Posted in: 20th Century Studios, Movies, Star Wars | Tagged: gareth edwards, lucasfilm, rogue one, rogue one: a star wars story, star wars, the creator

Gareth Edwards Says He Was "Incredibly Lucky" To Make Rogue One

The Creator director, Gareth Edwards, says he is "incredibly grateful" to have worked on Rogue One, even with all the reshoots.

The process behind making a blockbuster movie is pretty broken right now, and director Gareth Edwards is looking to change that with his new original science fiction film, The Creator. Edwards got his start with Monsters, a film made on less than $500k, and the entire crew consisted of himself behind the camera, a sound tech, a line producer, a driver, a translator, and the two leading actors. Once you cross over into massive blockbuster filmmaking such as Godzilla in 2014 or Rogue One in 2016, it becomes a completely different world that Edwards couldn't wrap his head around, as he explained to Variety.

"It made total sense to have 300 people surrounding you when you've got tanks and dozens of soldiers running across the Golden Gate Bridge as monsters are attacking," Edwards says. "It didn't make as much sense to have 300 people around you when you're filming in a room with two actors talking to each other. That's the bit I wanted to try to do differently."

After Godzilla in 2014, when he was signed on to direct the first spin-off film of the new Star Wars era, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, he tried to change things up in his approach to filmmaking. According to the interview, Edwards and his cinematographer, Greg Fraser, kicked most of the crew out at the end of every day. For an hour, they would get in touch with their roots and shoot "like it was an independent movie." Edwards had seen through his time with Godzilla that this giant moving machine while producing incredible films, was also doing things that just didn't make any sense. There had to be an easier way.

"We were just trying to figure out, how can you do this better?" the director says. "The way you make a film is as important as its screenplay. I would take full control over the process and a mediocre screenplay over a really good screenplay and zero control over the process."

The "zero control over the process," as the Variety interview noted, is about as close as Edwards will come to talking about the reshoots that Rogue One had to go under with Tony Gilroy. There were a lot of rumors about why the shoots happened and what Lucasfilm did or did not like about what Edwards was doing, but he was attempting to do things differently, and maybe that made them a little nervous. Edwards, however, doesn't take the bait and won't badmouth Lucasfilm or speak ill of his time working on Rogue One. 

"Look, the only thing I can say is I was incredibly lucky," he says. "I got to make a 'Star Wars' film. I won the lottery in that sense. The idea of someone as privileged as me in any way implying that it was anything other than the amazing experience that it was to some extent — like, I don't have any empathy for that person, and I don't want to be that person either."

Rogue One went on to be one of the best Star Wars movies to be [don't @ me], but there were so many aspects of it that were constrained because everyone behind the scenes was nervous. They were scared that the music wasn't "Star Wars enough," so it was changed at the last minute. They were afraid of taking a few too many risks for the first spin-off in a series of many planned down the road. The truth is that Edwards and everyone working on Rogue One really couldn't work to their full expectations because everyone was terrified that the public would reject this film wholesale. They didn't, and the film was a massive success, bringing in just over $1 billion at the worldwide box office and pretty good reviews all around. However, you have to wonder what Edwards did that made Lucasfilm so nervous that they brought in someone else to "fix it" and what his cut, specifically his ending, looked like for those characters.

The Creator: Cast List, Release Date, Summary

Directed by Gareth Edwards (Rogue One, Godzilla), the film stars John David Washington (Tenet), Gemma Chan (Eternals), Ken Watanabe (Inception), Sturgill Simpson (Dog), newcomer Madeleine Yuna Voyles and Academy Award® winner Allison Janney (I, Tonya). The film's screenplay is by Gareth Edwards and Chris Weitz, from a story by Edwards. The producers are Gareth Edwards, p.g.a., Kiri Hart, Jim Spencer, p.g.a., and Arnon Milchan. The executive producers are Yariv Milchan, Michael Schaefer, Natalie Lehmann, Nick Meyer, and Zev Foreman. It will be released in theaters on September 29th. 

Amidst a future war between the human race and the forces of artificial intelligence, Joshua (Washington), a hardened ex-special forces agent grieving the disappearance of his wife (Chan), is recruited to hunt down and kill the Creator, the elusive architect of advanced AI who has developed a mysterious weapon with the power to end the war… and mankind itself. Joshua and his team of elite operatives journey across enemy line into the dark heart of AI-occupied territory… only to discover the world-ending weapon he's been instructed to destroy is an AI in the form of a young child.

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