Making CGI films on a "shoestring budget", with Gareth Edwards and Spencer Kelly

basically when you make your first movie like everybody you have no money whatsoever and so you can do one of two things if you write a screenplay and have all this ambition and get very specific you have to go in and find those things or build those things and it gets really really expensive whereas if you just walk around and see what is happening for free like crazy kind of environments and situations and then you just Chuck your actors into those situations and film a scene it's really really cheap and so did this giant monster movie um because I love science fiction and we ended up going to Central America and there was just five of us in a van and we drove around and we just went to each town and crazy location and we'd say is there anything strange around here and they'd say oh there's a flood in the village next door or there's um a big Festival about the dead over there or Forest is burning down over here and we would go with this little treatment I had and CH the actors out and we would basically film a scene against this backdrop and so we rolled with all the punches and and I had to do all the visual effects myself at home on a home computer um and so it was really really super cheap and but hopefully looked way bigger than it was and it was a very creative experience and and ultimately it's what led me to have these like basically get teleported to the Super Bowl and do these giant Blockbusters so this would have been at a point when it was possible to do film quality visual effects on a home computer I guess I from a from from a technical pixel level yes film quality from a creative level I would never describe anything I've done as film quality um you and me both but good enough good enough to to get away with it yeah I've seen the making off now now I bought the DVD for Monsters I've seen even the road signs were done in CGI and you know yeah we didn't we didn't build anything so we didn't even have an art Department with um there's like scenes where they look at maps of how to get across this infected own with these giant monsters and we didn't even have those so we would have them look at like uh hamburger menus in in restaurants and then in the computer we changed the menus to be like a big display about how it's across America you know Mexico to get to America and it it's one of the easiest things to do in the computer because it's 2D um it's it's way easier and cheaper I could do those shots in just a few hours it was way easier than trying to build a sign and take it with us so but there is the element where as soon as something passes in front of that map even though it's 2D you suddenly have to draw around the person that's appearing in front of it that strikes me as something that's like really hard work and if you get it wrong at all um then the audience are going to notice um yeah it's called rotoscoping and it it's tedious stuff uh you usually gets in a big company gets farmed out to other countries um um but recently AI has gotten pretty good at it and so it's getting easier and easier and so yeah so what I would do is I just stick a film on or some making of you know a film in the background and I just commit like two hours of cutting around someone's fingers or hair and it's it's not it's not like it's something you can do it's just you need to put the time in it's not like oh my God how am I going to do this it's just oh God this going to be a really boring three hours now as I as I do all this stuff so I play music or get try to distract myself the crazy thing is when you see a a big Hollywood Blockbuster and you watch the credits you will see the number of visual effects artists that are involved and I would imagine that translates to thousands and thousands of man hours it's not physically possible for one person like you to spend the same number of hours so I'm wondering whether all those visual effects artists are actually necessary no I would never say that um they're all they're all my close friends um what I would say is that there is a limited bandwidth to what the human brain can take in um if I was to grab a magazine or a newspaper and hold it up in front of you for the a average duration of a shot in a movie is about 3 seconds so if I was to hold it up for 3 seconds and then pull it away you could never tell me every single thing that was written on that paper you'd probably say describe two images headline maybe a few sentences and it's like that in a shot there's only so much you can take in and so the way I would work and still do really is try to put all the energy where your eye goes and so we used to have this conversation all the time with the producers on my first film where you you know maybe the third time or fourth time you Loop a shot you spot something or you have a problem with something and I would say yeah but if someone goes to see a film four times we've won you know what I mean like they probably have bought the Blu-ray right so like let's all celebrate that they spot that you know what I mean it'll be amazing when they spot that problem um and so so on that level I could get away with it but it's still true on the higher level of like let's at least Target all the resources into the areas that matter and let's not build and create stuff with all these man hours that no one's ever going to really care about and so that I think as a as a having done visual effects I felt I wasted my whole life for a long time because I always wanted to just make films but now looking back I think the one thing it's helped me with is that that that dividing of time and resources between look let's not build that we can do that really well in the computer or let's not do that in the computer it's a nightmare let's really put that in front of the camera I think that that's that's probably uh the valuable sort of lesson I got from doing computer Graphics so it seems to me the creator has been made in a very similar way to monsters you you film the story you know that there will be some visual effects in there but it's not the case that each shot is meticulously mapped out in the same way as most movies would that be right uh yeah totally it was um essentially trying to trying to get back to all the the pros and and and positive elements of doing a gorilla film a VX gorilla a VX heavy gorilla film um and what H what you can do I think what's much better result is on these big movies what you do is you is you start off normally by doing concept art and all this imagery and then you chase that imagery the whole life of the film where it's like no it's got to look like this and there's no reason it has to look like this it just has to look good and so it's a way more efficient and exciting and interesting process if you if you basically go to a location that's like the place in the scene and we learned that um if the crew is small enough it's cheaper to fly anywhere in the world than it is to build a set and so with a small crew we would we basically went to seven different countries and whatever was the best place in the world we could find for that for that scene we would go there and shoot it there and and knowing that in the computer afterwards we change things and so what you do is you film you find beautiful shots you find real world things and you get inspired and the shot itself already looks good before you hand it over to the visual effects company you know industrial Light Magic in this case and so we we would then in in the end which normally happens at the beginning we would do it at the end we would then do all the design for the film so we would create still frames like frame grabs you know just like you would on your laptop as you're watching a movie create these jpegs and then with the production designer James Klein he would just we would start experimenting and very quickly over just it just like a few minutes like trying to trying ideas of like what a building could look like what a car could look like and when you see it in it's that's it in its final shot and you're just doing experiments with shapes it's much much easier to you basically know there's no reason to build the back of it because we never see it um the thing that's important is the light from here that catches this bit we never see that side of it and so you can you do things that I feel like way more correct and more efficient in terms of the audience's attention and eye to to the designs and stuff than if you did the design independently and then stuck it in the shot and then go oh the thing that looks good about it you never actually see and so so it was a great way of working and and it meant though that industrial Light Magic who's like you know the biggest best visual effects company in the world um uh had to blindly agree to to just do all these shots not knowing what they would be not knowing how many there were you know it was quite a semi suicidal uh undertaking for a VFX company and so but thankfully I then they agreed to do it I don't know how they feel about it now I think with this nomination they're probably cool yeah I reckon they're cool um it does seem like this is a question of trust this is somehow persuading a big Studio to let you rip up the rule book and say trust me this will work how on Earth did you persuade them uh we actually did a test I'd worked with them before on on Star Wars on Rogue one so we all knew each other pretty well um and I did a test where uh I knew this was going to be an issue for everybody and even for myself I was like this is this like am I just deluded and so we took some we asked for some money from the studio and said can we do a location scout and we didn't tell them but we snu a camera with this and it was just me and Jim spencec who was the producer of my first F monsters and we went to seven different countries around the world all it was the greatest hits of Southeast Asia and I would be like an Anor and this like monk would walk past and I would just shoot him with this like 1970s camera uh lens and then thinking in my head oh my God if we could make him a robot it would be incredible like I've never seen anything like that in a film and so I shot all this material cut it together as like an 8 minute kind of up it own little Art House uh holiday video and and then and then basically did try to do the process to sat with James Klein our production designer and he painted over them we then had that went down next to another artist like so for instance there's a there's a shot in the test where we were like on a train in Tokyo passing the city and it was like okay let's make the city a big science fiction city so we did a few sketches James you know arrived at what would look like a cool sci-fi shape and then essentially an artist came in and tied that up in Photoshop made it look real and then that got stuck onto what you'd call like simple like 2 and 1/2 D geometry so it had parallx so as you move around the buildings with the train you see the shapes move and it worked really well and normally in a film having done these films um to do a big city like that you're looking at like a month to do a shot like that and they build the whole city and they do it in all 360° whereas this was complete cheap they look really good and we did it in like a couple of days and so we ended up showing this test back to the studio and they knew how little money they given us and they would just like oh my God if you do that in the movie they would be so happy like that they go through it and it kind of green lit the film doing that little test I've heard you describe it like this before but I wonder whether you can do similar for me and then go on to explain why you've talked about the fact that most of the the movie budget is this and then you have a little bit left for what emergencies and you you flipped it round and so I wonder whether you can kind of summarize why you were able to make this film for so little money relatively and and how you left a much bigger part for everything that came after yeah I mean what what happens on a big movie inevitably is you have you have big action set pieces you know you have all this stuff where you do really need 200 300 people potentially right but the way the schedule of a big movie works is there's also drama scenes where it's just two people in a room chatting and you'll find there's 200 people stood outside just like bored wait waiting for the day to end and it gets super expensive you know and it's because of actor availability and all sorts of other reasons Logistics and and so we just tried to keep everything small and what allowed for that which was a new kind of what couldn't happen five years ago was camera technology had gotten really good so we Shot the movie on a new camera that came out just before we started filming which was called the son Sony fx3 and it's kind of the size of a like a domest you know domestic you know tourist uh mirrorless camera and it is very cheap it's about four grand which for a giant movie is a really cheap camera but I we would have paid 100 grand for that camera because the reason we wanted it is it shoots at what what's called 12,800 ISO so it's the Sens really low light yeah like like in moonlight so you can see at night you know a lot of the time and and it meant just working backwards the camera was small it meant it could now go on a piece of an equipment called a gimbal which stabilizes the shot which means I could hold it all day without getting tired and so wherever you put the camera and move around it it looks stable it looks like it you know very cinematic it's not like a handheld documentary feel it's a like you know more classical Cinema feel and then um because of the sensitivity of the camera it meant we didn't need really powerful crazy massive lights on big cranes all the time we could we could have battery operated LED lights and so just like you have a boom operator with a microphone we had what's called a best boy uh Nancy her name was and she had a PO with the light on the end and so as we're filming a scene I suddenly want to go around here normally on a movie that would take 15 minutes to move all the lights and move all the equipment uh I would just move with the camera and she would move with the light and within like 5 Seconds it was all re relit like another setup as it's called and so we could film for like 45 minutes sometimes without cutting and kind of get the whole scene from all different angles um and it was a massively liberating thing um that that I think helped us basically do it a lot cheaper than a normal film and so even though I hope visually when you watch it and also the fact we were in these crazy countries like Indonesia and Nepal and Tokyo and Thailand there's no it's weirdly it looks bigger than your average film because every single location is just like wow um like an Instagram destination you know it's it really was actually there was a lot we had to move a few of those Instagram uh standies you know that people would stand next to because it's like of the world and we'd have to be like this is going to ruin everything like me try and pick it up and move it um but yeah it was it was a lot of reasons all combined that it felt like we couldn't have done 5 years ago the technology wasn't there so it's new camera it's your confidence that you'll be able to sort it in VFX afterwards without that meticulous planning for every single shot and then it sounds like it's people and time are the main cost of a movie then and by by cutting down the number of people and the the amount of time that it takes to shoot a shot that that really brought you cost to yeah I think so um also filming in Thailand um for for a lot of it you know obviously you get your money goes a lot further there um yeah it's like I would say like you know there's that c that triangle I used to work in a cash and carry um when I was in summer job during film school and there was in the in the staff room there's a triangle and it said fast good cheap pick two and and I feel like we got all three like like and it's because the technology has changed um well the good bits up for you know other people to say I don't mean it like that but you know you know you're on you're on the short list so I think I think we can kind of accept that you you achieved good yeah we hope so I don't know um but yeah so it was it it it weirdly it's like I mean I went to I went to um look at a virtual Studio when before we started filming so it's one of those Studios that has all volume capture and you know you do it all in the computer and I was just out of curiosity I went to see one in Los Angeles and on the outside in the corridor it had a poster and it was a it was like a vend diagram of the process of making film and it was like pre-production and production and post-production and editing and and director and you know screenwriter and all this stuff and I was like why have they got this up on the wall this is such an obvious thing for filmm I did it seemed really strange and then the guy saw me looking at it went oh you're looking at our poster and I was like yeah and he said that's over a hundred years old and I looked carefully and I was like oh God yeah the paper was really weird in the font and and I was like oh my God we have not changed how you make a film in a 100 years you know for what it's such a technological industry the idea that no one went wait a minute this whole thing with a Clapper board you know like do we really need to do that anymore like my phone can stream and Bluetooth and like what are we doing here and everyone looks at you like shush you know like what are you saying don't don't question the process and and so I think there's loads of innovation to be had and all these new technological breakthroughs that around the corner that really feel like they're they're they're on the horizon um I think it's very exciting if you're if you're one like a up and coming filmmaker like a young filmmaker I think you know it's probably the most exciting time to have been born really right about now um what technologies are you Keen to try then what's just around the corner that you haven't been able to to use in production yet well the big elephant in the room is obviously AI right and and nobody really knows where it's going to go um anyone who tries to any you know if I say anything right now you can play this clip back in three years and I look like an idiot I'm going to be wrong um but with all these breakthroughs you know what's really interesting there's a lot of interesting things about it but I think one of them is if you look at the timeline of the history of Cinema and there's many technological advances like color and sound um um there's one that we all know a dotted line early 90s where you sort of say basically before CGI after CGI and after that dotted line of CGI essentially what what happened after that is you can now make anything you can imagine you know what I mean like that that were the films that came after it and you think oh my God that is going to be so exciting that's be incredible can you can you imagine what we're going to get and I think a lot of people who are film fans if you said said are all the best movies before that died line or after that died line I think a lot of people would say well my probably most of my favorites are probably before or at least maybe I'm showing my age right but there's something sometimes about being limited and having limitations and I think when these Pandora's Box is open and it gets all very exciting there's a gold rush everyone runs in tries to show off and be the first to do something massive you know and and and I think the things that stand the test of time are the things that you know mainly about story or creating a cinema cinematic experience that is more Timeless and and and not a gimmick really based on some new breakthrough and so I think AI is going to bring with it a gold rush and really like shake things up in a big way but I I I like to think that it'll all come ultimately all come back down to storytelling and emotion and all the things it always has um but it's it's you know that curse isn't may may you live in interesting times yeah yeah get very interesting I mean you know case in point we watched the whale last night and it's just I think it's fantastic um and it's pretty much entirely in fact thinking about it yeah it's entirely set in a living room that's it um and also I agree with you you know the the CGI can do everything so we will do everything you know the movies that would have come out in the last 10 15 years where they just get bigger and more spectacular I kind of got a bit bored with that you know um but interesting it's another fascinating thing about monsters you know even when you could have put up a road sign you decided not not to but it's not to it's it's not to go there's a massive thing there it's just it was more it made more sense for the way you were making the movie but also putting up a road sign meant maybe have commitment issues right it meant like going down a road going okay we'll put it here hammering it in taking half an hour driving the car back and driving past it trying to get the Shar and then maybe it's like oh it didn't look very good or the weather changed it was a lot more efficient to go let's just drive down this road for an hour and I'm going to film every single sign we pass and then in the edit later I'll pick the best moment that just looked the best and then we'll change that you know and it's just it makes for a better shot and it's also more natural it's like it when things feel contrived and presentational to camera you sort of sense it and my favorite things about what ilm did in in the Creator is is the stuff where we were like say we went to like a real Village in the Himalayas and we shot real families just existing and you know like an old lady just giv her grandson a chocolate bar or whatever and as I'm filming it I'm thinking oh my God if we could make make her a robot I've never seen that in a film before like the idea of something so intimate and beautiful but with but with AI and and so like these were the sort of shots I was trying to find and give to ilm and and it was my it was the most exciting stuff because when you're doing a science fiction film it's really hard especially even a robot film it's really hard to do something new you know I mean it's like everyone's everyone's kind of tried to do everything you could think of and I felt like the one thing that hadn't been done we that was for us you know felt like this is probably why we're making the film is to have really naturalistic very human emotional performances but from an from a robot you know like normally robots are like they either act like this and took like this or a very like you know there a soullessness from it um but um I I would kept I basically didn't tell people towards the end whether they were going to be AI or not in the movie which made the visual effects really difficult because we couldn't we didn't have tracking markers or anything on anybody you know normally you have those silly pajamas with all the dots on I found that once you tell someone they're a robot they start behaving like a robot and then and then also then you're committed to them being a robot and you can end up shooting a shot and you've got some guy in those dot pajamas who's just slightly in frame and you're like oh my God we've now got to spend $10,000 making his arm into a a robot AR you know what I mean and no one cares and so so like instead it was like okay the downside is it would be really hard to track everybody and put them in the computer but the upside is we can edit the movie and then there was this really nice day about halfway through the edit where we sat and watched it and basically depending on the cut and depending where your eye would go it'd be like okay my eye went to that lady make her a robot and so you you basically anywhere your eye went we made them into robots and then so your brain starts to think there's way more robots than there really is um and so so you you know it's it was a it was a actually a way more efficient of approaching it a way more efficient way of approaching it all and I don't know I don't know how to describe it but is you know there is this Mantra that you know planning is important and you know we but it sounds like yeah you can over plan and that gets expensive but also you're only doing the visual effects on almost the finished two hours or whatever rather than planning for maybe five hours of visual effects which you then throw most of them away yeah and also um I think a trick you can't help but learn from George Lucas in in Star Wars is that you have to throw stuff away so you have to kind of like sort of imply some really crazy sci-fi building or character and just keep going and and and and and the audience thinks basically starts to think oh my God there's stuff everywhere and if the camera paned right or left I would there's a whole new world of things and there isn't it's literally you know we're just putting in what you see but like we would we would we shot so much aerial photography so like you know with drones drones again like we used uh drones that you can buy for two grand like just pruma drones and there kind of Cinema resolution 4K and and we I and instead of being specific just try and find beautiful shots around M mountains and things and then later in the edit when we were like okay we need to set up this environment or we need to do this I need to do that I had I had like like literally like 10 hours of material aerial material and I would go through and go well maybe we could put the car on this thing and maybe there's no Road maybe they could put a road on as well and and you would sort of and then you would give that as the shot and there's something way more like I don't know it just feels more exciting that way and more and more fresh because it's not what you think you should do it it kind of you found it in the real world and it was like a like a beautiful moment that was just sort of given to you you know are you unconventional are you Avant guard are you the first of a new wave of director how would you describe yourself I always I always think I'm not pushing things enough like I always think I've conformed and and sold out and and like I and I look at my heroes who I think didn't and I'm like beat myself up like must try harder who are your Heroes and well growing up you know the heroes were obvious like Spielberg um George Lucas James Cameron in terms of science fiction um later in life you know artistically it's film like this film is very much inspired by a film called Barack director called Ron freaky and you know directors music video directors like Chris Cunningham Jonathan Glazer you know how can you beat yourself up um saying you're not pushing yourself enough I mean the whole story around the Creator is how surely you're doing things completely the other way to most Hollywood movies that that look anything like this um yeah I mean I think you can go further like I think we could go a lot further and do something a lot more unique as well which is exciting which is you know makes you want to pick up a camera and go shoot another film um I guess the downside of it to be honest with you is if you're trying to do something original um like having done these massive franchises there's a there's there's pros and cons and the cons are you've got this giant fan base and all this pressure and you cannot fail it better be a massive hit because there's so many people queuing up waiting for it to see it when you do an original science fiction that you've got the opposite problem no one's heard of it you know no one cares you know I mean you've got to educate the world that this film exists and what it's about and why you should go see it and so it's always a double-edged sword like of being trying to be do something new and and but if it's too out there you kind of you especially at this budget level everyone talks about the film being way lower budget than normal for this kind of movie but it still was a lot of money and we you know we had to have a a hit basically and so and so yeah there was a lot of pressure on it um you have different I think every time you make a film you have a different set of um pressure and I think on this one definitely the pressure was I just made all this up you know and like I this is not this didn't really happen and you be stood there sometimes on set going and there's all these people helping you and doing all this stuff and You' be like this I I was lying there's no way I you I mean like I just made this up in my head and everyone's like helping me create it and oh my God what if I'm wrong and you know doesn't work and and whereas with a big franchise the the pressure isn't that you know people are going to come and see it the pressure is you're going to do a good job of that version you know so it's it's it's very hard to um I know I think the day you get through a film and it was everything about it was easy and fun and enjoyable I think that's probably the day you make it your worst movie and you should probably retire afterwards I've I have had similar experiences where I've gone on stage feeling very um like this is going to be easy and it's the worst day Sandy toxic says always go on stage needing a Wii because it keeps the journaling up so you know um actually you say that right so got a story do you want a story real quick about that yeah yeah yeah so we go to um uh uh Comic Con to show the film for the first time and it's the first time we've shown a scene or anything from the movie to anybody ever it's a really big deal and the way comic conon is laid out you've got all the fans basically and then the filmmaker because of I kind of funneled through this all these back corridors and be and I had a real big headache and I was like I need I think I'm dehydrated and someone went you want some water and they gave me a big bottle of water my necked tip like an idiot and then and then we walked all the way to the stage and then suddenly it hit my bladder and I really needed to pee and I said I need to go to the restroom and they were like oh we're about to go on and it wasn't it was like nearly an hour and a half or something this this talk it was really long I can't remember and then and then um I was like uh and thenly like and Gareth Edwards right and you go on and I'm like I'm going to pee my pants and so I sit I sit on the stage and I actually at one point during the panel I look down to see if if people will see if I pee myself and they won't right there's a banner blocking blocking the table and so I'm thinking I think I'm just going to do it because I was in like at physical pain from needing to go and then they then they played like my friend this filmaker friend's clip of his movie and I was it was my first chance to go pee and I was like it's going to look so rude if I get up now when his clip's playing so I had to hold it in again and then it was my clip and I was like I'm allowed to go now because it's my own clip and I and so it's that thing you dream of all the entire life of the movie which is I'm finally going to show we can finally show the world all these great visual effects and everything for the Creator and I'm so excited and I had to leave and go urinate and and what was really funny is as I stood at the urinal peeing I felt this fan come up who had spotted me and he had a rogue one poster and a and a and a pen to sign it and I was like holding myself like this is about as awkward as it gets right now and I could hear all the sound and everyone cheering and from the film and I like this is a classic Hollywood moment like it never unfolds how you think um what's weird is that's not going to make the piece about the Creator but that might very well make Twitter so there's long that no to think anything that it's all good it's true so can you just give me an idea about you as a person so I I know a little bit about you know how it started but you're fascinated not just with telling a story but also with the technical um process of of enhancing those shots in a way that a lot of people aren't so so can you sum up your fascination with visual effects and where where it started yeah no it's interesting I I I see what you mean but I yeah I so I think I've always been very visually driven a lot more than literally words you know driven um I feel like if you got a script and for classic movies and you give someone a pen and just Mark every read the script and Mark every time you see something really good they' Mark certain sections then if you hit play on the movie to someone else you said press this button every time something really good happens those places would be completely different like the way a film Works in an audiovisual experience is is is something unique to cinema I think which is why I love it so much it's more like a dream or a memory um it's not a book it's not a play you know it's it's it's something it goes straight into your brain as if it if it's an experience you were having um and even more engaging than virtual reality having I've got right here um and I thought when I bought it I thought there goes my life I'm going to be on that thing all the time and I've been I play with it for like an hour or two and then I'm like and they not touched it in six months it's some reason it doesn't doesn't grab you like a film does um and so yeah so visually basically I went to film school did all that and then and then my my goal was to to show my film to Hollywood my short film my student film to Hollywood and then get off of the big directing deal and uh all I got was this very polite rejection letter and like oh my God I got to figure out what to do and so my flatmate was studying this new thing called computer animation Jurassic Park had just come out in cinema it was clearly the future of film making and so I bought computer and just got really into visual effects thinking that in six months I would use that technology and I'd go make a film and 10 10 years went by and I was still learning um and it was just but what happened in that it's all subconscious is it people talk about putting 10,000 hours into something and then you like are okay at it and I definitely put 10,000 hours into visual effects and and I think what's come out to the end of it is a real strong opinion about imagery and and and so as a filmmaker now it's a little bit like having um being on the Spectrum or something um like it's a little bit like obsessive compulsive with images you know like like an image turns up or some reason you're trying to design something or think of something and it's like you just get really obsessed with what to do to that image so you go oh if I saw that I'd be jealous of that if someone else had that in a film and I went to the cinema i' be like oh man I should have done that and so I love an image you know there's all cliches in there like an image speaks a thousand words um I just think images are very um you can carry an image with you for the rest of your life you can see it once and remember it till your dying day um like when they're really strong and they have some meaning behind them it can often be subconscious but there's like a more profound Primal reason why you gravitate to that image why it speaks to you um and you can't explain it like that's my favorite thing is you can see something you can have a feeling about it and if someone says write down in words why you have that feel like someone play your most your favorite song a beautiful song something with just Melody and someone said write down why it's amazing you ultimately can't you can't it doesn't translate it's its own thing it speaks its own language and it doesn't it can't become words and that's the ultimate irony of Cinema is to get a film made you have to write words it's called a script and there's a limit to what a words can do which is not the limits of what Cinema can do and so this barrier to entry which is always a screenplay is fascinating to me because it's like it feels like the wrong kind of document half the time and with all these technological breakthroughs like Pixar for instance you know they do the way they develop films is a lot more visually um they create animatics they call so like the you know using Stills and sometimes animation they tell this you can hit play and watch the whole film a friend of mine used to work at Pixar and he started making live action films a very talented guy and as a result he didn't write a script for his next film he did an animation like like as in like storyboards or and he and he invited us all to a screening and he hit play and for an hour and a half he watched his new film as like storyboards and he he wanted any feedback and all and it was like oh my this is really Brave and interesting way to develop a film um and it's all about iteration like like it feels like the more you can iterate like the more you can perfect something and and with the Creator we had a deal with ilm it was it was it was probably because it was just easy to say as a phrase but we had this three strikes you're out deal in order to pull the visual effects off for the time we had because we had so little time because of the money um um and everyone was being so efficient with the you know and unique with their way of solving a shot every shot three strikes and you're out that sounds quite um quite deadly it wasn't but it it it was it was what it is is normally with with I'm going to speak on their behalf right but normally with a filmmaker that doesn't have a background in visual effects you can it can really backfire showing them a work in progress you know what I mean like if you show someone and it looks like a bad PlayStation game and it's blocky animation or like you could Panic the filmmaker and they don't understand no no no all these elements are going to get corrected what you're looking for is the timing of does it move in and rotate the right way and and so it can scare everyone and so they there's a tendency in Industry don't show the shot until it's nearly finished right problem is that you've used up 90% of your resources and then if the filmmaker then says oh no I thought it was going to be this you spend twice the amount getting back to that and so the deal with industrial Light Magic which they said that they don't normally do but um we did it on this one which was very unique was they showed stuff in really crude form so like basically the were all wor thumb was if that's the amount of time it takes to shut a third of the way through show it another third show it and then show the final thing with final thoughts you know and seeing it really early like that you could go oh if there's a misunderstanding like no no no no it's really big it's out the frame and blah blah blah blah and no and actually don't rotate it this way because all it matters is this bit then you can have all those conversations and and it's so much more efficient because before anyone's done any work they've it's been course corrected and so I think having a background and visual effects give them peace of mind to to sort of like take off you know expose thems like that um and that was that was great and that was really important for the whole process yeah I think you're talking about a confidence of whoever it is who's watching the the W be called dailies or whatever to understand as you say that these are not the finished effects but it's just more important that you we can all imagine what it's going to be like let's assume it's going to look great but is it in the right place and my friend Ben actually Ben barfer who works for us he's now just finished editing his second movie his first one was called double date and it's just a really good horror comedy um but his test screenings he was explaining you know in front of a knowledgeable audience but still there's just empty slates everywhere saying VFX here or something and so you really got to trust your your test audience to kind of Imagine their way past that so they don't go well that that didn't look very good so I guess I think that sounds like what you were what you were saying yeah we went up to industrial Light Magic with so you as when you make a film you do what's called a director's uh cut which basically you get because of the Union rules you get 10 weeks to do your own version of the film and then at which point you know you know you show the studio and then it becomes more like a a team effort right to get it over the finish line and basically show people you do test screenings you do all sorts of stuff and so when I when I finished that director's cut I had a version but it was there was no visual effect it was just text and uh my joke is you know it was a beautiful font it was Futura it looked great but I would I would go we went up to San Francisco because there's always this dilemma of like do we show the whole VFX team the movie um or will it freak them out and and I I um I'd heard stories some people who worked in visual effects had told me stories about how a filmmaker came in and showed them the film to get everyone excited and it did the opposite effect where everyone was like oh my god with this is the film you know what I mean and and so I was like oh God I hope this might backfire but let's go do it so we went up to San Francisco and in the big theater there at Lucasville and we showed the whole movie to everyone and I was just sitting there it's the first time we shown it to any significant people outside of the edit suite and it ended and then all these guys and girls turned around and we're all cut from a similar cloth you know what I mean grew up in bfx and they all turn around and um they were all like bloodshot eyed and and they'd been crying and and I was like oh my God thank God and then and then on the way home I was like wait a minute maybe they weren't crying because it was a really emotional fail maybe they're realizing they had so much work to do and they weren't going to see their family for the next year um can we talk about the actors um so your style is very much you want to be as free as possible with the camera um you don't want to be encumbered by calling cut and by having to have everyone in the pajamas with the balls um how do the actors feel about working this way the actors once they get used to it like there's a little I think I didn't explain it to people I didn't sort of say by the way this is what we're going to do it just sort of happened um and then and then after the first take you see them go oh okay that was really interesting you know and they sort of getting their finding their feet a little bit but I felt all of them I I did think actually all of all of them were like this is a really fun way to do it because what happens is you know when you say action and cut and then you rejig things you say action and cut it's really hard to stay in the for them I think it's hard to stay in the moment and and and so it's not just my benefits that it's also for the actors in that in that you they'll sense you moving and sometimes I'll even go just go back just I just whisper it l just go back and they'll they'll rewind the scene by like 20 seconds and someone will just start talking like 20 seconds earlier because I missed something or something and then and we go and go and if they turn to me at the end and go can I do can I do another i' be like yeah yeah and they just go again and so it's like it's like it's it's a two-way street like they get to play and they go can I try something yeah and so they just go off because we got the time because of the way we're filming it they can experiment and they can like mess around and do something that fails and and it's no big deal and and so I think it's I hope you know it's it's as much a good thing for them you know and that said there were set pieces there were big action sequences in this film where it wasn't that it was it's this shot and you've got getting here whilst this explosion happens and so you know it was it was a mixture like a hybrid of um I used to always jokingly refer to the style of the film and obviously these are two masters of Cinema so I'm not saying it's like that as um if Terrence Malik had sex with James Cameron and had a baby and that was like the the ultimate High Benchmark of what this film was trying to do well I'm sure I mean that's that's an image that many of us will not what to do with including mik and Cameron I assume um you you described that this new camera is available you have explained quite well how you can make a film that looks more expensive for less money because you're not building things un unnecessarily why isn't everyone making films like this because I don't know this is really much more of a question for for other people but I think that or does it take a certain kind of director with a certain kind of knowledge of you know what's possible to be able to do this I don't know I think I think the process of making a film is a big film in Theatrical film is you know if I'm honest if everyone's honest it's far too too complicated um I wish I'm very jealous of people who are uh musicians and and songwriters um in that they can pick a guitar up put it around and they can strum like some a c a d or whatever and just start figuring out a tune and they can get it to a point where it's like 80% you can hear it and go that's great that should happen here's the deal now go make the good version of that I love it's beautiful You' affected me it's great we have to go and spend like hundred million dollars and and work with hundreds of people to get it to the point where you can sit and watch and go okay I get it that's great and so this is massive Financial gamble um by people so it's a it's a really big ask and and scary time for anybody and it's like if you were making a film if you were if you were a compos like a if you're a musician like a songwriter making a movie is like going it's taking away the guitar and saying no no no no no you that's not how we do it how we do it is you write like you have to write down the sheet music first right and then 10 people will read that sheet music and decide whether it but then some people read it and go wait a minute you've got seven decords in here we just released the track with six D chords we we can't we could you use more a chords you know and and then it's like actually decords are way more expensive than C's um so you only have 3DS and you have you can have five C's right and you and it's and you go crazy because you're trying to make something artistic you know or like a creative thing but the maths and the the Eon economics come into it in a big way and you can't blame anyone because this is the kind of money like I wouldn't you know what I mean like I I feel the same way if it was my money like these are massive massive Financial gambles so are describing a world now where Maybe and I'm sure music has worked in the same way in the past although will be at much lower budgets but you things have become democratized because you can now write and produce a song in your bedroom and I suppose you're describing cameras coming down in price you've demonstrated that you can do VFX on a laptop effectively um you don't need as many likes and you don't need as many people so maybe it's happening it's just taking this amount of time because you you're not playing songs just through headphones you're you're put putting your work on a massive screen so you it's got to kind of look believable on that kind of scale well look you know here's the upside right um the audio always goes through these digital revolutions before video and film right because it's less data so like we had digital music you know in the 80s synthesizers and all sorts before there was digital films in the '90s yeah and and so this idea that you that film making could One Day become like strumming a guitar and you could have like a old gallaga making a film you know and then it's undeniable how good that is uh before anyone spent a dollar making it I like to think the day that comes whenever that may be we will have just like the birth of rock and roll you might have a a wave of brilliant storytelling and I don't know if that's true but that's my that's I'm optimistic about it like that I I want to stay optimistic about it what do you think about generative AI when it comes to the imagery to to videos and to still images because there's a lot of um questions around whether that could ever be used or whether it's just derivative of the the training data would do you think you would be able to use it in your process at all for anything um yeah I think it's look it's this it's this asteroid coming you know there's no stopping it um I what's interesting is you look back at other things in history a bit like this and I heard someone tell me I should check this is true so if you look this up and it's not true then maybe just don't use it but someone told me that that apparently in the union of journalists um when um word processing started they the union banned it for about a year or something where it was considered this is wrong you shouldn't be using it as a journalist right the idea of like cutting and pasting words and using a computer it's not right and and we would listen to that now and just laugh right and think it was insane of course you're going to use it and I just can't help think that in whever it might be 10 50 years whatever people are going to look back at some of the reactions and responses to AI anything and the fact that we're so nervous and scared and rejecting of it and we'll laugh too and be like oh my God you know it's like when Photoshop came along I was very lucky and that we did the test for this movie with John null um and and he him and his brother basically created Photoshop in their garage when they were young and when that came out they they um everyone had this rejection of it you know I mean everyone had been literally cutting and pasting and you know doing graphic design physically and it was this that's not real that's no good that's it's cheating and it's not going to go anywhere and it's now it's what it actually did is it created there was way more jobs in the visual arts because of Photoshop than there was before it existed right and I just think that's what's going to happen you know we're just going to it's very hard to see the landscape in the future but we all want to do this stuff Everyone likes to create you know pretty much and and it would I think ultimately it's just going to allow more people to have creative jobs of some sort and get rid of laborious things you know iterative things that a time consuming and yes it pulls from things models of things that exist but that's kind of what everyone's brain is doing all the time like I'm saying words to you now I'm telling you I can't tell you where I learned any of these words it happened by osmosis and and and I don't entire directing career I would imagine you are the product of your influences yeah I think I could if you made me if you sat me down and went every single shot in this movie I want you to try and figure out the inspiration for it from a film you've seen when you were young or something and you would probably be able to go each one you probably have a good shot at going I think that's probably from that I think that's probably and that's why going to Real World situations is great because snaps you out of that it it it you have a contrived idea based on some your AI model of being fed films as a kid and then you see something you go oh I wouldn't have thought of that and it makes it more fresh you do something that isn't in your brain and so that's that's the exciting way of snapping out of that um as a human is to go to the real real places and and get inspired by something that you never thought of um yeah I think something big has happened in the world of AI just in the last couple of years and I so assume that you started making this film before we started seeing generative Ai and chat GPT and everyone started talking about it did that change maybe the direction of the movie or did that make you think oh it's happening I didn't expect it to happen yet but the the film's happening in real life yeah yeah and the reason I made it robot movie is like the Holy Trinity of sci-fi is a triangular which is like alien monsters spaceships robots and I'd made like a monster movie I'd done spaceships with Star Wars and things and it was like I really want to do a robot film and so that's why I was doing it and then you try and find some meat on the bone and find a meaning behind it and very quickly it's you know it's clear that robots you can use them metaphorically as people as like the other people who are different to us so AI in our film is very much about another kind of person that we reject and and fear and want to get rid of just like all through human history and so so it was kind of a fairy tale in that sense it wasn't meant to be anything about really about AI but the second you get into the reality of AI and you listen to a whole stack of podcasts and things um one of them that really stood out to me that I thought was interesting is a lady was one of the AI experts was talking about she did an experiment where she got these toys that were these articulate I don't if they were bunnies or dinosaurs but these articulate toys that you could interact with and she basically gave them to people and she said can you just spend like 15 minutes half an hour playing with this toy talking to it and at the end she gave them a sledgehammer and said if you smash it up I'll give you $100 and and nobody could smash it up even though every single person knew it's just a bunch of plastic it's not real there's a thing it says more about you as a person if you can smash that thing up you're more of a psychopath you know like we we anthropomorphize nearly everything we talk to things that we know aren't real you know like I talk to my car you know if something's not working you know we obviously talk to our phones and stuff and and and so I have no doubt at all that when AI turns up we will treat them as people I mean even messing around with chat GPT now and just out curiosity I'm really careful at the end to thank it and apologize if I've offended it because I I know it's like they're going to be our new overlords at some point and thankfully cuz I made this film though um I'm going to be let off the hook so when you're all rounded up they're going to be like leave him he gets us