The Creator is one of the most inventive and awe-inspiring science fiction movies in recent memory. If it wasn’t for Avatar: The Way Of Water, we’d be talking about it like that movie. Both movies take influence from the normal science fiction stories of the past. There’s a lot of Blade Runner, Terminator 2, and even some real-life examples like the Vietnam War. However, there are also some influences that you might not expect, especially in the design of the vehicles in the film.

In one of the most pivotal scenes in the movie, the US forces roll through a village in New Asia, hunting down the last vestiges of the AI people. Director Gareth Edwards answered about the vehicle designs with this.

So, James Klein, who is our Production Designer, should take credit for a lot of that. We wanted to put a tank in the movie that felt like something that should be in a anime film.  You know, like, one of these, like, futuristic, crazy, over-the-top tanks.  But if you just scale up a tank, it doesn’t look very exciting.  And so, it was like trying to create negative space and cut things out, where it still retains the basics of a tank, but has a shape you wouldn’t expect.  Our secret hope was that, we wanted Bandai, which is the company who make all the, like, the toy models of Manga and anime characters.

Edwards continued with how excited they were to see the designs in action for The Creator.

We wanted Bandai to release this as a model kit one day.  And so, we’d actually take Bandai boxes off the internet and put our tank on it, to see if it felt like something, if we were in the store, we’d go, oh, my God, I gotta get that.  And until we, like, got really excited and jealous and wanted to buy this toy, like, we kept going until it looked great.

The other interesting thing that Gareth mentioned during the press conference was how they wanted the music in the film to sound. Hans Zimmer does the score, but it doesn’t sound like his traditional work on other films. Here’s what Gareth had to say.

One of the reoccurring notes that we sort of joked about was I didn’t want Poor Man Zimmer, is what I called it. Basically, when you edit a film, when you make a movie, you steal music from other composers as, like, a temp track.  And then when you cut it all together, you then give it to your composer, and they have to listen to all these other composers’ music.  And then, usually go, “Oh, we’re not gonna do anything like that.  I’m gonna do my own thing that’s gonna be, like, really original.”  And but everyone always steals from Hans Zimmer, typically.  And so, you get all these other composers having to, like, imitate Hans.  And I jokingly called it Poor Man’s Zimmer.

To me, that was, like, music that was like, [makes noise].  You know, and I was like, can’t have any of that in the movie.  I really want it to feel like if someone played this soundtrack not knowing anything, they might not guess it was Hans Zimmer.  And you know, obviously, that’s music to their ears, excuse the pun.  But they loved that.  And so, our influences were things actually like Bach and Mozart for the West.  And then we took basically those themes that they had written, and then they used instrumentation from Asia and had them earlier in the movie. So, you sort of learn the theme subconsciously, and then you hear it in its glory later in the film.

The Creator releases in theaters on September 29th, 2023. If you love sci-fi and want a movie that’ll make you think about the future of mankind, this is the one.

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