Visually stunning The Creator is a rare piece of original sci-fi filmmaking

[Karlston]

Ars chats with director of photography Oren Soffer about the making of the sci-fi film.

John David Washington stars as a US sergeant on an undercover mission who befriends an AI "child" in The Creator.

20th Century Studios

 

It's rare to get an original piece of science fiction filmmaking not based on existing IP in this era of adaptations and superhero mega-franchises. So The Creator is a welcome offering in the genre, combining elements of District 9, Ex Machina, Blade Runner, and Apocalypse Now, among others, to produce a visually stunning and timely tale of a war between humans and AI. It's directed by Gareth Edwards, best known for 2014's Godzilla and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story in 2016.

 

(Some mild spoilers below but no major reveals.)

 

The inspiration for The Creator came post-Rogue One, when Edwards took a road trip through the Midwest. He spotted a strange building with a Japanese logo in the middle of one of the endless fields, and his mind instantly jumped to robots. What would a robot built inside that factory think when it encountered the field and broader outside world for the first time? "It felt like the beginning of a movie," Edwards recalled, and locked himself away in a hotel in Thailand to write the screenplay. He also joined a fellow director on a tour across Vietnam. "I started envisioning massive futuristic structures rising out of paddy fields... and I got really excited about the idea of something Blade Runner-esque being set in Vietnam," he said. The end result was The Creator.

 

The film opens in the year 1955, when an AI created by the US government detonates a nuclear warhead over Los Angeles, causing the US and its Western allies to essentially declare war on AI. But the people of New Asia embrace AI, advancing the technology sufficiently over the next decade to produce "simulants," human-like robots viewed as equals of humans. By then, the war between the West and the East is well underway. The US has a powerful advantage in the form of NOMAD, a high-altitude aerospace station capable of attacking from orbit.

 

John David Washington (The Protagonist in Tenet) stars as Joshua Taylor, a US sergeant and undercover operator living in New Asia. In 2070, he is charged with finding and destroying a new weapon dubbed "Alpha O," supposedly capable of destroying NOMAD. But "Alpha O" turns out to be a simulant in the form of a young child, who Joshua dubs "Alphie." His reluctance to fulfill his mission by killing Alphie drives the subsequent events of the film.

 

Edwards didn't have a Star Wars-sized budget for The Creator, so his early experience shooting his first indie feature film, Monsters (2010), came in handy. Most notably, he decided to reverse the order in which big studio films are typically made. The process usually involves designing the fictional world and building enormous sets in a studio, shooting scenes against a green screen. Edwards convinced the studio to let him shoot the principal photography on location and edit the film. Only then would he bring in designers and VFX people to layer a futuristic sci-fi world on top of it.

 

Ars spoke with director of photography Oren Soffer to learn more about the making of The Creator.

 

Madeleine Yuna Voyles plays the child simulant Alpha-Omega, aka "Alphie."

Warner Bros.

 

Ars Technica: You had a reasonable budget for this film, but not a blockbuster budget. Were there advantages to having those constraints?

 

Oren Soffer:  In some ways those kinds of constraints end up being the keys to unlocking creativity. You can look back through film history and see so many examples of that, like French New Wave cinema in the 1960s. These are films that were made on fractions of budgets because there just wasn't a lot of money in France at the time. So filmmakers like Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard and Agnes Barta used what they had. What they had was Paris. They had available light and lightweight cameras that could go on your shoulder, and they just shot on location without all of the traditional tools that you would need to shoot a larger budget film, like a sound stage and dollies and cranes and lights.

 

That same mentality applies today. The original Star Wars in 1977 had similar constraints. George Lucas was working with a relatively small budget, and that forced him to think creatively, shoot on location, and be frugal with set design and visual design. That movie changed cinema forever. We embraced that filmmaking style that really leans into the constraints. It wasn't just the ethos of the design that Gareth and Industrial Light Magic applied. From a filmmaking standpoint in the cinematography department, there's a lot of bloat in big-budget filmmaking. It's not necessarily a negative. It's an insurance policy. It's making sure that you have this tool and this amount of support just in case.

 

But that can quickly snowball and end up landing you with a ton of lights and a ton of trucks and a ton of crew to support it. Then before you know it, you're shooting a huge blockbuster movie with a big footprint that's very hard to move and it's very hard to be nimble and reactive and spontaneous, which is what we wanted for this film. So we intentionally shrunk down our footprint and forced ourselves into these constraints, knowing that we had a limited set of tools to work with and that we were going to have to stick to those tools. That was going to force us to think creatively, but also allow us a freedom and flexibility that would be unattainable on a larger shoot with a larger footprint.

 

Location footage was shot first, and special effects were added later.

Warner Bros.

 

Ars Technica: You used lightweight cameras and guerrilla filmmaking techniques. What was the experience of shooting like under those conditions?

 

Oren Soffer: Even though it was still a large budget comparatively to an independent film—$80 million—it felt like an independent film on set in the best way possible. The set was small. There was not a lot of crew on set. We did have a lot of support crew off-set, but we kept the footprint during the shoot quite small. The result is that it doesn't really feel like a film shoot in the traditional sense. The benefit of that is it just gives everybody—both filmmakers and actors—a ton of freedom to genuinely embody a moment and capture an authentic experience that doesn't feel artificial.

 

We shot a few scenes on Railay Beach in Thailand, a pretty popular tourist destination. Thailand had only just opened up after COVID, so there were only a few tourists there. We weren't actually able to shut down the beach, so we had to shoot on an active beach. We had John David Washington and Gemma Chan running all around the beach with extras in sci-fi costumes. We were worried that would draw a lot of attention from the tourists just down the beach at the resorts having Mai Tais and margaritas. We thought that people, out of curiosity, would come over. Nobody did. I think it's because it looked like we were filming like a YouTube video.

 

The footprint was so small. It was just Gareth with a small camera and a boom operator, and that was it. Everybody else was out of sight, including myself. It didn't look like a big film. So nobody thought to wander over to check it out. That happened to us a few more times during the shoot and allowed us to shoot in real villages in Thailand with real villagers. It imbued the film with this very unique sense of place.

 

The film shot on location in real Thai villages, with real villagers, to give the film "a unique sense of place."

Warner Bros.

 

Ars Technica: The look of the final film is stunning with all the VFX woven in, but you still get a sense of something that's real. It's a future that's recognizable.

 

Oren Soffer: That's ultimately what the goal of all of this was. At the end of the day, this isn't about doing something just for the sake of doing it. We as filmmakers are always making decisions for the audience. It's all about the audience experience in the end. We wanted to create an immersive experience for an audience that transports them to a world that feels believable and tactile and lived in. Especially when you're making science fiction or fantasy, you're already asking the audience to suspend disbelief. So the more a world feels real, the more people will buy into the reality of that world and won't have to take that leap of accepting the fantastical elements of it.

 

It's why the original Lord of the Rings trilogy is so successful. They took this massive high fantasy world and grounded it by shooting on location in New Zealand, and that makes all the difference. It imbues the trilogy with a sense of place, and the audience is transported there. That's what we were after for this film as well.

 

The cast and crew were relieved to be on air-conditioned sets in Bangkok for the final weeks of filming.

Warner Bros.

 

Ars Technica: What was the biggest challenge you had to overcome while making The Creator?

 

Oren Soffer: Obviously there's a trade-off. We created this environment that was very fruitful, but it is very physically difficult to shoot on location. We shot in the tropics. It's hot. It's humid. We were shooting in remote locations, and we sometimes had to physically carry a lot of equipment to those locations. Again, we kept the footprint small in order to be able to do that, but that was definitely a challenge.

 

We ended up in Bangkok for the last five weeks of the shoot, with a lot of interiors and air conditioning and sound stages. After being on the road for a number of months, shooting in the middle of a field somewhere in this beautiful mountain range, everybody was so happy to get back to Bangkok and shoot in some air conditioning. It all shows up on screen, so it ends up being worth it. Those hot days and cold showers afterwards are all worth it, because you end up seeing that physicality on camera.

 

The Creator is now playing in theaters.

 

Trailer for The Creator.

 

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