Godzilla and Rogue One director Gareth Edwards is returning to the sci-fi genre with The Creator, and the result promises to be another visually stunning epic. Now you can get a closer look behind the scenes of this robotic sci-fi movie with an exclusive featurette.
Check out the video player above or the embed below for a look at the making of The Creator:
"My favorite cinema is very visually driven," says Edwards in the featurette. "It's not like a play; it's like a dream of pure emotion. This film's a melting pot of things I grew up loving. A Vietnam movie mixed with robotic sci-fi."
"Gareth has the ability to inject compassion into the sci-fi genre that usually leans on spectacle and danger," says star John David Washington. "What jumped out was the magical realism that he was able to execute - the depth and emotion that he was able to capture in every frame."
IGN previously spoke with Edwards at San Diego Comic-Con, where the director revealed that he's very happy to be telling original stories again after working with major Hollywood IP like Godzilla and Star Wars.
“I never meant to do IP,” Edwards told IGN. “I honestly thought what I would do with my career, if I had one, is my own ideas, one after the other. And then I just got offered this amazing, lottery-winning thing of getting to do Godzilla, teleporting straight to the Super Bowl final.”
“And it was like, ‘Oh, I can't turn this down. I'd regret it for the rest of my life.’ And so I did that and I was like, "Okay, that's it,’” he continued. “And then, someone goes, ‘Do you want to do Star Wars?’ And it was the only thing anyone could have said that would've made me go, ‘Okay.’"
Edwards also revealed that the movie was partly inspired by a trip to Vietnam spent with Kong: Skull Island director Jordan Vogt-Roberts. That's where The Creator's Vietnam War elements come into play.
“So I just go over, just for a day, and I end up staying a week and traveling all up and down Vietnam with him and seeing imagery that I associate with, obviously, the Vietnam War and stuff, but through a sort of science fiction lens, because I had this movie in my head,” Edwards said. “And every time I saw things – like you'd see Buddhist monks walking towards a temple – and I'd think, ‘What if that was a robot?’ And I'd picture that imagery, and after a while, it was like watching Apocalypse Now, but set in the Blade Runner universe.”
As for how Washington came to star in the film, the director revealed that he was looking for someone relatable and "a bit like me." Washington's name was among those on a short list of candidates, and a lunch meeting between the two pretty much sealed the deal.
“He was wearing a Star Wars pandemic mask,” Edwards said. “And I laughed and I half thought, ‘Is he doing this for me? This is weird,’ because of Rogue One. And he's like ‘No, look, I'm a massive Star Wars fan. I've been wearing this the whole pandemic. I thought about not wearing it to meet you because it would be weird, but I didn't want to lie.’ And we just really hit off. He's incredibly down to earth, really humble, genuinely the nicest human being you'd meet.”
The Creator also stars Gemma Chan, Ken Watanabe, Sturgill Simpson, Madeleine Yuna Voyles and Allison Janney. The film will be released by 20th Century Studios on September 29, 2023.
For more on The Creator, check out the trailer for the upcoming film, then brush up on the best sci-fi movies of all time.
Jesse is a mild-mannered staff writer for IGN. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket by following @jschedeen on Twitter.
source https://www.ign.com/articles/the-creator-exclusive-featurette-gareth-edwards-sci-fi-movie