The Ambitious Pitch That Got The Creator Made (Exclusive)

In the age of franchises and sequels, The Creator arrives as an original idea in the sci-fi genre. Gareth Edwards, who previously helmed Godzilla and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, brings to life a story of our world set years after a war with artificial intelligence has left humanity ravaged and divided. To tell it, the film required the finances to visually build the A.I. characters and futuristic settings, an expensive task in a Hollywood period where so many big budgets are reserved for the likes of Marvel titles. With this in mind, Edwards approached the studios with a unique plan to allocate The Creator‘s budget without missing a beat of his ambitious story, emotionally or visually.

“The way we pitched the film, the very simple version would be this; this is the budget you normally have for a movie. And what happens is, they usually take away this much as a safety net, like an insurance policy, and they put it on a shelf. Well, I was like, ‘Can we go make the movie with this, like an independent artistic film, and have this as the backup insurance to go give to Industrial Light & Magic and do crazy VFX throughout the whole film?’” Edwards told ComicBook.com in an exclusive interview. “And they were like, ‘That sounds really cool. No one’s ever done this before. Prove it.’” With the challenge set, Edwards got to work.

“So, we were like, ‘Okay. Well, can we go do a location scout?”‘They gave us a little bit of money,” Edwards recalled. “We went to eight or so countries in Southeast Asia. And I didn’t tell them but I snuck a camera with me, and one of those 1970s anamorphic cinema lenses. Basically, we shot everywhere we went. I got all this material. When I came back I cut together a 10-minute short or whatever, and then went to Industrial Light & Magic and said, ‘Look, this is how I want to make the movie. I want to sort of reverse-engineer everything, do it all backwards, and kind of cheat.’”

Industrial Light & Magic, often abbreviated to ILM, was up for the task despite its lack of traditional nature. As ILM’s Jey Cooper recalled, “One of the things that 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.”

Edwards got the necessary teams on board, though. “You could see them quite nervously going, ‘Okay. Okay,’ wanting to be part and play along, but this could really backfire,” Edwards said. “So, we did this little test. They knocked it out of the park. It looked stunning, and things that normally take like a month were taking like a few days.”

The unique and ambitious pitch approach was successful. “We basically hit play on that to the studio and they greenlit the film,” Edwards revealed, and The Creator was brought to life on an $80 million budget which has left some key members of the crew baffled by their own accomplishments.