While battles over the use of artificial intelligence are raging in Hollywood amid the double whammy, Gareth Edwards is about to release his own cinematic version of the war between humans and AI.
The creatorWritten and directed by Edwards, the film stars John David Washington, Gemma Chan, Allison Janey and newcomer Madeleine Voyles. The latter plays a robot with world-destroying powers in the guise of a small child. At an IMAX screening and question-and-answer session Tuesday in Los Angeles, which showed three key scenes from the film and a conversation with the filmmaker, which was broadcast in theaters across the country, Edwards joked that he Lucky timing because “there’s a sweet spot window where it’s before the robot apocalypse and not after – which I think is November or maybe December.”
He noted that he tried not to give a date for the futuristic war, but after doing some research decided to put it at the year 2070. “Now I feel like an idiot because I should have picked 2023 because of everything that’s happened in the past few months, ‘or a year is kind of weird,’” Edwards said.
“When we first pitched the film to the studio, everyone wanted to know the backstory of this idea of a war on the AI: ‘Wait a minute, why would we be at war with the AI?’ “Well, they were banned because it kind of went wrong.” “But why would you ban AI? “It’s going to be great, and blah blah blah,” he continued. “It was all these ideas that you had to come up with so maybe humanity would reject this thing and not be so cool about it. And the way it’s going, the build of our movie is pretty much the same as it’s been the last few months, it’s kind of weird,” he joked. “Watch the movie before November because then we’ll be enslaved.”
Edwards, who previously directed Rogue One: A Star Wars Story And godzillasaid he was influenced by blade runner And apocalypse now in creating the film, which was shot in 80 different locations around the world with very little green screen work. He first wrote it in 2018, admitting, “It felt like this was 30 years away at the time… It really wasn’t on my radar at the time as far as reality is concerned.”
“Of course, when this movie started, I didn’t know that AI would do what she did last year, so in the fairy tale of this story, AI was like the other ones; People who are different from us, who we somehow want to get rid of or with whom we naturally have conflicts,” he explained. “But the second you made them AI, all sorts of fascinating things happened while you were writing the script and you started thinking, ‘Are they real? how would you know If you didn’t like what they were doing, could you turn them off? What if they didn’t want to be turned off? And all of those things started to unfold, which became as strong as the premise, and that’s what I’m most proud of in the film, that we stuck to.”
Edwards was also reflecting on his star ensemble cast, revealing he first met with Washington during the pandemic at a dinner where the actor walked in with a man war of stars mask on. To find the young AI star, the team held an open casting call and spotted Voyles, whom Edwards called “a director’s dream.”
He also revealed some surprising background actors – while scouting filming locations in Thailand, he found a particle accelerator lab to shoot in and was told he didn’t want to; that is, until they found out he was directing Villain One, and asked the director if the staff could be in the film. Cut to a scene shown during the screening: “Everyone in this scene, everyone walking around, are nuclear physicists. And they were great,” Edwards said.
Tuesday’s fan event took place live at the AMC Century City IMAX Theater and was shown at nine other participating IMAX theaters in New York, Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Toronto, Seattle, Washington DC and San Francisco and sold out nationwide. The creator hits theaters on September 29th.
Source : www.hollywoodreporter.com