The Creator Cinematographer On Making The Epic Sci-Fi Film A Grounded Affair [Exclusive Interview]
This post contains spoilers for "The Creator."
Gareth Edwards' "The Creator" is getting a lot of attention for its revolutionary approach to shooting an epic sci-fi film for millions of dollars less than comparable movies coming out these days. The crux of that approach rested on shooting almost everything on location rather than building expensive sets, which also helped give the film a groundedness and sense of realism.
"We wanted the lighting to feel as authentic and truthful and real as the design and the world of the film," the film's cinematographer, Oren Soffer, told me in an interview, adding that the filmmaking team wanted it to seem like "we were just the luckiest filmmakers in the world who just stumbled upon this perfect, beautiful, and perfectly lit location."
Soffer and I talked about how working on "The Creator" differed from a traditional shoot, and what unexpected locales made up those scenes near the end of the film.
Note: This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.
'It just sounds like a crazy adventure and there's a lot of unknowns'
I was really impressed by a lot of things in "The Creator," but particularly how revolutionary it was in terms of cinematography and special effects. How was this project pitched to you? Did you know how different it would be?
Well, I got a call from Greig Fraser [Academy Award-winning cinematographer on "Dune," "Rogue One," "The Batman" and many other films]. You may have heard of him. When you get a call from Greig, I always pick up and I always am expecting something a little crazy and off the beaten path. And that was the case with this.
He called me about this film and basically initially pitched it as, "It's Gareth Edwards' new movie, and I'm on as cinematographer and I've been working on it with him, but I'm not going to be able to be on set because of an overlap with the prep on "Dune: Part Two," so we're looking to bring on another DP to basically go on this crazy adventure with Gareth, be his right-hand man, and support him on this journey and provide the visual support and lighting and camera support that he needs in order to achieve his vision." That vision included their very unique shooting approach and methodology that they had already been discussing and developing in order to shoot the project.
After another call with Greig and Gareth, hearing a little bit more about that methodology and the conversations that they'd already been having, I was just like, "Yeah, let's go. Let's do it. It just sounds like a crazy adventure and there's a lot of unknowns, but there's a lot of excitement in the unknown." And I think that both of their willingness and eagerness to embrace that unknown and lean into it as opposed to recoil from it was something that really excited me as well and really challenged me as a cinematographer and as a filmmaker.
Greig has always talked about how he only takes on a project if there's an element of it that's a little bit scary to him. And I've always been inspired by that and really, really taken by that. So I was more than happy to live up to the standards that Greig had already been setting and dive in and go on the journey with them.
'We wanted the lighting to feel as authentic and truthful and real as the design and the world of the film'
The movie has a groundedness to it and a grit that you typically don't see in current genre films. Can you talk about how you created that look for the movie and the process for bringing that look to the screen?
I'm so glad you noticed that, because that was really the biggest element that we all really wanted to instill the project with. I think initially, that all came from Gareth. The inspiration in the approach here was the culmination of a filmmaking approach that he started on "Monsters," his first movie. He found these ways to create grounded sci-fi that feels lived-in and a reality that's believable, and all of that is to serve the purpose of immersing an audience within the experience of the characters at the end of the day. That's the main driving force behind creating that aesthetic and creating that grit.
He took a few detours on the way, and I think in "Rogue One," he and Greig started to explore as much as they could instilling that feeling and that groundedness into a larger-budget sci-fi canvas. This film was really the direct continuation and almost culmination of those ideas and that concept.
The ultimate goal is to create an immersive experience for the audience, to ground us with the characters' experience and to create a world that feels believable and lived-in so that you're not even really thinking about the world-building when you're watching the movie. It's almost a throwaway. It's just a given. This is just the reality that we were dropped into, that we dropped a film crew into, who happened to film this story about this surrogate fatherhood relationship with the AI robot.
Basically, the biggest decision that was made to accomplish that grounded feeling was to shoot as much of the movie as possible on location. I think that, as opposed to building sets, really dictated the tenor of the feel and the aesthetic of the movie more than anything, because our lighting approach was then derived from that decision.
We wanted the lighting to feel as authentic and truthful and real as the design and the world of the film. We leaned heavily into a hyper-naturalistic, very grounded, and very natural light-driven approach, which sometimes involved fully just embracing available light at a location, and sometimes involved us building it from scratch from the ground up, but doing so in a way that feels like it was found, and that we were just the luckiest filmmakers in the world who just stumbled upon this perfect, beautiful, and perfectly lit location. There was a lot of work that often went into building that look, but it was all to serve that same purpose, which is that tactile nature that you noticed in the film.
'Our job was really to just treat every location as a location and embrace the lighting and embrace the imperfections'
There are a lot of shots in rural areas, but then there are also shots in a big city. And also at the very end, we're on NOMAD itself. I'd love to hear the specifics on how you aimed to create the different looks of each of those different environments, because they come across and feel a bit different just given where we are within the film.
All the locations were derived from the script and from some of the concept art and design work that James Clyne and Gareth had been working on in prep to create the world of New Asia. But Gareth's approach to locations is very different from what I've experienced before and what I imagine people typically experience on larger budget films, which is often you have a very prescribed idea of what a location needs to look like that's heavily designed and iterated on in pre-production. And then when you can't find a location that gives you that, you end up building a set on a stage. But the approach here was the opposite.
Because a lot of the visual design work on the film, specifically the visual effects, were reverse engineered, the plan was always to shoot on locations that were as close as an approximation to the vibe of the space that we could find, knowing that ILM was then going to go in and do 2D paint-overs or do 2.5D paint-overs on the location to enhance or extend or adjust a lot of the real world locations to bring them into the future world of New Asia.
But on set, we didn't have a specific plan or specific idea of what those paint-overs would look like. So our job was really to just treat every location as a location and embrace the lighting and embrace the imperfections and embrace the tactile nature of those spaces.
And then James Clyne, the production designer, was working all through production. He would actually take shots from our dailies and start doing initial sketches and initial paint-overs just in Photoshop just by himself and would send those over. Every week, we would get a little digest of the latest James Clyne paint-overs and start to get an idea of what the enhancement of the world could look like at very low resolution. But once you see the final film, everything just is brought to life at such a level by ILM that some of it is stuff we couldn't have ever even imagined when we were on set.
'The approach really was more about creating a tactile and believable reality for the entire movie'
I would love to dissect a specific sequence from the film, and the one I'm thinking of is when Alphie is in the lab, which I know is a real particle accelerator, which is crazy to me.
Yeah, one of the many examples of just some of the crazy location work that we did, and ending up in that situation was hilarious.
So I definitely want to hear about that, but also the transition between inside the sterile lab when Alphie goes up the ladder into the field because I think it's obviously a transformation. I wondered for you, approaching the lighting and just the look of those shots, how did you transition from that lab space to being outside in a field at nighttime?
That sequence was quite complex, because a portion of it was shot at a particle collider, but there are other portions of the underground AI lab that were shot in different places. I think there was six or seven different locations that all served as different components of that sequence. And some of them were set built, and some of them were other locations, and some of them were a mix of the two — there was a lot of VFX and ILM work to combine everything.
To be honest, on previous films I've worked on as a DP, you end up spending a little bit more time analyzing different scenes and different sequences on a scene by scene basis, and really creating an evolving visual look for a film that maybe corresponds to a character's journey or wanting to create a different sense or feeling for different spaces and create that delineation. And on this film, to be honest, for the first time, we did not adopt that approach. And the approach really was more about creating a tactile and believable reality for the entire movie.
So the lighting approach intentionally was pretty much the same, whether we were on a location in an interior or an exterior location like the field at night or a set build. The approach and the mentality that we adopted in order to light those spaces and how to shoot those spaces was kept the same. And that was in order to create a cohesive feeling and sense and atmosphere for the entire movie to feel like it was one believable lived-in world that no matter what space we were in.
Whether we were in the city, which was mostly shot in Bangkok, or in the countryside or the mountains or anywhere, the approach was the same because we wanted to create a cohesive aesthetic for the entire movie and to create an atmosphere and a vibe that the audience can settle into and be taken on that journey without actually being guided through an evolving visual style or anything like that. So that was very intentional, maintaining that consistency. And it was challenging at times, but that was part of the fun and the assignment of the movie — to find the different ways and the different levels we had to apply to lighting and tools and the crew in order to achieve that same consistency across the whole film.
'Even a lot of the lighting was inspired by the available light in these real world locations'
To follow up on that, at the very end, we're on NOMAD itself, which I think has a different feel than the rest of the film. Was there anything you did different there for creating those sequences?
Well, I think that the NOMAD sequences end up feeling a little different just by virtue of the location, and that is intentional. So there was an intentionality in the design to say like, "Okay, well in the last act of the film, we're jettisoning our characters as well as our plot and our stakes up to this final, higher level."
Funnily enough though, aesthetically, we still maintained the same approach. So lighting and camera lens-wise, those sequences are shot the same way as the rest of the movie. And I think it's just there's such an overwhelming amount of new imagery and new stimuli in that space that it ends up feeling a little bit different. But I think there's also a little bit of the fact that most of our artificial set builds or traditional stage work was revolved around that final sequence, but not all of it. There was actually a lot of that sequence that was also shot on location that were enhanced real world locations.
Where?
In Bangkok.
Just factories or something?
It was mostly at a train station and a convention center. So it's a mix of these two different spaces, but they're heavily transformed by ILM. So you wouldn't be able to necessarily recognize them when you look at it because of the set extensions and all the work that they did. But the hope is that there's still a groundedness and a [tactility] to even the NOMAD sequence, because a lot of it was shot on location and the foreground and the ground and what the characters are interacting with.
Even a lot of the lighting was inspired by the available light in these real world locations that we would then match or recreate or have to make something completely different for the portions of that sequence that were shot on stage. And there's a little bit of Volume work in there as well, but hopefully when you watch the whole sequence, nothing in particular stands out as being one method or the other. It should all maintain that same sense of reality and tactile and groundedness, which is what we were after for the whole movie.
"The Creator" is now playing in theaters.