THE CREATOR Director Reveals He Didn't Tell the Actors If They Were Playing Robots or Humans
The Creator looks like it’s going to be an incredible sci-fi film! This past weekend at Comic-Con they showed ten minutes of footage from the movie, and I was told by my friends who attended the panel that it was incredible!
The film tells an epic-scale story set in a distant future after a “catastrophic and apocalyptic war” between humans and robots that were created by 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.
There are a lot of actors in the film that are playing the robot characters, and it turns out that many of them didn’t know they were playing robots. Director Gareth Edwards (Rogue One, Godzilla) wanted to keep the human element of the robot characters real, so to he just didn’t bother to tell them they were playing robots.
While talking to CB, Edwards was asked about the influences of AI in the movie and he explained that the AI in his film was different from movies like The Terminator. He said he instructed all of the actors to play their characters as humanly as possible so that the robots look more natural. It was actually in the post-production process when he decided which characters to turn into robots and which ones to keep human. He said:
"I think the similarities are inevitable because I grew up loving the movies you talked about, but hopefully it's just a starting point, like those similarities kind of take a left turn and the film becomes quite different to those movies pretty quick.
"But I'd say the biggest difference is I really wanted the AI in the movie to be completely human. Like even the robots are very naturalistic. I stopped telling people at a certain point whether they're a robot or not because you notice that people, when they think they're a robot, they start acting a bit different and pushing things a little bit more. And so I would get everyone to play it like they were human. No one knew who was going to be AI and who wasn't in the scene and do it like a normal, contemporary movie that's not science fiction. And then in post, with ILM, the more naturalistic someone was the more interesting, the more thrown away they were just [looking bored], I'm like, 'Make that guy I robot because that would be really fun.' You never see that in movies."
That’s an interesting approach, and I’m sure the film will be better for the way that Gareth handled that aspect of it.
In The Creator, “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!