The Oscars are only a few weeks away and The Creator is in the hotseat for the Best Visual Effects gong, and speaking with A.Frame, director Gareth Edwards and visual effects supervisor Jay Cooper discuss the groundbreaking visual effects of the movie.
The Creator looks like an expensive blockbuster. However, it sounds like the execution was less like Rogue One or Godzilla and more like Gareth’s debut feature, Monsters?
Gareth Edwards: You can view it two ways. You can say we’re either the world’s poorest blockbuster or the world’s richest guerrilla film. And when you’re the world’s richest guerrilla film, you can do anything! [Laughs] It was trying to find the holy grail of filmmaking where you get all the advantages of being opportunistic and organic — like an independent film — and having the scope and scale of a massive blockbuster. The crude way to explain that is that usually, on a film, you have a hundred units of budget, and you take ten of those units and put it in a bank, and that’s your safety net. So, you make the film with 90 units. With The Creator, it was like, ‘Can I take the ten units and make the movie with that and have the 90 units for post-production and visual effects?’
Also, if you get the crew small enough, it’s cheaper to go anywhere in the world than it is to build a set, so suddenly you don’t have to do green screen and you can cherry-pick all the great locations of the world, which is what we did. We went to Indonesia, Nepal, Japan, Cambodia and Thailand, and we found real-world locations that represented the closest thing to the final shot that we’d wanted. We knew that in post, ILM and the other VFX companies would be able to digitally augment that. When you shoot green screen, you’ve got the foreground actor, maybe, and then it’s a free-for-all as to what the hell is behind them, which is a creative nightmare. If you’ve got everything in camera, the lighting is really nice, you’ve found a pretty shot, and it’s all working, when you replace that mountain with a sci-fi building or a car with a futuristic vehicle, it’s all going to work. I’ve never understood why people do it the other way around. It has never really made sense to me as a VFX person. The Creator was the first time I could actually grab the reins and say, ‘No, we’re going to do this, and this is how films like this should be done.’ I’d definitely do it again.
At the 96th Oscars, The Creator is nominated for Best Sound and Best Visual Effects, the latter of which recognizes ILM’s Jay Cooper, Ian Comley (visual effects supervisor), and Andrew Roberts (on-set VFX supervisor), as well as special effects supervisor Neil Corbould (who is also nominated this year for his visual effects work on both Napoleon and Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One.)
- Hardcover Book
- Miller, John Jackson (Author)
- English (Publication Language)
- 432 Pages - 04/09/2024 (Publication Date) - Random House Worlds (Publisher)
