The Creator Director Gareth Edwards On Intensive Worldbuilding & Unique Robots

Gareth Edwards: It was trying to keep it simple, and I guess there’s real world things you can’t help but talk about when you go, well, everything’s like that situation, but with AI, you know what I mean? And so there was a lot of quick references in terms of conflicts and things like that in the world, but it didn’t have a political agenda.

If anything, it was the reason the divide happened like that is because I’d gone to Asia [with] Jordan Vogt-Roberts, who directed Skull Island. He’s like the Peter Jackson of Vietnam. He’s really famous over there. He’s like, “You’ve got to go to Vietnam.” I ended up going over there with him and I wanted to do this robot movie. So I spent the whole time I was there, I didn’t tell anyone, but I was just picturing everybody as a robot.

And there’s something about, you see a monk go into a temple and you just picture them like a robot monk, and you just go, “Oh my God, I’ve not seen that before. What is that? What’s that monk doing? What’s going on here?” And I got fascinated in that visual and I ended up trying to create this weird hybrid between a film like Apocalypse Now and Blade Runner or something. And that’s really where it all stemmed from. Then reverse engineered the politics out of that. It wasn’t like I had an agenda in that sort of sense.

Gareth Edwards: I guess it was more exploring the way of making a film. There was some things we did on Rogue One that were very, I thought were very successful. We went to the Maldives to shoot all the beach scenes in Scarif and everything. And we shot in some real world train stations weirdly, and turned it into Imperial infrastructure. And so I want to do a whole movie like that. I want to go to, for every single scene in the movie, I want to go to a real location.

And if you get this crew down to a certain size, the cost of building a set, which is like 2 to 300 grand, if you get this crew to a certain size, it’s cheaper to fly them anywhere in the world than it is to build a set. And so suddenly you can go, I was literally a kid in a candy store. It’s like, “Okay, I’m going to pick the best location in the whole world for every single one of these things.” We went to eight different countries, 80 different locations. Just in Thailand, 10,000 miles. It was insane. Like 150 hotels and during the pandemic, which is a-

Gareth Edwards: I hate movies with little kids in them. 97% of them are really annoying. And I was like, “We can’t be one of those films.” You know what I mean? I don’t want to make one of those movies. I don’t like watching them myself.

We need to have the right kid or we should forget it. And she came in, she was the first kid we ever auditioned. I met with a whole bunch of parents and kids and she did this scene and we were near tears and we stopped and I was like, “Hang on, this is too good to be true.” And I thought maybe the mom whispered some stuff to her just before she came in the room and got her upset. And I don’t know why. I just thought there’s no way this could be happening.

So then I tried a little, I was like, “Can we just try something else?” And we did a different scene. I made something up and she did it just even better. And she left the room and we just looked at each other and went, “Why are we carrying on? This is her, right?” And then I was paranoid the whole time she wouldn’t be able to come to Thailand and shoot the movie or it felt like we hit the jackpot.

Gareth Edwards: Yeah, I can’t do a film like this and not be… I mean, I love the Terminator. And so you’re standing on the shoulders of giants, right? We’re making a film about AI. And so I think the thing I was really interested in doing that felt what we could bring to the table was how human everyone was. And what’s funny is actors turn up on set and they’ve got to do a robot and they’re like “So the robot, how does it move? Does it talk like?” “No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Forget, you’re not a robot. You’re a human. They think they’re human.”

Pretend it’s not a sci-fi movie. And by the end, I stopped telling people if they were AI or not. I didn’t want them to behave differently. I wanted it to be completely natural. And the great thing about Industrial Light Magic is that we were able to wait until post-production and we didn’t have those silly suits with all the dots. And so we could basically watch the movie and go make him a robot, make that person AI.

And my favorite bits in the film are when there’s a robot that’s just smoking or just doing something a little kid or it’s a very, something that you’d see in a Terrence Malik film, but it’s James Cameron. It’s like the two of them have had a baby or something. That was the holy grail of what we’re trying to achieve.

Gareth Edwards: Oh, thank you. Well, the first cut was five hours, so we had a lot of material. We shot a lot. And okay, so look, I would love to go back to this world. There are so many things I didn’t get to do that I would just absolutely love to do. But my girlfriend’s a massive, when we sit and we have some dinner or something, let’s watch something. She wants to watch TV shows. I want to watch films.

And the other day I was like, “Well, what’s your problem? What’s going on here?” And I thought about it. I was like endings, my favorite part of the story is the end. My favorite part of a joke is the punchline. And so I just want it to be this self-contained thing. So I mean, it’s a high class problem. If someone ever came up and said, “We want a sequel.” That’d be a really good problem to have. But it is not the plan. No.

Gareth Edwards: Yeah, totally. It’s like saying, is the computer going to be part of the entertainment industry. 30 or 40 years ago. Yeah, we can’t stop it. It’s coming and no one wants, the guilds don’t want to ban AI. We need to just have control over this stuff. And everyone knows that it’s going to be this very powerful tool. My personal hope is that it will democratize filmmaking.

That ever since basically there’s a divide in cinema, say digital effects, Jurassic Park, say pre-Jurassic Park, post-Jurassic Park, and cinema sort of changed on that moment. I think there’s going to be an AI, pre-AI, post-AI in terms of films. And it might mean that some kids in their bedroom will be able to make a masterpiece and not have $200 million. And so that might mean great filmmaking starts happening. Just like the invention of the electric guitar. There’s a creative explosion in music we never saw before. So I’m rooting for good to come out of it.