The Creator: Gareth Edwards Reveals He Kept Cast in the Dark If They Were Human or Robots (Exclusive)

The Creator, the new film from Godzilla and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story director Gareth Edwards, pits human beings in a war with a race of robots that came from an an AI program. The trailers have shown that there will be a ton of robots featured in the film, but we recently learned that many of the actors portraying the robot characters had no idea they weren’t playing humans. While the major characters in The Creator likely knew who and what their characters were, the other actors in most scenes were told to just approach everything as if they were human.

While speaking to ComicBook.com’s Brandon Davis at San Diego Comic-Con, Edwards was asked about the influences of AI in the movie. As he explained what made his AI different from what we’ve seen in films like The Terminator, Edwards said that he instructed all of the actors to play their characters as human as possible, in order to make the robots look more natural. In post-production, he decided which characters to turn into robots and which ones to keep human.

“I think the similarities are inevitable because I grew up loving the movies you talked about, but hopefully it’s just a starting point, like those similarities kind of take a left turn and the film becomes quite different to those movies pretty quick,” Edwards said. 

“But I’d say the biggest difference is I really wanted the AI in the movie to be completely human,” the director continued. “Like even the robots are very naturalistic. I stopped telling people at a certain point whether they’re a robot or not because you notice that people, when they think they’re a robot, they start acting a bit different and pushing things a little bit more. And so I would get everyone to play it like they were human. No one knew who was going to be AI and who wasn’t in the scene and do it like a normal, contemporary movie that’s not science fiction. And then in post, with ILM, the more naturalistic someone was the more interesting, the more thrown away they were just [looking bored], I’m like, ‘Make that guy I robot because that would be really fun.’ You never see that in movies.”

What Is The Creator About?

Washington stars in The Creator as an ex-special forces agent named Joshua, who is grieving the disappearance of his wife. In the middle of a war between humans and artificial intelligence, Joshua is hired to hunt down and killed a being known as the Creator, the architect of the AI who has the power to end the war, as well as mankind itself. 

In addition to Washington, the film stars Gemma Chan, Ken Watanabe, Madeleine Yuna Voyles, and Allison Janney. Edwards wrote the script with Chris Weitz and produced the film alongside Kiri Hart, Jim Spencer, and Arnon Milchan. The executive producers are Yariv Milchan, Michael Schaefer, Natalie Lehmann, Nick Meyer, and Zev Foreman.

The Creator is set to arrive in theaters on September 29th.