The Creator Director Explains Movie's Take on A.I. (Exclusive)

The usage of artificial intelligence has been an increasingly divisive conversation amongst those in Hollywood as of late, even though the topic has been at the root of film for decades thanks to the likes of The Terminator and I, Robot amongst others. The latest blockbuster to be based upon the technology is Gareth Edwards' The Creator, which features a world where a war is raging between humans an AI-powered robots. Edwards tells us is take on The Creator is largely inspired by the aforementioned movies, though he wanted to take it all a step further with human-like AI.

"Yeah, I think the similarities are inevitable because I grew up loving the movies you talked about. Hopefully, it's just a starting point. Those similarities kind of take a left turn, and the film becomes quite different to those movies pretty quick," the filmmaker told ComicBook.com at San Diego Comic-Con.

"Basically, 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 who wasn't in the scene, and do it 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 sort of thrown away, where they just were bored, I'm like, "Make that guy a robot," because that'll 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.