The Creator director holds no hard feelings for Star Wars over his Rogue One experience

Felicity Jones and Diego Luna in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story — (Image credit: Lucasfilm)

Rogue One director Gareth Edwards has addressed his time working on Star Wars – and the filmmaker says he has no hard feelings about the experience.

"Look, the only thing I can say is I was incredibly lucky," Edwards said in a new interview with Variety about his upcoming AI movie The Creator. "I got to make a Star Wars film. I won the lottery, in that sense. The idea of someone as privileged as me in any way implying that it was anything other than the amazing experience that it was to some extent – like, I don’t have any empathy for that person, and I don’t want to be that person either."

Reports from 2016 that emerged ahead of the movie's release said that Rogue One screenwriter Tony Gilroy had taken over from Edwards to handle reshoots and post-production.

"The way you make a film is as important as its screenplay. I would take full control over the process and a mediocre screenplay over a really good screenplay and zero control over the process," the director added, which Variety says is "as close as Edwards gets to addressing" the Rogue One reports.

Edwards' next movie, The Creator, stars John David Washington, Gemma Chan, and Ken Watanabe in a sci-fi thriller set in a world where AI is at war with humanity. "I needed to get off the merry-go-round, do you know what I mean?" Edwards told our sister publication SFX magazine of the seven-year break between Rogue One and The Creator.

"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."

The Creator hits the big screen on September 29. In the meantime, check out our guide to the best sci-fi movies of all time.