How The Creator Director Gareth Edwards Saved Hundreds Of Millions On The Film's Budget
Gareth Edwards, the director behind 2014's "Godzilla" and 2016's "Rogue One: A Star Wars Story," has not had a movie in theaters in seven years. That is downright insane, given his success in the blockbuster space, from starting the MonsterVerse to creating a $1 billion hit in the "Star Wars" galaxy. But Edwards is finally back with "The Creator," an original sci-fi film that is due to arrive in the fall. While it looks just as expensive as his previous films, the filmmaker actually got creative and managed to make a movie that looks like $300 million for less than a third of the price.
IMAX recently screened footage from "The Creator" during a preview event, and /Film's Vanessa Armstrong was in attendance. During a Q&A session, Edwards discussed how he managed to make such a sprawling, massive-scale sci-fi movie for far less than the Hollywood average. In this case, the budget was around $80 million. Here's what he had to say about it:
"You look at all that imagery, and it was incredibly ambitious. The natural reaction is, 'This is a $300 million film. There's no way we can really do this. We'd love to do this, but we can't really do it.' And I was like, 'No, no, no, no, no. We're going to do it very differently. We're going to film it with a very small crew and we're essentially going to reverse-engineer the whole movie.'"
'We didn't really use any greenscreen'
New Regency wanted to make the movie, but they also didn't want to end up in over their heads financially. Edwards had to show them that it could be done cheaper than they thought. Interestingly, the secret was actually relying less on visual effects and more on real locations, despite the fact that so many modern blockbusters opt to craft locations using a combination of sets on a stage or use innovative tech like The Volume employed by "The Mandalorian" combined with CGI — not that "The Creator" didn't use ILM StageCraft; it did, with those sequences overseen by Greig Fraser. Edwards explained:
"What you normally do is you have all this design work and people say, 'You can't find these locations. You're going to have to build sets in a studio against greenscreen. It'll cost a fortune.' We were like, 'What we want to do is go shoot the movie in real locations, in real parts of the world closest to what these images are. Then afterwards, when the film is fully edited, get the production designer, James Clyne, and other concept artists to paint over those frames and put the sci-fi on top.' Everyone was like, 'Sounds great,' but basically, we had to go and prove it to them."
So they did, and the crew went to 80 locations, which is far more than one would normally use for a movie of this size.
"We didn't really use any green screen. There was occasionally a little bit here and there, but very little. If you do the maths, if you keep the crew small enough, the theory was that the cost of building a set, which is typically like $200,000, you can fly everyone to anywhere in the world for that kind of money. So it was like, 'Let's keep the crew small and let's go to these amazing locations.'"
Getting really, really creative
Given what we've seen in the trailer for "The Creator," it's clear that Edwards was able to squeeze the most out of every penny he was given. While I won't name names, there are movies that hit theaters in recent years that cost more than twice as much as this movie that look half as good as what we've seen so far. Much of that is owed to Edwards and his innovative thinking on set.
For one, he developed a lightweight, mobile lighting rig that a crew member could move in seconds, rather than minutes. That time adds up, and it allowed him a lot of freedom to work with the actors on set and get the best shots possible. It was fast, efficient, and most importantly, cost-effective. As Edwards explained:
"I could move and suddenly the lighting could readjust. And what normally would take 10 minutes to change was taking four seconds. So we would do 25-minute takes where we would play out the scene three or four times and just give everything this atmosphere of naturalism and realism that I really wanted to get, where it wasn't so prescribed. You're not putting marks on the ground and saying, 'Stand there.' It wasn't that kind of movie."
The big question is whether or not audiences will show up to see what Edwards can do outside of a major franchise. Is a movie from the director of "Rogue One" enough to put butts in seats? Is John David Washington ("Tenet") a big enough star to help draw a crowd? Are those impressive trailers going to do the job? At the very least, Edwards didn't make his job harder with a needlessly inflated budget.
"The Creator" is set to hit theaters on September 29, 2023.