How Was The Creator Made For Just $80 Million Dollars? (Exclusive)

The Creator's VFX supervisor and cinematographer detail using a minimalist budget.

By Liam Crowley

Critics are already calling The Creator one of the greatest sci-fi movies of all time. Director Gareth Edwards birthed a lived-in world complete with its own fleshed out mythos without needing multiple tie-in stories or a larger cinematic universe around it. Most impressive of all comes in the film's cost, as The Creator was made with a reported production budget of just $80 million. Ringing up a price tag under nine figures shocked many considering The Creator's elaborate action sequences, larger-than-life spacecraft, and mostly-CGI ensemble.

How Was The Creator Made For Just $80 Million Dollars?

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(Photo: Alberto E. Rodriguez / Stringer)

Speaking to ComicBook.com, The Creator Visual Effects Supervisor: ILM Jay Cooper and Director of Photography Oren Soffer attributed the production crew's ability to spend smartly as a result of many "targeted decisions" and being wise with "allocating the resources."

"I can't figure out how we did it for the money that we had. I think it's a lot of targeted decisions," Cooper said. "When I was approached about the movie, one of the things that (director) Gareth [Edwards] spoke about was just this idea that we would figure it out as we went. We would partner together. He would list out all of the things that he wanted aspirationally. Maybe he would get a lot of them, but he knew he wouldn't get all of them. That's a very different starting place than a lot of the movies that I work on."

"It was less about limiting the resources and it was more just about allocating the resources in a bit of a different and untraditional way as compared to other films at the same sort of scope that end up costing twice or three times as much," Soffer said. "That all comes down to Gareth and (co-cinematographer) Greig [Fraser] and really the whole crew that Gareth put together for the film. Everybody was fully on board with the approach that we adopted for this film that really required a lot of thinking outside of the box and outside of the conventions of blockbuster and big budget filmmaking. There's still a lot of people that worked on this movie, like the crew size and all that was no smaller or more limited than any other bigger project."

While The Creator features a significant amount of high-octane scenes, much of the film comes down to conversations between John David Washington's Joshua and Madeleine Yuna Voyles's Alphie. Both Soffer and Cooper pointed out that they were selective on what crew was necessary for certain shots.

"When you're shooting a large action sequence, for example, it makes complete sense that you need a ton of crew and extras and stunt people and support staff and lighting technicians and everything," Soffer said. "But when you're shooting a scene between two people on an exterior on a mountaintop, it's like, why do you need all these people when all you're really trying to capture is this one really small, intimate moment?"

"He was really good about targeting what things made the shots expansive and impactful, and in doing so, he's able to sort of put together a movie that feels larger than its budget," Cooper continued. "The other component is that he was really smart in the way that he shot. He had a very small number of people, smaller complement of people on set, which allowed more travel time. He was able to go to more locations and fit that into the budget."

Even when The Creator did get big, much of what was captured in the camera lens was what was used in post-production thanks to the decision to shoot on location.

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"The shoot was almost entirely done on location was also a big contributing factor to keeping the costs down. It requires more work and it requires a lot more planning and thinking about how to allocate those resources. Once you put in that work and that time you end up realizing that you have a lot that is spent on support and logistics that you don't actually need in order to create something that feels and is intended to feel very intimate and tactile and raw."

The Creator is in theaters now.

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