Director Gareth Edwards discusses why he does not like films that force feed the audience a message too much and what he finds interesting about a movie. Gareth Edwards also discusses the premise of his film “The Creator” and how he wanted the concepts of AI and humanity to mix into the movie in his interview. Check it out.
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Short filmTranscript
00:00 I don't like films that preach at the audience.
00:03 I think everyone who watches a movie
00:04 where you're being force fed,
00:07 you know, some sort of message too much,
00:09 you kind of reject it.
00:10 And so when you write a movie,
00:12 if you sit down and go,
00:13 okay, I'm gonna make a film about prejudice,
00:15 you're gonna make a terrible movie.
00:17 And so what you do is you find something that interests you.
00:21 And the thing I found really interesting
00:24 is this idea that you can save humanity
00:30 or you have to do like AI is taking over the world.
00:32 All you have to do to save humanity
00:34 is kill this top breakthrough AI,
00:39 the super AI that is gonna,
00:41 the first thing and only thing that can surpass humankind.
00:45 The problem is it's in the form of a six year old child.
00:49 And I really liked that dilemma.
00:52 Could you kill a kid to save the world?
00:54 And that was the original premise.
00:58 And as you start writing it,
01:00 you know, about halfway through making a film,
01:02 you start to realize what the movie's really about,
01:05 like what the hidden meaning is.
01:07 And science fiction is always a metaphor
01:10 for, you know, probably one of the best genres to have
01:14 'cause everything's really a metaphor for something else.
01:16 And in our movie, AI and robots
01:18 were kind of representing people who are different to you,
01:23 like the other people that you,
01:25 we often see as the enemy.
01:27 And the idea of like, how would you feel if you were AI?
01:30 And in a way, you probably feel like a slave to humans
01:34 and that we were the bad guys.
01:36 And so I wanted to create a story
01:38 that kind of threw a hero into that world
01:41 and made them question all their preconceptions.
01:44 And I think that's what science fiction is best at.
01:47 It usually takes something, you know,
01:50 that's from the real world and just twists it upside down.
01:54 And then suddenly everything you thought, you believed,
01:57 you start to not be so sure of.
01:59 And I think the best kind of science fiction
02:01 that's got like meat on the bone like that
02:03 is, you know, as much as it's fun to watch spaceships
02:08 and explosions and robots,
02:11 if there's not some sort of meaning,
02:14 some deeper meaning at the heart of it,
02:15 then it's all kind of pointless.
02:16 And I know the films I've carried through the years
02:20 that I grew up loving
02:22 had this kind of significant, you know,
02:27 message at the heart of them
02:29 that you kind of keep in your pocket
02:31 even when you're an adult.
02:33 I spent, like there was the last film I did
02:37 was a Star Wars Rogue One film.
02:39 And I kind of spent seven years waiting for the,
02:43 basically waiting for a film
02:45 that could go on the big screen.
02:46 I didn't wanna do, no offense, you know,
02:49 I love TV and stuff,
02:51 but I didn't wanna do something for TV.
02:53 I wanted to, you know, I grew up loving cinema.
02:57 And one of the things that happened when we made this film
03:01 is we used these 1970s cinema lenses
03:06 that, you know, gave the film the look of films
03:10 from the '70s and '80s.
03:12 And when you put them on the modern camera,
03:15 a strange thing happens that never used to happen before,
03:17 which is it basically doubles the width
03:21 of the aspect ratio, it's called, of the film.
03:25 And so you end up with this really wide screen,
03:28 like super, like,
03:30 vista vision type movie.
03:34 And we begged the studio,
03:36 please let us release it in this like crazy wide format.
03:39 And they were like, no, you can't,
03:41 because, you know, films,
03:42 no one releases in movies like that.
03:44 And so we looked and there was a president,
03:47 like President Quentin Tarantino
03:49 had done "Hateful Eight" in 276 to one,
03:52 which is that crazy wide format.
03:54 And like films like "Ben-Hur" before that.
03:57 And so they let us release it in 276.
04:01 And so that's like ultra kind of ultra wide screen.
04:04 And so you've got to go see it
04:06 on the biggest screen you can find.
04:08 Like it's a very immersive film.
04:10 The countries, we shot in eight different countries
04:12 that had incredible vistas.
04:14 It's designed for the big screen.
04:18 There's so many details, you know, science fiction,
04:21 futuristic, crazy, random things that are in this movie.
04:24 Yeah, it's not, it was never made for your phone
04:29 or even TV.
04:30 It's like, you've got to go to the cinema and see this.
04:32 I feel like, you know, the ultimate goal of any filmmaker
04:35 is, you know, let's be honest.
04:37 It's like, if you can make people tear up or cry
04:40 when they watch a movie,
04:41 like there's no bigger accolade than that.
04:44 And I remember as a kid, you know,
04:47 going to CET, excited about seeing an alien maybe
04:50 and a spaceship or something
04:52 and got sucked into this relationship
04:54 that made me like bawl my eyes out.
04:57 And I still, you know, it still makes me cry now
04:59 as an adult watching it.
05:01 And so like, that was the high benchmark of like trying,
05:04 wanna do something science fiction and robots and all this,
05:07 but the ultimate goal is to take the audience
05:10 on this journey where they might come in
05:12 with preconceptions about, you know,
05:14 the kind of film they're gonna see
05:15 and what they think of AI and, you know, all that technology,
05:18 but they get sucked in and there's this problem,
05:22 there's this kid, you know, you can win the war,
05:26 you can save the world, just kill this kid.
05:28 That's all you got to do.
05:30 But the kid seems quite real.
05:32 I kind of like the kid.
05:33 You kind of like really struggle,
05:35 like our central character just struggles
05:37 with this relationship and how to, you know,
05:40 and you kind of, you wanna take the audience
05:43 on that journey too,
05:43 where they don't know what to do either.
05:46 And I think the biggest reaction we've had from the film
05:51 that people weren't expecting is,
05:54 I took the movie up to all the visual effects artists
05:59 that were working on the film.
05:59 I showed them like a rough cut of the movie
06:02 and then the lights went up and everyone looked round,
06:04 they're all 40 year old men like me and they turned around
06:07 and they all had bloodshot eyes and they were like,
06:08 "Oh, I wasn't expecting that."
06:11 And that was like probably the highest compliment
06:14 I could have got is that we managed to make grown men cry.
06:17 And so, yeah, so it was kind of like, you know,
06:23 it was always part of the plan if we could pull it off.