by Gill Pringle
“When you write a film, especially a science fiction, I try to avoid putting in a date because even Kubrick gets it wrong,” says the Godzilla and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story director.
“And so, it’s like, don’t write the date, and then at some point you have to, and so I did some maths and picked 2070, and now I feel like an idiot because I should have gone for 2023,” he laughs.
“Because everything that’s unfolded in the last few months or year is kind of scarily weird. . . and when we first pitched the movie to the studio, this idea of war with AI – everyone wants to know the backstory like, ‘Well hang on, why would we be at war with AI?’ It’s like, ‘well, they’ve been banned because it kind of went wrong…’ ‘but why would you ban AI? It’s gonna be great. . .’ And there were all these ideas that you set up that maybe humanity would reject this thing and not be that cool about it. And the way it’s played out, like the setup of our movie is pretty much the last few months,” says the Brit writer/director.
Filmed across 80 real locations – including Thailand, the Maldives and Nepal – The Creator is set amidst a future war between the human race and the forces of artificial intelligence.
Starring John David Washington as Joshua, a tough ex-special forces agent, 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.
Still grieving the disappearance of his pregnant wife Maya, portrayed by Gemma Chan, Joshua takes on the mission, secretly hoping to find his wife in the process.
Accompanied by a team of elite operatives, he travels 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 named Alphie.
Asked to further explain The Creator’s premise, Edwards reluctantly outlines the plot: “The world is divided in two; essentially something terrible happened in America and AI got banned. It’s completely banned in the West, but in Asia, there was no such problem; they carried on developing it until it was near human like, and so there’s this war going on over there to wipe out AI and Public Enemy Number One, the person everybody’s after, is the Creator. From the western perspective, this is the Osama bin Laden of our story, but from Asia and the AI’s perspective, this is like God.”
Talking about casting the film – which also stars Allison Janney and Ken Watanabe – Edwards discusses the serendipity of finding young Californian actress Madeleine Yuna Voyles to portray Alphie, without whom, he believes his ambitious film wouldn’t have been nearly so plausible.
“We had an open casting call all around the world and I think we got hundreds of videos. Thankfully I didn’t have to watch all of them. They sent me like the top 70 and then I went to meet about ten kids. And the first one in was Madeline and she came in and did a scene,” he recalls.
“We were all nearly in tears at the end. And I thought to myself, ‘this is weird and phenomenal – and maybe the mom was just brilliant at prepping her to get really upset just before she came in, and there was some little trick going on’. So, we chatted for a bit and did some other scenes and then, right at the end, I was a bit cruel and was like, ‘Oh, can we just try one more thing?’ I just wanted to see if it was repeatable,” he says, explaining how he prompted her to do another scene that wasn’t even in the script.
“We just improvised it – and she was even more heartbreaking. And I don’t know what we would have done if we hadn’t found the right kid. We got really lucky because the version of this movie where we didn’t find Madeleine, like I’m glad I live in the universe where that happened because the movie lives and dies…
“And I hate movies about little kids because they tend to be so annoying – and my biggest fear was we’re gonna get one of these really annoying kid movies. So, it was the biggest relief when she was beyond her years, like she’s reincarnated or something.”
Voyles – of Southeast Asian ancestry but born and raised in San Diego – instantly bonded with her co-star Washington; Denzel Washington’s talented son whose films include Tenet and BlacKkKlansman.
“She’s quite method. I can’t tell if she’s method or not because we only knew each other during the filmmaking process. But she kept everybody at arm’s reach. Like, I was allowed in a little bit. But her and John David were inseparable,” says Edwards.
“He became like the surrogate brother or father figure, I’m not sure which. And what’s amazing is, I thought I was gonna have to trick her. So, when we did all the scenes, I was like, I need this to be like a documentary, so we can pull this performance out of this girl without her having to act – but she could act her pants off! It was a director’s dream. You could just tell her what Alphie is thinking and this amazing performance would come out and you’d look at the other actors and be like, ‘Why can’t you all be like this? What’s your problem?!’’ he jokes.
Working largely on live locations, Edwards utilised local talent in the most unlikely places.
“Everything in this movie is the closest thing we could find to what the artwork suggested it should be. For instance, when we were in Thailand, we needed to find a really technologically advanced factory or something like that and we looked everywhere. There were car manufacturing plants that were nervous about us filming. And eventually we found a particle accelerator, like the most advanced kind of thing probably in the whole of Thailand.
“And we were like, ‘please, please, please, could you let us film here?’ It had the whole circular hub thing going on and we visited and they were like, ‘There’s no way you’d be allowed to film here’,” he says explaining how the officials asked what they wanted to film there.
“And we went, well, there’s people with guns shooting and explosions. And this is a multi-million dollar facility with all these cutting edge scientists, and they were like – ‘it’s not gonna happen’.”
But at the last minute, one of the officials asked who the filmmaker was. “And they said, ‘Oh, it’s this guy from the States or whatever, he lives over there’. And then they go, ‘What films has he done?’ And they went, ‘I don’t know if you saw it – he did this Star Wars film called Rogue One’. And they were like, ‘What? Can we be in it?’ And we were like ‘sure’, and so everybody in the scenes where everyone is running around there, are real nuclear physicists. They really really are – and they were amazing,” he says.
Again, Edwards, 48, cannot hide his delight at the uncanny timing of The Creator’s release.
“Weirdly, as we were making the film, there were all these news stories about whistle-blowers at big tech companies warning us about how advanced the AI had become and how it was being developed for questionable purposes, and how it could replace human labour,” he says of the AI revelations that began during The Creator’s six month shoot between January and June 2022.
“And it feels like we’re at that tipping point now where it’s here; that Pandora’s box has been opened. And this movie, by sheer fluke, is completely about that issue. And is it real? Does it matter? Should we embrace it? Should we destroy it? Those ideas are at the heart of this film, so it’s really timely in that sense.
“But I think the trick with AI is to get the timing right,” he adds mischievously. “There’s a sweet spot window where it’s before the robot apocalypse and not after – which I think is in November, or maybe December?!”
The Creator is in cinemas September 28, 2023
