The Creator has been a long time coming for director Gareth Edwards, who has been working on his AI sci-fi movie for a few years now. Set during a future war between the human race and artificial intelligence, the movie follows one man who’s tasked with discovering a mysterious weapon that could end the war and all of mankind.
However, before he began work on the sci-fi epic, Edwards took a bit of a career gap after helming the Star Wars prequel Rogue One in 2016. "I needed to get off the merry-go-round, do you know what I mean?" Edwards says of the break to SFX magazine in the new issue, which features The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon on the cover. "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."
His successes meant there was no industry-imposed "director’s jail" for Edwards to grapple with. Rather, it was an existential one. "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 says. "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."
The Creator forms 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. Starring John David Washington, Gemma Chan, Ken Watanabe, and Allison Janney, The Creator arrives in cinemas on September 29.
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That's just a snippet of our interview, available in the latest issue of SFX Magazine, which features The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon on the cover and is available on newsstands from Wednesday, September 6. For even more from SFX, sign up to the newsletter, sending all the latest exclusives straight to your inbox.
