Background on Movie Production

Director's interviews

Brandon Davis- I mean kudos to all you guys who were part of that pitch because this movie is stunning and the VFX work especially is awesome, but there’s an AI concept in the Creator. I can geek out with you about some of the concepts you introduced in this film all day long but there is one AI Concept in the Creator I really want to talk to you about and get your thoughts on. When a person’s memory and their thoughts and their personality is scanned out of their brain, put on a memory card and transferred into a Sim, as they’re called on the Creator, is that the same person or where do you fall on the consciousness debate with AI and transferring that?

Gareth Edwards- That’s the great question isn’t it? It’s kind of up to your own beliefs about that. It’s always like that dilemma with Kirk in Star Trek where if he’s beamed up to the Enterprise and then it’s got a fault in it and then there’s two of him being beamed up, like which one’s the real Kirk? If you copy someone and paste them somewhere else they’ll both argue that they’re the real deal, but I like the idea that there’s a time limit to that person depending on how long ago they died or when you scan them, you might only get like 30 seconds of ability to talk to them and then it’s over.

Davis, “The Creator- Director Gareth Edwards On The Origin Of The Best Sci-Fi Film in YEARS” (ComicBook.com September 23, 2023) Interview (April 7, 2025)

Perri Nemiroff- What about in terms of how the conversation about AI evolved from draft one to finished film? Did you ever find any of that kind of conversation and the warnings about what AI could do to the world influencing how you tackle that material in the film?

Gareth Edwards- Basically, the movie was always like the world is divided in two. Half the world banned AI. They hate it, it’s wrong, it caused some real big problems, and the other half of the movies embraced it, carried on developing it, to the point where it’s now human-like and so it’s kind of a East versus West kind of situation at the start and at the very beginning it was like ‘But why would you ban it’, you know? There was genuinely, every single reaction to the screenplay was why would anyone ban AI? It’s like this amazing thing, and so they had to kind of invent a scenario where you might reject it, right? And weirdly, now, the way things are going it’s like the default setting is ban it, right? And it’s a strange reaction that we’ve all had to this technology. It's like this freaky mirror that says “Hang on, how come there’s no one home but yet it seems so real?”

Would you describe the film as a cautionary tale regarding AI or is it more so the film heavily leaning into presenting AI as the other?

It’s presenting AI as the other. I like films that are gray, that are not black and white, where you sort of experience the full conversation of both sides and it’s up to you how you end up feeling about it at the end.

Did you pinpoint a specific year that the movie takes place?

I did. I did and I’ve made a mistake because I should have picked 2024. But, I picked 2070 because I didn’t want to make the mistake Kubrick made of like 2001 not being true, so I was like “I’m gonna pick something way downstream and it was like oh God it’s probably next year”

That’s like the conversation we keep having now. This is very random but there’s one thing I keep remembering from when i was a kid going to sleep away camp and they always used to make a joke that in the future a camp trip for that particular group to the moon, and now there’s people that are buying tickets to go to the moon and it's just something that we never used to think was going to be a reality. It was just a joke that we used to say and now it’s happening.

Yeah, there’s certain things if you’d said like “Predict out of all these things, jet packs, going to the moon, whatever the things that you think science fiction is going to achieve in your lifetime”. I didn’t really have AI as like a definite, you know? I thought we might land on Mars again maybe before I died, but this was eons away, and even the experts said they though it was like 30 years away and it turned out when they stated kind of mimicking the way the human brain works and creating these neuron networks it’s actually quite straightforward and this magical thing happens where unless you’re religious, it’s just a bunch of switches and if you mimic if guess what happens? It kind of seems like it’s alive.

I don’t know why this just came to mind and I don’t know if you’ve thought this through in term of your back story but the thing that kicked, in this world that the movie takes place in, the thing that kicked off the creation of robots in general and this AI that ultimately led to this war that the movie is exploring are things that exist in our real world reality now.

So it was a nuclear bomb that detonated, and you know in the same way that I don’t want to pick a famous make of electric car, but you know how a self-driving car might crash and it’s through some random accidental thing with the algorithm like a simple error and it results like in military hardware that could cause horrific consequences and so its like one of those. All it’s going to take is one of those moments, like where a plane just falls out the sky or something where everyone goes “Okay, we can’t do this anymore, this is too risky, we need to figure this out”. And so , it’s off the back of that kind of event that AI gets banned and you can imagine the idea was - we don’t have time in the movie to get into this- but the idea that things would come with little stickers and logos that say AI-free and it creates this movement against AI which we sort of see. We shot scenes in Thailand with people with protest signs for and against the AI, thinking this is like kind of absurd and now, like I live very near the studios and we drive past and that’s exactly what’s happening

Interview (April 17, 2025)