THE CREATOR Director Gareth Edwards Explains Why He Took a Break From Directing After STAR WARS: ROGUE ONE
After director Gareth Edwards made Star Wars: Rogue One, he kind of dropped off the map. He didn’t take on any film projects for years after that. Then all of a sudden The Creator pops up, and we find that the filmmaker has gone out and made a sci-fi epic that looks incredible!
So what happened after Edwards made Rogue One? Why did he take an extended break from making movies? You’d think after an experience like that, you’d be primed and ready to jump into the next thing. Well, it turns out that the Rogue One experience kind of killed his spirit and he needed to take a break from the Hollywood system.
During an interview with GamesRadar, the filmmaker shared what he was going through at the time that caused him to step away, 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 while he was making these big-budget Hollywood movies, he found 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."
Edward’s next film, The Creator is said to be “a bridge between his low-budget roots and big studio backing for Edwards, who has previously opened up about how they used guerilla filmmaking methods to tell this story.” It seems as though, with this movie, he found his happy place.
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 movie also stars Gemma Chan (Eternals), Ken Watanabe (Inception), Sturgill Simpson (Dog), Madeleine Yuna Voyles and Allison Janney (I, Tonya). The Creator hits theaters on September 29th!