• last year
Director Gareth Edwards talks about finishing directing star wars and where he got the idea for his film “The Creator.” Check it out.
Transcript
00:00 - Yeah, I mean, essentially I'd just finished Star Wars
00:04 and I needed a break and I wasn't expecting
00:08 to be thinking about the next film at all.
00:11 And we ended up with my girlfriend driving
00:13 to visit her family across America.
00:15 And she lives in Iowa, so it's like a four day trip
00:18 through like amazing landscapes.
00:19 And I put some music on, I was just looking out the window
00:23 and we were passing all this like farmland
00:25 and tall grass fields.
00:27 And then there was this like factory
00:29 in the middle of nowhere.
00:30 And I remember it having like a Japanese logo or something.
00:33 And I just thought, I wonder what they're building in there.
00:36 And then in my head, I was like,
00:38 'cause I love science fiction, I was like,
00:39 oh, maybe it was robots or something.
00:41 Obviously it wasn't, but I started thinking,
00:43 what if you were a robot built in a factory
00:47 and you'd never, you were born in this room
00:51 and this factory line, and then you,
00:53 for some reason, something happened
00:54 and you stepped outside for the first time
00:56 and you saw the grass and the sky,
00:59 like what would you think was going on?
01:02 What would you think of the world?
01:04 And I thought it was a really nice little moment,
01:05 like a scene from a movie,
01:07 but not any movie I would ever make.
01:09 And so I kind of threw it away.
01:11 And then suddenly had another idea,
01:13 like, oh, I know what could be happening.
01:15 Maybe the robot escaped 'cause of this reason.
01:17 And suddenly all these ideas started forming.
01:21 And very quickly, the idea for the movie came together.
01:24 And normally it will take,
01:26 it can take months, if not years to figure out a film.
01:30 And it came, by the time we got to her parents' house,
01:33 I had the whole movie kind of pretty simply
01:36 worked out in my head.
01:37 And that's very rare.
01:40 And so I was like, oh, maybe there's something in this.
01:42 Like maybe this is,
01:44 maybe I should pursue this for my next film.
01:47 I really didn't wanna do this movie
01:49 in a studio against green screen.
01:51 So we managed to talk the studio
01:54 into letting us go into the real world
01:56 to shoot real locations.
01:57 We went to eight different countries.
02:00 We went to Nepal, Cambodia, Tokyo, Indonesia,
02:05 Vietnam, Thailand,
02:07 and shot in all these,
02:10 like basically the best locations in the world.
02:13 We found that if you could make the crew small enough,
02:16 then the cost of flying anywhere in the world
02:18 becomes cheaper than building a set
02:22 against green screen or something.
02:23 So suddenly we were allowed to go wherever we wanted.
02:25 And it was kind of amazing.
02:29 The biggest problem was,
02:31 with all the traveling, we traveled 10,000 miles.
02:33 It was kind of exhausting as well.
02:36 And it was six months of filming
02:39 and it was just like far too long to make a movie with.
02:43 But every time we stood somewhere
02:45 and we're on the beaches of Thailand
02:47 or some paddy fields, like in Indonesia,
02:50 you get so excited about what you're seeing
02:52 and how beautiful it looks.
02:53 Like all that exhaustion just goes away.
02:58 And we also were doing it,
03:00 as we started planning the movie,
03:01 the pandemic came along and it was like,
03:05 oh no, here we go.
03:06 We're not gonna be able to make this film now.
03:08 And like everybody in the world,
03:11 this terrible thing happened
03:12 and a year and a half went by.
03:14 But then we were the first people into these countries
03:17 after the rules changed
03:19 and we could go and go over there and film.
03:22 And the great thing about that is there was no tourists.
03:25 So we ended up in all these amazing locations
03:28 and we were kind of the first ones in.
03:30 So life was carrying on.
03:33 People were really happy to see,
03:35 Westerners again and tourists,
03:37 but people stopped wearing masks
03:40 and were like happy to be out
03:42 and kids playing in the street.
03:43 And so we thought it was really,
03:47 like it was very important to me
03:48 that as a Hollywood film,
03:51 we didn't come into these villages and environments
03:56 and like block off the street
03:59 and push all these people out.
04:00 Like the best thing about these locations
04:02 are all the faces and all the crazy randomness,
04:05 like the little, you know, farm animals and livestock
04:09 that just run across the street
04:10 in the middle of a shot and things like this.
04:12 And so we got very small and the crew hid out the way
04:17 and it allowed us to film with all these amazing actors
04:20 in these real locations, but kind of keep life,
04:23 keep the village life and the real world flowing through.
04:28 And then we added like with Industrial Light and Magic,
04:30 we managed to add all the science fiction on top.
04:33 And I think the result is, you know,
04:34 you get a much more rich, believable,
04:38 like random world that you don't really see
04:41 in big epic sci-fi Hollywood films.