Gareth Edwards first made a splash with Monsters, a sci-fi horror movie which was made for less than $500,000. He quickly made the leap to much bigger budgets with Godzilla and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. The experience on those films prompted Edwards to take a nearly seven-year break from Hollywood, but he’s back on the scene with The Creator, an original sci-fi action thriller starring John David Washington.
While speaking with SFX Magazine, Gareth Edwards discussed why he needed to take a break after Rogue One. “I needed to get off the merry-go-round, do you know what I mean?” Edwards said. “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.“
Edwards also wanted to return to his low-budget roots. “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,” he said. “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.” At $80 million, the budget of The Creator is considerably more than what Gareth Edwards had to work with on Monsters, but it’s still significantly less than the budgets of Godzilla and Rogue One.
The Creator is set amidst a future war between the human race and the forces of artificial intelligence. The film stars John David Washington as Joshua, a “hardened ex-special forces agent grieving the disappearance of his wife, 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. 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 film also stars Gemma Chan, Ken Watanabe, Sturgill Simpson, Madeleine Yuna Voyles, and Allison Janney. The Creator will hit theaters on September 29th.
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