an AI in the form of a young child. Here, in an exclusive interview with Post, I spoke with Edwards about making the film, working on the VFX, and his love of post, editing and the DI. You co-wrote this with Chris Weitz, who co-wrote Rogue One. What sort of film did you set out to make? "A whole bunch of films rolled into one. It's interesting how it came to be. I was writing another sci-fi film, and I hate writ- ing, and I'd gone to Thailand to work on it, and I finished it and then got a text from Jordan Vogt Roberts, who did Kong: Skull Island. He was in Vietnam, and I ended up going there to meet him, and touring the whole country, and you can't do all that without thinking about the war and films I grew up loving, like Apocalypse Now. But I was seeing it all through the prism of science fiction, and I'd see monks walking into temples and imagined them as ro- bots. So I got fascinated with the idea of, if someone made Apocalypse Now, but in the Blade Runner universe. That's a style of film I've not seen before, and that gave me the 'world.' And then the whole story idea was sparked by seeing this factory in the middle of nowhere in the mid-west as I was driving past, and as a joke I thought, 'What if they're building robots in there? And imagine if you were a robot and you escaped, and you saw all the farmland and sky for the first time?' That idea got me really excited, and by the time I arrived at my destination I had the whole movie in my head. And when things come together that quickly, it usually tells you it's worth pursuing, and it ended up being my next film." I heard you did a lot of location scouting and test shooting all over Asia, including Vietnam, Cambodia, Japan, Indonesia, Thailand and Nepal. What were the main challenges of pulling all this together? "As important as the story and screen- play is, the actual filmmaking process is equally important, and I wanted to do this quite differently from the normal way, and essentially do it backwards. "Normally, you work with concept artists to imagine this crazy, ambitious world. The studio looks at it and says, 'It'll cost $250 million, you can't possibly find these locations, so you'll have to build it all with green screen.' I didn't want to do that. Instead, I wanted to shoot amazing locations in the real world that match what's in the screenplay, edit the movie, then design the world on top of what we've edited. That approach is more ef- ficient. So we scouted all these amazing locations, from Tokyo to the Himalayas, and active volcanoes in Indonesia, and I took a prosumer camera and a 1970s anamorphic lens, and shot all this materi- al. Then we went to ILM and asked them, 'Can you do the VFX process without the usual tracking markers, without people in motion capture? Let's try and reverse-en- gineer it.' "So they went for it and everyone was very surprised it went so well, and it cost very little. So we showed that teaser to the studio and they greenlit it." So you didn't do all the usual previs for all the huge action sequences? "No, but I did storyboard the set pieces so everyone could see it was do-able and possible, even though we didn't stick to the storyboards." I assume you started integrating post and all the VFX on day one? "It was tricky as we didn't actually decide who was going to be a robot and who GARETH EDWARDS — THE CREATOR REIMAGINING THE FILMMAKING PROCESS TO ENVISION THE FUTURE OF A.I. B DIRECTOR'S CHAIR www.postmagazine.com 10 POST SEPT/OCT 2023 BY IAIN BLAIR Edwards on-set with Madeleine Yuna Voyles.