AFTER making his directorial debut with the indie Monsters in 2010, director Gareth Edwards was seemingly given the keys to the universe by Hollywood, following the film up with Godzilla and then Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.

The latter film and the two films afterwards were made on extreme ends of the budget spectrum. Monsters was done with a skeleton crew using basic equipment in Latin America on a half-million dollar budget, while the other two ranged between US$160 million (RM755 million) and US$220 million (RM1,027 billion).

In his latest film, The Creator, Edwards found the best of both worlds by directing the monumental science-fiction spectacle with a reported US$80 million (RM377 million) budget, far under what most Hollywood blockbusters cost.

He also thinks huge franchises can take a similar approach, provided the filmmakers have that discipline.

“I think you could give it a good go, yeah,” Edwards told The Hollywood Reporter in an interview.

“The reality is that the most expensive part of those movies is the visual effects (VFX).

“The VFX budgets always end up at a certain amount and you cannot shortchange them too much because you are asking for a thousand or more effects shots”.

Edwards also explains that for The Creator, the team’s goal was to get everything “small enough”, such as the crew, because “it’s cheaper to fly absolutely anywhere in the world than it is to build a set on a soundstage”.

He also said that the original budget for the film was much lower, but the pandemic caused it to shoot up.