‘The Creator’ filmmaker Gareth Edwards on the film’s timely message

Gareth Edward‘s new film The Creator couldn’t be more timely, even though that wasn’t his plan when he started writing it. The movie, out this weekend, is all about humans interacting with AI, and the problems and pitfalls.

“I think the whole point of the movie, if anything, was, you see something as the enemy, as a problem, you get thrown into the middle of it and … you start to question your beliefs,” he tells ABC Audio.

The concept was a jumping-off point, adds Edwards, who says he “just picked AI four or five years ago, and I started writing this as like a metaphor for people who are different to you.” But soon, “ideas pop up like, how do you know they’re really alive? Like, what happens if they do something you don’t like and you turn them off? What happens if they don’t want to be turned off?”

“Suddenly, you know, cut to 2023, and those questions are like on every home page of every website,” he says. “And it was this far distant sci-fi … thing when I started trying to make this film. And now it’s become … quite real in terms of what it’s dealing with.”

The use of AI in movies has become a real hot-button issue, so was The Creator made using machine learning?

Edwards says yes, explaining, “You’ve seen them in behind the scenes of films where you’ve got this suit on with all the dots, and it means you can track the actors what their movement is, so you can make a CGI character … I didn’t want any of that. And so Industrial Light and Magic, who do the visual effects, had to figure out a way to do this without any tracking markers … And so they used AI.”