Creativity requires the possibility of success, not the guarantee.
Forcing certainty on any idea means we follow the formulas of the market, our peers, competitors and our past work. To do the things that have been done before. It’s easy to go down this road even though we know it to be one that hampers creativity. It slows invention, slows skillset development, slows labours of love. It’s repetition with misdirection, not originality.
The possibility of success is the leap of faith taken to pursue something truly original. That is much harder to convince people of. And it would be easy to argue that major film studios mostly do the opposite — their world is franchises, sequels and adaptations.
Tomorrow is an outlier.
Gareth Edwards’ original sci-fi studio feature film The Creator will be released in the UK and US. ‘Original’, ‘sci-fi’ and ‘studio’ are words so infrequently used in the same sentence that it felt like a good focus for this week’s newsletter.
I have written about Edwards before. 10 years ago, in fact. Both that time and today are from a position of immense respect. There are two reasons. His work is inspiration for the leap of faith.
For staring down the odds: it is exceptionally difficult to get original stories commissioned by film studios. Let alone original sci-fi stories.
Here are the top five films by domestic box office over the past three years:
2022
2021
2020
One of those films might stand out. 1917 is the only non-franchise film since 2020. You can rewind the clock a further 10 years, and only two other original films have entered the top 5 since 2010: The Secret Life of Pets (2016) and Inside Out (2015).
The perceived financial risk of originals, especially in the sci-fi genre, is high. They carry hefty production budgets due to CGI and set builds, require more intense marketing effort to create audiences for unknown properties, there’s a disproportionate need for positive critical reception, and they must meet the standards that sci-fi fans have come to expect since Ridley Scott.
Gareth Edwards is in rarified air. An original sci-fi film with an $80m budget (doubled or tripled once you include P&A) fronted by A-list talent. This is uncommon among the uncommon. Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival had a production budget of $47m, Alex Garland’s Ex Machina had $15 million, and Duncan Jones’ Moon only $5m.
This is a reminder that there are people and heavily resourced vehicles of commercial creativity willing to take the leap of faith with original ideas. Even against overwhelming odds. Maybe you’ll join me in holding every ounce of that hope, both for personal reasons and so we are gifted more original ideas by others.
For big, ambiguous challenges that you can’t imagine not pursuing: all of this could easily not have happened.
Before Edwards’ first feature debut in 2010, he worked as a freelance visual effects artist for the documentaries department of the BBC. Read how he described himself in an interview with Collider:
Whenever I plucked up the courage to talk to one of them and come out and say, “I actually want to make films,” I realized that everyone just didn’t take it seriously at all. Basically, I viewed myself as a filmmaker that was pretending to be a visual effects person, and everyone else viewed me as a visual effects person who had these illusions that maybe he could make a film. You start to believe it and think, “Well, maybe they’re right. The chances of being able to make a film are very small, so maybe I am kidding myself, and maybe I should just shut up and feel lucky that I can at least do computer graphics for a little bit.”
With his work for the BBC, Edwards had become an effective and Emmy-nominated asset, not without a financial incentive to continue in his current role.
“It came right down to the wire of how badly I wanted it. I had wanted to do it since I was so young, I wanted to do it stupidly badly. You get to a point where it’s like ‘I’d feel better with myself completely failing than I would never having tried,’ so you just give it a go.”
In 2010, with backing from British film and distribution company Vertigo Films, Edwards took a skeleton crew of four people, including himself behind the camera, a cast of two actors, and travelled across Mexico, Belize, Guatemala and Texas to shoot his first feature film Monsters (2010).
Created on a micro-budget of $500k, Edwards filmed with an improvised script and a consumer-grade digital camera. He persuaded locals to get involved as additional actors, had an editor working on location with a £700 laptop, and created all visual effects shots himself from a bedroom.
Monsters was later screened at Cannes Film Festival to wide acclaim, won three British Independent Film Awards and was nominated by BAFTA for Outstanding Début by a British Writer, Director or Producer. Edwards went on to direct two supersized franchise films, Godzilla (2014) and the underrated Star Wars: Rogue One (2016).
Creativity is born of leaps of faith. Sometimes financial at the moment of commissioning, sometimes personal at the moment of “how badly do I want this?”.
Either way, it is born from the possibility of success, not the guarantee. Edwards will have my ticket purchase as a small contribution to the top-5 moonshot.
Ian
