‘The Creator’ Director Gareth Edwards Talks ‘Spielbergian’ Approach to Filmmaking (Exclusive)

There are a handful of working filmmakers who have been on the cutting edge of crafting brilliant sci-fi movies with stunning visuals and storytelling. There’s no doubt that Gareth Edwards is part of this class, following in the footsteps of directors like Ridley Scott and Steven Spielberg. After acclaimed turns with Godzilla (2014) and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Edwards returned this year with a new original film, The Creator, which he also wrote and produced. The Creator stars John David Washington as an ex-special forces agent who is recruited to hunt down and kill the Creator, the elusive architect of advanced AI, including an alleged world-ending weapon. However, he is not prepared for what he’ll discover about how the Creator connects to his past.

Recently, PopCulture.com had a chance to chat with Edwards about the new film, and he opened up about his approach to telling the story, which was born in his affinity for “Spielbergian” moviemaking, including having “a lot of control over the world you’re building.” He elaborated, “No one can basically tell you [that] you are wrong because you’re creating it from scratch.” However, Edwards also noted, “I feel like equally to the fact that there’s a fan base and a franchise, the big downside obviously is that you don’t have a fan base built in, and so you’ve got to start from scratch with trying to explain what the hell this movie’s about and why people should go see it.”

Reflecting on his study of cinema and his very first movie — the 2010 sci-fi horror Monster — Edwards said, “I feel like the first film… I was never expecting to do this when I grew up. I always pictured making films in the Spielbergian way and in my head of you storyboard it all. I used to watch the in-depth making of Indiana Jones and you’d storyboard everything and then you would have this plan and it was all very Lawrence of Arabia kind of very considered camera work, beautifully told. Then my first movie that I got to make, just the nature in which we shot it had to lean towards handheld and therefore documentary-like.”

Edwards continued, “Rather than fighting it, I embraced it and I came out the other side of that very excited and happy about all the random organic things that happened on that shoot that felt very naturalistic for a science fiction film. Then I was torn because it was like, wow, that’s not the vocabulary that I grew up learning. So, I did Godzilla and I went back to the more Spielbergian kind of approach.” The filmmaker also clarified that his use of the term “Spielbergian” is not meant to downplay the other “amazing” movies that Spielberg has made, like Schindler’s List or Saving Private Ryan.

After Godzilla, Edwards was tapped to join the Star Wars universe with Rogue One, which has become one of the most heralded films of the franchise. “I started trying to introduce back this more organicness, this grounded kind of vibe, but couldn’t fully do it I guess in terms of it was a massive $200 million or whatever the budget ended up as,” he said, then going on to compare that to his approach on The Creator. “So, this was really an attempt at trying to start fresh and go, ‘Okay, there’s got to be this holy grail way of making a film where you get all the positives of a big blockbuster and all the scope and scale and you get all the positives and organic creativity of an Indie gorilla film.’” He then quipped that he feels that he and the films creative team got “way closer than I was secretly worried we wouldn’t,” adding, “I’m kind of surprised how much freedom we got in that sense.”

Edwards went on to share that his “main feeling right now” is accepting that “we’ve given birth to the movie, it’s out there. It doesn’t belong to us anymore. It’s just a sense of genuine excitement about the future, about everything we did differently in that movie that wasn’t the normal way of making a film was probably the strongest parts of the film.”

“It just feels like, let’s go. Let’s learn from this and go even further on the next one,” Edwards continued. “I think when you look at what’s around the corner with AI, filmmaking is just going to be so unrecognizably different in a few years from now.” He added, “If I was back 10 years ago doing Monsters and AI was starting to happen, I think I’d be very excited about how it’s going to level the playing field for storytelling and epic movie making. It’s not going to be about whether you’ve got a hundred million dollars, it’s going to be about if you’ve got a really good idea.” Discover the world of The Creator, available now on 4K Ultra HD, Blu-ray and digital.