Shooting The Creator
By the time last year when cinematographers Greig Fraser and Oren Soffer were signed to work on the feature film The Creator, director Gareth Edwards had already spent more than a year doing test shoots and location scouting. Edwards said he used that time as the opportunity to envision the look of the film. He went to Vietnam, Cambodia, Japan, Indonesia, Thailand, and Nepal. He said, “Our whole plan was just to go to the greatest locations in the world, because the cost of a flight is way less than the cost of building a set.” Considering the budget of just over $86 million, the filmmakers utilized guerrilla filmmaking methods by having very few crew members and natural lighting on set for select on-location scenes, and limited sound recording. I recently spoke via email with Soffer to learn more about how The Creator was shot.