The Creator's Visual Design Was Inspired By A Cool Alternate History Concept

As a genre, sci-fi inherently lends itself to reinterpretations and predictions and cautionary tales about our own trajectory as a species. Every time humanity comes to a certain set of pivotal crossroads, the choices we make (or ones made for us by those in power, in many cases) can go on to define the next several decades of our history. It's a simultaneously comforting and terrifying thought, revealing just how much agency we actually have as a collective. Thankfully, the more entertaining and much less existential version of this train of thought applies to movies like "The Creator," which, in many ways, seems to be arriving at the perfect moment in time.

It's no use pretending otherwise: we couldn't possibly hide our excitement for whatever "Godzilla" and "Rogue One" director Gareth Edwards has up his sleeve with his next big-budget genre movie. That hype was dialed up a couple of notches with the recent early look at various scenes from "The Creator," teasing even more intriguing bits of action, characters, and world-building. Thanks to a post-screening Q&A session with Edwards attended by /Film's Vanessa Armstrong, we're getting even more details on what went into crafting "The Creator."

According to the director, he channeled a bit of alternate history to properly define the look and feel of this world:

"The way we tried to quickly describe the design aesthetic of the movie is that it's a little bit retro-futuristic. So it was like, imagine the Apple Mac hadn't won the tech war, and the Sony Walkman had. So everything has this sort of '90s, '80s kind of Walkman, Nintendo [vibe]. We looked at all the product design from that era, and kind of riffed off little pieces and tried to put it on the robots."

Although Gareth Edwards had great success joining ongoing franchises like "Godzilla" and "Star Wars" and reinventing such properties to fit his distinctive approach to visual design, "The Creator" posed a unique challenge as an original story set in a futuristic world dominated by artificial intelligence and wars and suffering — so, you know, not entirely unlike our own. But, to hear Edwards tell it, this setting also required a certain creative mindset that borrowed heavily from all sorts of real-world sources. In this case, he and his production team set out to meld the mechanical world with the natural world, repeating the process over and over again until they arrived at the aesthetics we see in the trailer.

As Edwards explained:

"And the robots ... we did a whole pass at one point where we took insects, and we took insect heads and tried to make it as if that insect had been made by Sony, and changed it into product design. Whether it was a praying mantis or things like [that]. And then equally, we took products and tried to turn them into organic-looking heads. So we took things like film projectors and vacuum cleaners and things like this and just messed around. And usually took both of those things and put them together and deleted pieces and just kind of kept experimenting. It was kind of like evolution in real life. It's like DNA getting merged together with other DNA and trying to create something better than the previous thing."

Film projectors and vacuum cleaners?! Given how many recent sci-fi movies have felt a little stale, it's encouraging to hear just how much effort Edwards put into the visual design. 

"The Creator" arrives September 29, 2023.