After making his 2010 indie film Monsters, director Gareth Edwards was thrust into the world of big-budget and big-studio Hollywood filmmaking. His next film was Godzilla for Warner Bros. and from there he went on to helm the Star Wars film Rogue One for Disney and Lucasfilm.
Edwards spent a good amount of time playing in the sandboxes of big franchises. Those films took a toll on him and after making Rogue One he took a 6-7 year break from making movies. He previously talked about that, saying:
“I needed to get off the merry-go-round, do you know what I mean? In Hollywood, you can get stuck on the hamster wheel, or whatever analogy you want to use. I just wanted to get off and have a break to take some time thinking about the next thing.”
He went on to explain that even though he was making these big-budget franchise Hollywood movies, he realized that more money didn’t necessarily give him freedom. He said:
“I got to make a very low-budget science fiction film with Monsters, and I realized there were some serious advantages to having no money. It was kind of a shock to have all the money you could ever want, and still be limited. I felt like if I could somehow get that big bag of cash and send it back in time to me when I was making Monsters, the possibilities would have been infinite. And so, in a weird way, I was trying to find that kind of scenario again. I was as much interested in the process of how to make the film as I was the idea.”
When he was ready, he pushed his sci-fi project The Creator forward, which he described as “a bridge between his low-budget roots and big studio backing for Edwards.” The question is, would Edwards be open to jumping back into the big studio system for another franchise project?
The answer to that is yes, but it all depends on him having a comfortable amount of creative freedom. He explained in a recent interview with CB, saying:
“I like franchises, obviously, or else I wouldn’t have done two of them. So there are things that I would still love to do in that arena,” Edwards explained. He quickly added the caveat that even if working for a big studio, he’d still want to use the practical and immersive world-building approaches he did to make The Creator.
Edwards went on to talk about not wanting to get caught in the Hollywood “factory,” and shared what his best-case scenario would be with the franchise:
“If I got to do them, I only want to do them if I can use this methodology and bring this stamp to it,” Edwards said. “Because you go into a certain factory, it’s going to turn out all the other things in the factory. So, it’s like trying to escape the factory and just do it this way. If someone was willing to go, ‘Okay, here’s the IP. Here’s the franchise, but go off and do it how you do things.’ That would be probably one of the best-case scenarios, I reckon.”
Well, if The Creator ends up being a big hit, there are studios out there that will give him the creative freedom that he’s looking for.
The Creator tells an epic-scale story, which is set in a distant future after a “catastrophic and apocalyptic war” between humans and artificial intelligence. John David Washington stars in the film as a character who is tasked with saving the world, but he might have to kill an AI robot child to do it.
The movie is based on an original story and screenplay that Edwards wrote with Chris Weitz, and the synopsis reads: “Amidst a future war between the human race and the forces of artificial intelligence, Joshua (Washington), a hardened ex-special forces agent grieving the disappearance of his wife (Chan), is recruited to hunt down and kill the Creator, the elusive architect of advanced AI who has developed a mysterious weapon with the power to end the war… and mankind itself.”
It’s explained: “Joshua and his team of elite operatives journey across enemy lines, into the dark heart of AI-occupied territory… only to discover the world-ending weapon he’s been instructed to destroy is an AI in the form of a young child.”
The Creator will be released in theaters on September 29, 2023.
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