Don't think AI wants our jobs: 'The Creator' filmmaker Gareth Edwards

WASHINGTON: A TV journalist warns that AIs are after jobs in a scene from 20th Century Studios 'The Creator', in which they wreak havoc on Los Angeles. But that's not what screenwriter Chris Weitz and director Gareth Edwards actually think.

According to Edwards, "I don't think AI wants our jobs at all," on a recent episode of The Hollywood Reporter's Behind the Screen podcast.

Weitz may have penned the sentence in 2019, according to Edwards, years before AI became a hot topic in Hollywood and a central issue in the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. "ChatGPT seems to not want anything," the director says of artificial intelligence today.

"But it is an amazing tool. It is going to disrupt a lot of things. We will get to the side of it and I think we will be grateful that it happened. Just like all the other big technological advances like cars, like electricity, like home computers, like the internet, it's going to change things."

As per The Hollywood Reporter, the futuristic sci-fi movie follows Joshua, played by John David Washington, who is recruited to destroy an AI in the form of a young child. Edwards admits that back when they were writing the script, AI seemed very far into the future, and the story was "really more of a metaphor for people who are different to us." But as they wrote, more questions about artificial intelligence surfaced.

"What if they don't do what you want them to do? What if you have to turn them off? What if they don't want to be turned off? All this sort of stuff that we're starting to deal with now starts to kind of become more interesting than the original reason you were making the film," he said.

He notes that one of the questions was what year in which to set the film.

"Stanley Kubrick even got it wrong by picking 2001 when we'd all be living on the moon. And so I was like, 'Don't try and pick a date, you're going to look like an idiot,'" says Edwards.

"But at some point, you have to. So I went for 2070 and I didn't realize I was going to be more of an idiot because I should have come earlier. I should have picked 2023 or something."

Along with the subject, the film's VFX-savvy director discusses the creative ways he produced the USD 80 million movie to appear as though it cost much more.

He mentions that setting up shoots can be less expensive than creating sets if crew size is managed. In light of this, a small group travelled to eight nations, including Cambodia and Vietnam, with a camera in hand and shot a significant amount of footage.

Afterward, Industrial Light & Magic "reverse-engineered" the footage to create the design. Similarly, they filmed with actors playing the AI-driven bots, but without motion capture markers or similar techniques.

"They've figured out ways to track the human body when there weren't any markers on it," he says of ILM's work. Edwards adds that aside from principal actors, many of the performers didn't know if they were playing a human or an AI during the shoot. "I stopped telling people because I wanted the robots to be very naturalistic and human in their behaviour," he admits.

"We actually chose who was AI about halfway through the edit," reported The Hollywood Reporter.