Gareth Edwards On Directing Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Godzilla & More

it sounds like a lie or it just sounds a little bit like this is the sort of thing you'd say in publicity but I really did watch Star Wars and I wanted to join the Rebel Alliance and blow up the Death Star like that was my career goal and then slowly you learn after a while that it's not real and it's this lie called filmmaking and so I felt like well okay I can't do that and the next best thing is to become a liar and make films and there was this book I had about Steven Spielberg and and it said inside it that he made a short film and he showed it to producers in Hollywood and he got this gig directing television and then eventually you know a TV movie of the week and his feature films and so the okay well somehow you've got to make a short film and the obvious path was you go to film school my college nearby had this course which was a diploma in audio-visual took like photography video audio graphic design I did that and I made lots of videos and little shorts no silly things like like me trying to rip off my favorite films at the moment so is I had those of Terminator type film and a Cape Fear type film and things like this that got me into film school and then made a graduation film and thought you know naively that I'd send that off to Hollywood under my little VHS tape and they'd obviously watch it and give me a job and all the sort of thing it never happened and then I was like okay oh god I've kind of what I do now and my flatmate at the time was studying this new thing called computer animation Jurassic Park had just come out in the cinema and it was clear that this was going to be the future of filmmaking in some way and and so I thought okay I'll buy a computer and I go into debt and borrowed some money and bought this computer from PC world we're at suspect shelves at Marks and Spencers and then evening then I learned the software in the day and I thought what I do is I like was like okay so I learn this software and it'll take me about three months and then I'll go make his film and ten years later I was still learning the software it was a lot harder than I thought I'd go for job interviews and I had my short films that I've done at film school and then I had these silly little computer animations that I was messing around with and I did things like I put a robot in the driveway of our house and I put a dinosaur weirdly in Steve McQueen's bullet so in a clip from that it was really strange everyone I was going for job interviews in London with they'd see this stuff what's this and you'd say oh it's just something I did on my own computer and they go how can you do this on a home computer murmurs like and we'll use animation and suddenly go but we pay thousands and thousands to do this in Soho like how you can do and you'd say no it's just normal software and they would and what happened as end up getting offered jobs to do graphics for like low-end television I did this series for this for the BBC and it went down well and and the people upstairs were like how did you pull that off for very little money and and his and that his his more money go make a second series and nobody asked me if I wanted to do it and I knew that the next best option was to go into Soho and pay five times the price and so I kind of let this keep going I didn't say anything no one said you're going to be up for this and and then finally like they were kind of trapped and they said okay Gareth when you know you're going to do the show and I said no I don't want to do I want to direct but I will do it if you let me direct one of the episodes and they're like yeah we can't do that I was like okay and then they were saying but you're going to do the effects right I said no because I will do it if you let me direct one or direct anything and so eventually they were like okay we'll let you direct something on BBC three that no one's ever going to watch for no money and then you can do this exercise said okay so I did this really low-budget very very bad show where I think the budget for it was an hour's television and the budget was probably 90 grand a thing and it had 250 visual effects in it I had to do them all myself in about three months it was crazy and they're very bad but it ended up looking maybe like with 250 grand on it and because it looked like that I could then get a job at a budget level of like a quarter of a million because it looked like that's what I've been given before and then I made that look a bit better in a light because of all the visual effects you can add the production value looks a bit better but the problem was it was really for specialist factual it's really for the documentary Department and I couldn't make that leap to drama every time I went for interviews and I showed them whatever I'd done and said really want to direct they saw you as a documentary person and and and not drama there's a bit of snobbery with that divided and you just couldn't you couldn't go across I got fired from directing a TV show because they said you didn't have enough experience as a consolation prize the executive producer said oh you should get an agent I know someone who's an agent you should go see them and so I went and talked about how I dental like visual effects work and I felt that there was this you know if this whole holy grail of like you know low-budget filmmaking was that you could use computer graphics and digital technology so it makes me look a lot bigger and better than it really was and she said oh you should go see this company called vertigo who make low-budget films and so I went round there and showed them my stuff and and pitched them some different ideas and they I didn't believe them they went yeah let's do it okay let's go make this film they said okay write down on a piece of paper the date you want to start filming and I promise you we'll be filming by then and I did the math to my head and so I went out of money in three months but I can't keep myself alive after three months so I wrote three months you know three months away September and they said ok and we ended up it worked out we ended up in the middle of Mexico three months from then and but I had to write it and cast it and find the locations in three months which having never done it before I felt like loads of time you know and I realized it was no it was very little amount of time and because I knew that we'd be going into these places and not really having permission sometimes and using non-actors you know people we met to try and do things and I'd be putting things in the computer afterwards I didn't want to be too specific with it's like they stand you know I didn't want to write it like a classical screenplay because we'd never be able like whatever I wrote we'd never be able to find it everywhere we went we drove around Mexico and we said so everyone we met we said like is there anything strange around here like post-apocalyptic or oh there was a hurricane and some boats got washed upon the shore or oh there was a slurred and the and something got destroyed over here and so we'd go to those places and when we got there we go obviously it's like it could be this section of the film great and then so then we would pick well what could be the emotional part of that scene and and give the actors some ideas like maybe you talk about this maybe you talk about that and then just let them go and then I would try and film it a little bit like a documentary I guess we try to get it into Sundance and Berlin and these other places and they rejected it and and when we send it to south west southwest it was still had just text on the screen for where the visual effects would be because I hadn't done them all yet and you have to send it way in advance the guy accepted it with just the text and the joke was like when I landed and we arrived there he said old did you replace the text and I said yeah yeah it's a much better font now and we say we showed this film and it was really like the whole of your life kind of coming to this point of what if no one likes it what if it was all for nothing and I felt like at least I would have tried you know at least there was like you could you could live with yourself when you're older going you know give it a go and we tried to make film it ended and there was a couple of people at the end that said oh well done and get me a cart at a business card but after I went back to the car was really depressed you know I mean like I thought God is that it like is that what it was all for and and then thank God the next day and this if he hadn't been there just my story would be so different there was a guy that was in the audience and he happened to attend just because he got an email someone saying can you go see this film and then he came up to me in the next day and he said oh I represent film directors and and I'd like to represent you sort of thing and I was like okay he knows like five yeah that's amazing and he was like John Lee who are representing I was like sure and he said Quinton Tarantino and timber and I was like okay and John Woo and Wes Craven and all this was like and hang on you represent me from that point on everything changed like from that point on I didn't need to know anything else I really liked pre-production I really liked post-production and there's this battle in the middle which is filming you dream about film and you picture it and then compromise inevitably happens you can't have that set you can't shoot they're like the graph of making a film is you know you dream and you've conceived the movie and you're trying to make something amazing if you can so it gets really high in your mind then you start filming and it starts going down because you start it's just never as good as you were hoping you know whatever you do it always feels like you're picturing some it just a little bit better and then in the post you start mending all those problems and fixing them and it and you go actually no hang on it wasn't so bad and and the goal is to get as close to the original height of what you were conceiving in post-production and so it's a little bit like a sandwich we're late the beginning and the end is a lot of fun and the middle bit is a bit tough I mean every act is different by I always used to think that directing was like a horse whispering or something and that you go up to the action you go like mommy's gone you want to cry you know I mean like this and then they this amazing performance happens and it's not it's not that at all ninety percent of the work is in the casting like if you get the right people your jobs nearly done and you can let them do their thing and it's try trying not to puppeteer someone and it's like and say stand here you know look that way say it like this like that's like a real no no I think for a lot of actors the scene is the gap in the canyon and what you've got to do is build a ramp for them so you've got a talk about what just happened where they kept you know what just happened to their character what their little backstory is what they're trying to achieve in this scene but not tell them specifically what to do and how to do it like let them let them figure that out when you picture a scene you're pulling from something subconscious and it's usually like other films or other experiences and and if all you're ever doing is getting that then the films only as good as what's in your head and to make a better film it feels like you want it to sort of merge and get fused with things that are outside of your head like like let chaos come in a little bit and and and I like I like a bit of chaos I think I think it it just keeps everything feel more real like something it's just not the drag-and-drop obvious version of a scene don't give up like you're gonna fail a lot I mean genuinely I got rejected from directing anything for about 10 years you know I mean I was trying to get into the right night trying to get to music videos try and get into commercials trying to get into TV and drama and just no one was giving me the opportunity it's very easy to look back on people who've got lucky and things have happened to them and and trace a very simple line and go oh look they did this this and this and it and it all went brilliantly and it's like it didn't go brilliantly like for 10 years I was failing at becoming a filmmaker and then I got lucky one day and but I got unlucky I think every other day up until that point I used to play that game of looking on IMDB but my heroes and what age they were then when they got to make their first film and it's very depressing because like Spielberg did jaws I think when he was 27 and things like this and I was 35 when I did my first film and and it's amazing like lighting for some extent it's not it's unfair to say to people like all you've got you know you've got access to all these cameras now and you can edit on a laptop it's really you know you've got it really lucky because the opposite problem is that there's a lot of competition a lot of people doing it and there's a lot of stuff on the internet and it's hard to be spanned out but I honestly think if you show promise you'll get something and it might not be what you want but it would be a step towards what you want and then if you're good at that you'll get another step and like just keep going it'll work out at some point and enjoy it like I honestly look back I know it sounds for everyone else like amazing you get to make these big films and it's amazing and it is I guess but I look back on my time when I was trying to make films as like some of the best memories I have it was really exciting like not knowing what was ahead and that and the adventure of like trying to make a film with your friends whatever in the middle of nowhere and and I kind of wish I could go back and relive that experience because I mean everyone said it to you it's a cliche is like parents don't know you always say like oh you know I wish I was your age again and all this sort of stuff but it's true it's like when you're young and you've got a lot of energy and enthusiasm and excitement and you want to change the world and like that's really special and and and you won't have that when you're 50 don't wish that away don't want your life to hurry up light enjoy it and take a risk don't don't play it safe like you're not going to get noticed for being average like you've got to go take things to the edge a little bit and so whatever it is you're doing and be brave with it and and risk something like gamble and it usually pays it off like fortune favors the brave as they say it usually works [Music] [Music]

Channel: BAFTA Guru

Views: 9,774

Rating: 4.9520383 out of 5

Keywords: BAFTA, BAFTA Guru, British Academy Of Film And Television Arts (Award Presenting Organization), creative, career, film making, TV, gaming, actor, advice, movie, movies, movie making, gareth edwards, star wars, rogue one, star wars director, interview, visual effects interview, monsters, godzilla

Id: ylaA_MXpcyw

Length: 15min 1sec (901 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 08 2017