SPOILER SPECIAL
The Creator
DIRECTOR GARETH EDWARDS ON HIS STUNNING SCI-FI
WORD CHRIS HEWITT
GARETH EDWARDS’ THE Creator is the kind of smart, savvy and stylistically stunning sci-fi that we’re told they can’t make without bankrupting a studio, and which showed us what we’ve been missing in the eight years since Edwards’ last movie, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. Here, the director talks Empire through key moments from a movie that puts the AI in ‘humanity’.
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The Creator is set in a world where AI is rampant, and the AI-resistant US is at war with the AI-friendly New Asia; information communicated to us in the film’s opening moments, depicted as a clip of newsreel footage that builds out the history and stakes of his world. “In science-fiction you’ve got a lot to explain,” says Edwards. “There were so many questions about what’s going on in the world, and we tried different ways of setting up the world.” In the end, Edwards took inspiration from his co-editor, Hank Corwin, who helped craft the opening info-dump assault of Oliver Stone’s JFK. “That was our answer: why don’t we have a bit of archive, and a speech by a military general, and we can do everything we need to do within that structure.” An impromptu screening of JFK, with Edwards watching alongside Corwin, shone the light on his strategy.