Interview: ‘The Creator’ Director Gareth Edwards and the Oscar-nominated VFX Magicians of Industrial Light & Magic [VIDEO]

Andrew Roberts: That’s right. I started as a 3D generalist and then would often be the artist that receives material from on set and then tries to figure out how to construct and build a scene from that. So that would be one thing that I would refer to is, if I can only get one thing from here, what would it be? And then I did my best to capture that. And then whether it was an HDRi, or a clean plate, or just tons of photo reference, I would try and capture that. I think Gareth’s familiarity with visual effects allowed him to be more bold with his framing and with his choices, knowing that, okay, we know that ILM and the rest of the vendors are going to be able to execute these shots. So there was a level of trust there in how we approached it. Typically you would know, you are framing this way. This is your actor, that’s your background, you know what the design is, and then you’re going to do four or five takes until you’re happy, and then you do the next setup and the camera’s pointing in this other direction, and then you sort of rinse and repeat. Pretty early I realized that Gareth doesn’t like to say cut, and so he will reset and have his actors just take it from the top again. But he’s moving around and he’s hunting for that perfect angle to capture that moment between them. So we might start off just looking over Alphie’s shoulder towards John David, but then as he resets, Gareth’s wandering around, and now they’re in profile, and now we’re behind John David looking at Alphie, and now it’s a wider framing. So the typical approach of, okay, this is my background and these are the things I’m going to capture, I had to set aside and just try and follow Gareth and take note of the areas where he was shooting, or when he was done, try and shoot some clean plates or try and do a 360 to try and get main coverage of what he shot. But I think that not being beholden to a specific angle, not being restricted, really allows us to have some beautiful imagery.

Gareth Edwards: This Gareth guy sounds like a nightmare.

Ian Comley: It’s worth calling out the effort to take these plates without the full complement of data, and get it to a level where we’ve hopefully got a really tight integration. There was a lot to do there. But on many projects, I think it’s fair to say, having gone to those lengths and having put energies into an asset, you want to show it off. You want 15 shots of that thing, you want to fly through all angles, and it really wasn’t like that here. To Gareth’s credit and the strength of the film, you get these glimpses of the world, you get moments of robots only ever seen once, and it builds up this kind of residual impression that, wherever you could point a camera there would be things enriching this world. It just so happens we are on this particular narrative train, and that’s taking us down this path. It didn’t necessarily make things easier for us, but I think it really helped the audience.

Gareth Edwards: One of the big conversations you get into a lot when you’re turning over shots to become visual effects is, everyone wants to understand what it is that’s there. I think if you really went to the future, like 2070 or something, and shot a film and then came back in time and edited it, there’d be so many things visually you’d see and you wouldn’t have a clue what they were. There’d be giant buildings and little devices and vehicles, and people would say, “What is that?” And you go, “I don’t know. We didn’t have time to ask.” But it was there. To me, if someone from 70 years ago came today, they wouldn’t understand a lot of the things they’re seeing. The first question from ILM is, “Okay, so what is that building and what does it do?” And you’d be like, “I have no idea.” And that was a common answer. And it was like, “No, no, no, we’re not supposed to have an idea.” That makes it real. You know what I mean? It just looks like that. That was the beauty of Star Wars, as there were so many throwaway things that all could be their own little movie if you cared.

Jay Cooper: The other thing that I thought was really helpful,  is finding something that was only the spine of a location, and shooting that as if it were already completed. So whether you shot interiors of airplane hangars or inside of greenery, things that have a very rich textural component to start with, and then took our ability to elevate those with visual effects, that was really cool. And I feel like we ended up in a better place than if we had commissioned that as a set, where we had made a bunch of choices about, okay, this is what the ground is going to be, this is what those walls are going to be. The fact that you start with something that you don’t have, there’s all of this naturalism too. I think it gets us to a much better place, and it allows us to find imagery that we haven’t seen before. Because what happens again is, and this is not to bag on set building, once you say, “All right, it’s going to exist in a stage,” you say, “It’s going to have flat ground and it’s going to be built with plywood, and then we’re going to dress on top of it,” whereas the more locations that you go to, the more interesting things there are to start with that you would never have thought about. That location that you guys shot in Thailand, what’s the name of it, Andrew? The Super Collider, the–

Andrew Roberts: Oh, synchrotron, yeah.

Jay Cooper: Where they turned it into the AI lab, it’s an amazing location. And all of the catwalks and the stuff that’s already there, the metal tubes that I have no idea what they’re used for, are very scientific. And then our ability in visual effects to extend that world out and build forms around it, and layer in hanging arms, that’s an amazing marriage of production and location work with visual effects. It’s also something I don’t think you see a lot of. We’re charting our own lane in that way.

Andrew Roberts: Eight countries, 80 locations. At times it was exhausting, but I think it was absolutely worth it. The production value is up there on the screen.

Ian Comley: You guys have already mentioned James Clyne as being fundamental, but what’s really unusual is he stayed on pretty much to the very last shot delivered in the movie. So from our point of view, we were already working within the framework of the design language that Gareth and James had been putting together, but we could keep asking questions throughout. Our artists were reaching out directly through us to questions for Gareth, but equally, they were reaching out to James and having these great conversations, and James would do a quick paint over here and had an artist doing a model there. That was enormous just for detailing and fleshing out this world around the framework.

Jay Cooper: That’s another place where I think our movie’s a little bit different from the way that visual effects are typically run, where it’s very much like a segmented system, pre-production, production, and then post. In this case, we’re kind of all on top of each other, where we were doing a tremendous amount of what would traditionally be production work in visual effects. We would model something, and Gareth and James would take a look at it and say, “Well, it’s kind of right from this angle, but it’s wrong from this one.” And then James would take that image and do a paint-over on top. We’d take it back, do it again, and back and forth. That shuttling between things is typically very difficult just because you know that every time you do this back and forth, it’s additional layers of work. But we knew at the very onset that this was something that we wanted to do. So we built systems where there were art assets that were created in the art department that became the consoles of cars, for example, or became parts of guns. And it’s completely different from other ways that production usually works, where we actually would leverage assets that were built in the art department and we would dress them up in the most modest ways possible to try and get them into shots.

Gareth Edwards: Normally what happens on a movie is you have production, where you go shoot the film, and then everyone, nearly everybody that was involved in that goes, “Bye, see you in a year or so, nice to know you, blah, blah.” And they all go and do the next gig and then post-production starts, and it’s a complete brand new nightmare for a whole group of new people. So my producer Jim Spencer, I was like, “Jim, you’re staying on post.” Because what happens on every movie is they whack up a green screen, and basically all they’re doing is they solve a problem on set by just putting a green screen there, and now we don’t have to worry about it. It’s like, no, that becomes someone’s nightmare six months from now when you’ve all gone home, and so it’s going to be your nightmare. We’re not going to do that, right? It really helped, having continuity from production to post. No one could really escape these issues, and therefore, I think we went about it a lot more efficiently, where it was the right use of money in the right areas.

The Creator is nominated for two Oscars at the 96th Academy Awards: Best Sound and Best Visual Effects.

This written interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.