The Creator, from 20th Century Studios, New Regency, and Entertainment One, is an epic sci-fi action thriller set amidst a future war between the human race and the forces of artificial intelligence. Directed by Gareth Edwards, the film stars John David Washington, Gemma Chan, Ken Watanabe, Sturgill Simpson, Madeleine Yuna Voyles, and Allison Janney. The screenplay is by Gareth Edwards and Chris Weitz from a story by Gareth Edwards. The producers are Gareth Edwards, Kiri Hart, Jim Spencer, and Arnon Milchan. The executive producers are Yariv Milchan, Michael Schaefer, Natalie Lehmann, Nick Meyer, and Zev Foreman.

In The Creator, Joshua (Washington), a hardened ex-special forces agent grieving the disappearance of his wife (Chan), is 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. Joshua and his team of elite operatives journey 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 (Voyles).

Courtesy of The Walt Disney Company Malaysia and 20th Century Studios Malaysia, we were given the opportunity to join a press conference for The Creator featuring director Gareth Edwards.

A scene still from 20th Century Studios’ THE CREATOR. Photo courtesy of 20th Century Studios. © 2023 20th Century Studios. All Rights Reserved.

He spoke about many things, including how he came up with the idea for the movie.

On that subject, he said:

“There are lots of ways of trying to explain where the idea came from. The most unique one, which I remember very clearly, was that I had just finished Star Wars and needed a bit of a break and we decided with my girlfriend that we were going to see her parents who live in Iowa,  which is on the other side of America.

Okay, we’ll do like a four-day road trip, and the great thing about having finished a movie is your brain sort of deletes, formats the hard drive and so you’ve got this blank canvas. I wasn’t expecting to think about the next film, to get any ideas but I just put some headphones on and just looked out the window.

And we went through this tall grass sort of farmland area and there was this factory that went by and it had what looked like a Japanese logo on it. And I thought, just because of the way I’m wired like in science fiction, I wonder what they’re doing in there. Maybe it’s robots or something cool. I doubt it, it’s like the Midwest.

But then I was thinking, imagine being a robot built in a factory and you step outside the factory for the first time and all you’ve ever seen is inside this building and suddenly you see grass, the trees and the sky, what would that feel like? I thought that’s a cool little moment in a film but I don’t know what that would be so I threw it away and carried on thinking about other things.

But it kept coming back the rest of the trip. Then I was like, you know what that could be, I started building on the idea, and by the time we got to my girlfriend’s parent’s house, I kind of had the basics of the movie mapped out, which is really rare. Normally, you’d sit painfully for like a year trying to get a movie sort of in your head, so I was like, maybe there’s something in this, like it should be the next film.”

A scene still from 20th Century Studios’ THE CREATOR. Photo courtesy of 20th Century Studios. © 2023 20th Century Studios. All Rights Reserved.

Another interesting topic is about the designs for some of the machines in the movie, which Gareth Edwards reveals is inspired by anime.

He said:

“James Clyne, our production designer, should take a lot of credit for that. We wanted to put a tank in the movie that felt like something that should be in an anime film, like one of these futuristic crazy over-the-top tanks.

But if you just scale up a tank, it doesn’t look very exciting. It was like trying to create negative space and cut things out where it still retains the basics of a tank but still has a shape you wouldn’t expect.

And we always wanted, our secret hope was that we wanted Bandai, which is the company that makes all the toy models of manga and anime characters, we wanted Bandai to release it as a model kit one day.

So we’d take Bandai boxes off the Internet and put our tank on it to see if it felt like something if we were in the store, we’d be like, “Oh my god, we gotta get that!” And until we got really excited and jealous and wanted to buy this toy,  we kept going until it looked right.”

A scene still from 20th Century Studios’ THE CREATOR. Photo courtesy of 20th Century Studios. © 2023 20th Century Studios. All Rights Reserved.

The Creator premieres in Malaysian cinemas on 28 September 2023.

Check out the trailer below: