Filmmaker Gareth Edwards knows his gorgeous visuals with films like “Godzilla” and “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story”. He also knows how to do movies that look like they cost considerably more than they do – such as his debut film “Monsters”.
The upcoming sci-fi epic “The Creator” has all the appearance of a film that cost $200+ million – packed with the kinds of visual effects and epic vistas that look to be on that level. However, during a recent IMAX screening of footage from the film with a Q&A afterwards, Edwards revealed the budget came in at only a very cost-effective $80 million.
He indicated New Regency wanted to make the movie, but were worried about the financials until Edwards showed them it could be done cheaper than they thought thanks to a combination of heavy use of real location shooting (80 locations in all), innovative lighting, a small film crew and judicious use of digital effects.
He explains to Slashfilm that they essentially had to “reverse-engineer the whole movie” to pull off all this ambitious imagery, and finding real world locales that looked astonishing was key to that:
“What you normally do is you have all this design work and people say, ‘You can’t find these locations. You’re going to have to build sets in a studio against greenscreen. It’ll cost a fortune.’ We were like, ‘What we want to do is go shoot the movie in real locations, in real parts of the world closest to what these images are.
Then afterwards, when the film is fully edited, get the production designer, James Cline, and other concept artists to paint over those frames and put the sci-fi on top.’ Everyone was like, ‘Sounds great,’ but basically, we had to go and prove it to them.
We didn’t really use any green screen. There was occasionally a little bit here and there, but very little. If you do the maths, if you keep the crew small enough, the theory was that the cost of building a set, which is typically like $200,000, you can fly everyone to anywhere in the world for that kind of money. So it was like, ‘Let’s keep the crew small and let’s go to these amazing locations.'”
Another factor was lighting with the production developing a lightweight, mobile lighting rig that a crew member could move around and setup in a matter of seconds rather than minutes:
“I could move and suddenly the lighting could readjust. And what normally would take 10 minutes to change was taking four seconds. So we would do 25-minute takes where we would play out the scene three or four times and just give everything this atmosphere of naturalism and realism that I really wanted to get, where it wasn’t so prescribed. You’re not putting marks on the ground and saying, ‘Stand there.’ It wasn’t that kind of movie.”
Edwards also revealed the design aesthetic was retro-futuristic with a kind of 80s/90s Sony Walkman/Nintendo vibe meaning spins on the product design from that era.
“The Creator” will open in cinemas on September 29th.
