How Gareth Edwards’ Sci-Fi Opus ‘The Creator’ Achieved Blockbuster Scale at a Fraction of the Cost

variety.com:

Todd Gilchrist editor As costs spiral upward for production infrastructure, visual effects and good old fashioned star wattage, blockbuster budgets tend to be one of the closely guarded secrets in Hollywood.

Yet in the weeks and months leading to the release of “The Creator,” due Sept. 29, cowriter and director Gareth Edwards has not stopped talking — if somewhat apologetically — about its $80 million price tag, a pittance for filmmaking at the scale of his globe-trotting, cast-of-hundreds sci-fi opus. “I’m a bit embarrassed it was $80 million,” Edwards tells Variety. “We should’ve done it for less.” As the director of the 2014 version of “Godzilla” and the “Star Wars” prequel “Rogue One,” Edwards has not only worked with bigger budgets (a reported $160 million and $220 million) but served at the behest of their respective parent companies, Legendary Pictures and Lucasfilm, who exerted a significant amount of control over the creative process.

Though he (almost studiously) exudes gratitude for those opportunities, Edwards aspired to recreate storytelling on their scale while retaining the latitude he enjoyed on his ultra-low-budget 2010 debut “Monsters,” requiring him to merge the two filmmaking models — philosophically and especially practically. “When you first make a movie, you have to kind of make it by hook or by crook,” Edwards says. “Typically, everyone’s first film is a kind of a no-budget feature.

And then if you’re very lucky like I was, you get teleported into an amazing situation where you get to do one of these big Hollywood films that you’ve always dreamt of being able to do.