The cost of film production has been a big topic of late, with the enormous near $300 million budgets of the recent “Misson: Impossible” and “Indiana Jones” sequels seen as symptoms of an unsustainable model.
On the flipside, movies like “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” coming in at a comparatively more reasonable $100 million or so each are signs that grand and ambitious filmmaking can be done relatively economically.
Nothing shows it better than Gareth Edwards’ new sci-fi film “The Creator” which clocks in at just $80 million dollars despite having a visual scale and scope of films three times that size.
In a new interview with Variety, Edwards says he was a “bit embarrassed it was $80 million” and thinks he “should’ve done it for less”.
The resulting film is a mix of both the big studio scale he had with “Godzilla” and “Rogue One” combined with the lower scale elements of his ultra-low-budget 2010 debut film “Monsters”. He sees advantages and disadvantages to both approaches, so is trying something new and in the middle here.
Cinematographer Oren Soffer says the overall aesthetic was very inspired by 1970s sci-fi films. The approach was to shoot natural landscapes in remote locales, and then add all the futuristic elements digitally in post-production (very little blue screen was used). Edwards explains how this could be done economically:
“Essentially, if you make sure everything in the immediate 10 or 20 meters [of the frame] is for real and that the stuff that you’re going to invent is in the distance.
The way parallax works, the brain can’t tell motion beyond about 20 meters. It’s like putting digital matte paintings behind your foreground. That’s a really good bang for your buck.”
Even foreground elements such as people, the visual effects were all done in post and were added in such a way as to suggest the world is bigger than it is:
“I didn’t want to put dots on anybody or have any of those motion capture suits, because that way, we weren’t wedded to those people having to be robots.
Once the film was cut, I could pick people [in the shot] and say, ‘Make that person a robot’. It feels sacrilegious to make someone a robot who’s just kind of sat in the background doing nothing.
But once you start doing that a few times, you start to think everybody else in the background is probably a robot, too, and it has this strange perception of filling out the world.”
Visual effects supervisor Jay Cooper says shooting in real locations and environments and then later building them out digitally worked great:
“If you look at the movie, the places that were most successful are places where the location informs what the build became later. And that’s something that you can’t really anticipate.”
A big part of this was that the film wasn’t heavily pre-designed from the beginning, rather they saved money by keeping design and set building budgets down, they were able to save more money for the final stages of the process to then enhance the images they knew would appear on screen.
Soffer says this kind of filmmaking would be hard to replicate and isn’t really a new template:
“You need a director who has Gareth’s tenacity and boldness and also good taste and vision to execute it. But it’s a very unique way of working, all in service of creating a final film that feels immersive and authentic, especially in a sci-fi setting where it can feel very fantastical and very removed from reality.”
“The Creator” is now in cinemas.
