‘The Creator’ is the best-looking movie of 2023

The trailers for “The Creator” make it look like the kind of science-fiction movie you’ve seen before — and many times. Here’s a movie with a fairly anodyne title and a story involving yet another Important Child. And all of it comes under the banner of “From The Director Of ‘Rogue One.’” Oh, you mean Gareth Edwards, the guy who was benched by Disney at the end of production on that very film? The same. 

So you can see why box office prospects for “The Creator,” going into its opening weekend, have been aggressively dim. Lord knows I wasn’t expecting much out of this movie when I attended a screening last week.

Holy s—t, was I in for a surprise.

It turns out that “The Creator” is not only one of the best movies I’ve seen this year but also one of the best-looking films I’ve ever seen. There are some kinks in the script, including plot twists that you can see coming from a mile away and others that feel crammed in at the last second, to the point of feeling abrupt. There’s a millionth rendition of the “Wait, you could speak English this whole time?” gag. The plot itself is also somewhat familiar — there’s a war between humans and AI, with said Important Child having special, Eleven-esque powers that might be the key to it all. And yet, “The Creator” is a prime example of how execution sometimes matters more than concept. Sometimes it becomes the most vital part OF that concept.

This usually isn’t the case with big, effect-driven features. I know because, a year ago, I investigated the VFX industry, interviewing over a dozen VFX artists and supervisors to understand why modern visual effects, even in movies that run up a $300 million production tab, can look so slipshod. They told me stories about studios forcing them to redo entire sequences at the last minute, directors leaving entire scenes to be built from scratch in postproduction, VFX work being outsourced to multiple shops for a single movie (and then outsourced by those shops to even more shops), and crushing hours that finally led Marvel VFX artists to formally vote to unionize just two weeks ago. That’s how you end up with a movie like “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” looking like an iPhone game.

“The Creator” suffers from no such absence in quality control. It’s not just arresting visually; it’s interesting. There’s a story in these effects. You see AI “simulants” (androids) being made in a factory, their eyes already blinking as their bodies are being assembled. You see people gunned down with laser fire, and it feels as visceral as if they’d been hit with lead bullets. You see John David Washington’s character remove his bionic arm to reveal a gnarled stump of a shoulder, and you want to know how he lost that arm to begin with (you’re never told). You see a great, floating warship called the Nomad canvassing the Earth’s surface for targets, and you feel the same dread that every character on the ground feels when they see that ship looming on the horizon. 

There are echoes of “Brazil,” “District 9” and, yes, “Rogue One” in here, but all of it feels cohesive and more inspired than knocked off. 

Most important, it feels REAL, which is the truest litmus test for all movie effects. I counted just one moment in “The Creator” where I could spot the seams in its effects. Every other frame of it puts you in a plausible, dirty and very nasty future world where artificial intelligence doesn’t conquer humanity but rather divides it into warring factions, with America being the bad guy and an AI-allied “New Asia” as the sympathetic rebel faction. As with the best sci-fi, you can see our world in this world, and vice versa. Very few movies are able to achieve that kind of visual standard. “The Creator” does.  

But how? Edwards pulled all of this off with a budget in the ballpark of $85 million, which struck me as impossible. So I hopped on a Zoom with Jay Cooper, who works out of Industrial Light & Magic’s mothership office in San Francisco. ILM was founded by “Star Wars” mastermind George Lucas in Van Nuys in 1975 and was eventually purchased by Disney in 2012 along with the rest of Lucasfilm’s properties, “Star Wars” itself being the most famous asset among them. Cooper joined ILM long before that acquisition and has worked on movies like “ET,” “Avatar,” “Babe: Pig in the City” and movies from pretty much every tentpole franchise you can think of. Suffice it to say, the man knows his s—t, which is probably why he got tapped to be one of the VFX supervisors on “The Creator.” I wanted to know how he and the movie’s postproduction team were able to set a new visual standard with this movie in a time when shoddy VFX has become so widespread. So I asked him.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Drew Magary: What were your exact duties on “The Creator”?

Jay Cooper: I was the head of department for the movie. My job started with the conversations with Gareth about what our approach was going to be. Then I led the team that did the implementation of the visual effects, working with our production designer and our on-set VFX supervisor.

Magary: Those conversations you had with Gareth, were those prior to principal photography?

Cooper: Beginning, after and during. It started with our initial discussions of stagecraft volume: what we would build, what we could get away with not building, how we were going to create our simulants. Then those discussions extended into post.

Magary: Is that kind of continual back-and-forth with the director common across other projects you’ve worked on, or did you consider this to be a bit of an anomaly?

Cooper: There’s no route to success where you’re not constantly talking with the director about what their goals are, both visually as well as thematically, and extending that to the team of folks that are on set, including the director of photography and the production designer. These massive movies are team projects, and every department has to contribute their part.

Magary: Well right, because if any of those lines of communication are disrupted, it’s going to show up on screen.

Cooper: Absolutely. There are some things that we can change later, but if we’re all on the same page, it helps dramatically.

Magary: Correct me if I’m wrong here, but the reported budget for the creator in total was $85 million. Is that accurate?

Cooper: You know what’s awesome? I truthfully do not know the answer to that question.

Magary: Well, then I’m going to ask you the follow-up question anyway. Do you know what percentage of the budget was set aside for VFX?

Cooper: It was significant.

Magary: Can you ballpark a percentage for me?

Cooper: I don’t think I can actually. It was a significant portion.

Magary: How much time did you have after principal photography wrapped to work on these effects to get them right?

Cooper: It was probably the better part of a year. A year and a few months.

Cooper: I think that’s consistent with this kind of thing.

Magary: Is it? Because I’m sure you’ve seen the reports on Marvel movies where they would get crunched and have very, very, very little time to work on those effects.

Cooper: That was not the feeling that I had here. Certainly, it got stressful toward the end, as every project does. Here’s the difference, and I’m not going to throw any other movies under the bus: Gareth is a very strong creative force, and he owns the filmmaking production. There’s not a series of people that we were working through. Gareth was in our visual effects reviews for months and months. We tried to make it as flat a hierarchy as we could. We included artists in these meetings. It wasn’t one where we were trying to please a series of people along the way.

Magary: Have you had that kind of problem in the past on other projects?

Magary: Did you use any artificial intelligence yourselves in making these visuals?

Cooper: There are a lot of machine learning tools that help us be more productive but none that are creating imagery. There are some tools that are machine learning-based that can help you augment those things, but they only get you so far. I would say that it’s not unlike if you’re going to make a meal using a Cuisinart. 

Magary: What you’re describing to me is an incredibly functional and collaborative process. Why am I not seeing that across every movie that I watch? Why the inconsistency?

Cooper: I don’t think it’s a question that I can answer because you’re effectively asking me why aren’t other people doing what we did.

Cooper: I can only speak to the things that I do. I think this movie is successful because we went to real locations. We tried to lean into the aesthetic that was already established. We were working very closely with a director who had an idea of what he wanted. We shot with a minimum of blue screen. When you throw up a blue screen, it’s usually for a good reason, but it can get a little out of hand. It’s a much more difficult ask to make your movie feel grounded and authentic if every single shot is against blue screen. For “The Creator,” we shot in airports and shopping malls and modern forums that we could use as a basis for our set extensions. We’re (digitally) replacing a huge portion of a Nomad hallway, but the walls and the floor all come from a physical space. That translates into the production. If you were just shooting on a stage, you don’t get to the same level of realism.

Magary: No, because having those real elements in there gives any shot a composition where your eye is naturally going to be drawn to the real parts, and the parts that are digitally filled out are going to be a bit more peripheral, both in your vision and in your mind.

Cooper: Absolutely. You have two different ways to skin this cat. You can put everybody in motion capture pajamas, and then everybody is CG head to toe. The second way is, “All right, let’s shoot with real people, and then we’ll decide later which things to replace.” (For our AI police officers,) we shot real actors and in real costuming, and then we’re taking out their heads and their arms and replacing that with our CG.

Magary: You’re talking about all this prep work in order to minimize how much you have to do exclusively in post. How hard is it to get that prep work done? You have to get the locations down, shoot it at the right time of day, and all that stuff. I feel like a lot of times moviemakers will say, “We’ll fix it in post because it’s just easier from a planning stage.”

Cooper: This was the compact that we had with Gareth, which was, “I’m going to shoot this movie. You’re not going to come out necessarily with all of the information that you normally would have. We’re going to be changing a lot of stuff later.” We did a test with (co-supervisor) John Knoll before this movie got green-lit. He traveled through a number of different countries, and we would replace the environments. I think we did it for 50 shots. A couple of those shots ended up in the movie. But the idea was always, “We can figure it out. It’s going to be uncomfortable, but we know we can get there.”

That was the deal that we made. That was the cost of doing business. It was a lot more conversational. This part is not the standard structure in filmmaking. I’ll be completely candid about that. This was a really close collaboration with Gareth. We held hands and jumped together.

Magary: It shows on the screen. It really does.

Cooper: Awesome. I’m so happy to hear that.