The Creator Director Gareth Edwards Really Wanted To Kill That Dog
When writing fiction of any sort, one thing to keep in mind is that most audiences really love dogs. A guy can murder multiple people, and viewers will have an easier time forgiving him for it than if he'd harmed a dog in any way. There's a reason why John Wick can keep the audience on his side after having a murder count in the triple digits; someone killed his dog once, so now we'll follow him to the end of the Earth. If he meets another character with a dog they love, no matter how antagonistic they may initially seem towards Wick, we know he'll form a trustworthy bond with them.
Even if the dog isn't intentionally killed, some viewers still refuse to watch any film that treats its dogs poorly. That's why the "Does the Dog Die?" website is still so popular — the death of a dog (AKA the death of innocence/hope/love) is simply too painful for many people, even those who don't even have a dog.
So it's a good thing that the sci-fi blockbuster "The Creator" chose not to kill off its most prominent dog, even though director Gareth Edwards really wanted to. In the movie we got, a couple of robot cops throw a grenade into the barn where the main character is hiding. Mistaking this for a game of fetch, the dog that lives at the farm picks up the grenade and returns it to the robot cops, dropping it into the ditch where they're taking cover. The robot cops get blown up, but the dog survives. In the original plan, the poor dog — played by the very talented canine actor Olieng, provided by a dog training center in Bangkok, Thailand — was supposed to die in the explosion as well.
What changed Edward's mind
"The dog is riffing off a Darwin Awards story," Edwards explained in an interview with Empire Magazine. There was a real-life story where a dog fetched a live grenade back to his master, killing them both in the process. The phrase "winning the Darwin Award" is often used to make fun of someone when they die at the hands of their own ineptitude, and that's exactly what the Darwin Award website did with this real-life tragedy in 2002. It's an inherently mean-spirited website that not only jokes at people's deaths but celebrates them as having "improved our gene pool" in the process. To direct these jokes at a dog seems even meaner, which is why it's lucky that Edwards' girlfriend changed his mind.
"In my original first draft, the dog blew up, and my girlfriend, who would read my scripts, just handed it back to me and said, 'You can't kill the dog,'" Edwards explained. "I tried to kill the dog for a very long time." Eventually, he listened, however, and the result was a movie scene that was the opposite of mean-spirited; instead, it served as an ironic celebration of organic life. Ultimately, the logical, supposedly superior robots are defeated by an animal who doesn't realize just how dangerous this game of fetch really is. Whereas celebrators of the Darwin Awards would likely joke that dogs like this would be better off removed from the gene pool, the good dog instead inadvertently saves our main characters' lives, and, by extension, saves most of humanity as well.
Thank you, Gareth Edwards' girlfriend, for helping turn what would've been the movie's worst scene into one of its best.