Although Gareth Edwards had great success joining ongoing franchises like “Godzilla” and “Star Wars” and reinventing such properties to fit his distinctive approach to visual design, “The Creator” posed a unique challenge as an original story set in a futuristic world dominated by artificial intelligence and wars and suffering — so, you know, not entirely unlike our own. But, to hear Edwards tell it, this setting also required a certain creative mindset that borrowed heavily from all sorts of real-world sources. In this case, he and his production team set out to meld the mechanical world with the natural world, repeating the process over and over again until they arrived at the aesthetics we see in the trailer.
As Edwards explained:
“And the robots … we did a whole pass at one point where we took insects, and we took insect heads and tried to make it as if that insect had been made by Sony, and changed it into product design. Whether it was a praying mantis or things like [that]. And then equally, we took products and tried to turn them into organic-looking heads. So we took things like film projectors and vacuum cleaners and things like this and just messed around. And usually took both of those things and put them together and deleted pieces and just kind of kept experimenting. It was kind of like evolution in real life. It’s like DNA getting merged together with other DNA and trying to create something better than the previous thing.”
Film projectors and vacuum cleaners?! Given how many recent sci-fi movies have felt a little stale, it’s encouraging to hear just how much effort Edwards put into the visual design.
“The Creator” arrives September 29, 2023.