How Gareth Edwards made ‘The Creator’ an unconventional take on AI

Gareth Edwards observes the picket signs not far from his house and admits he didn’t see it coming. Not quite so soon, anyway.

When would swaths of humanity vigilantly protest the potential threats of artificial intelligence? In 2018, when Edwards began to write the apocalyptic sci-fi adventure that became “The Creator,” setting his story in a year like 2070 seemed safely distant. He jokes that he didn’t want to commit the same time-frame “mistake” one of his favorite filmmakers, Stanley Kubrick, made nearly six decades ago when setting a futuristic space odyssey as soon as 2001.