The Artificial Eye: Oren Soffer on Filming The Creator

One of the closest relationships on a film set is between the director and the cinematographer. “It's like dating,” said Oren Soffer, “but you have to decide to get married on the first or second date.” However, he found himself in a creative ménage à trois on the set of The Creator, the sci fi drama by Gareth Edwards.

The film debuted at Fantastic Fest this year and arrives this week on 4K UHD and Blu-ray with consistent praise for its gritty yet spectacular view of the future. However, Soffer wasn't originally planned to be behind the lens for the Godzilla director's tale of a near-future AI rebellion. Indeed, Edwards has spent years developing the look of his globetrotting techno-drama with Greig Fraser. “You may have seen one or two of his movies,” Soffer said, “little indies like The Batman or something like that.” Edwards and Fraser had been discussing the project since they wrapped Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, with the plan to work together. The project was greenlit by 20th Century Studios but, Soffer said, “due to scheduling pushes due to Covid, as well as Dune: Part 2 being brought up, Fraser was no longer able to be on set for The Creator.” When the search began for his replacement, Fraser suggested his protege, Soffer, “and they brought me on as an additional cinematographer.”

Normally, the process of being hired for a big film like The Creator is a nerve wracking one, built around the hope that the director and cinematographer will jell, creatively and personally. Those first meetings can be a bit of a blind date, but this time there just happened to be a wise matchmaker, “and that babushka happens to be acclaimed Oscar-winning cinematographer Greig Fraser,” Soffer said. However, they weren't simply proposing that he replace Fraser: instead, he would be the project's man on the ground, while Fraser would provide logistical support from Los Angeles, all while serving as “an objective sounding board who was just looking at the images coming in and assessing them.”

However, he wasn't simply joining a film: he was joining a conspiracy between Edwards and Fraser about how to make blockbuster budgets manageable again. During the production of Rogue One, he said, “there were aspects of a big budget production, and the machinery involved, that they were starting to question.” During his initial Zoom meeting with the duo, they began to explain their thinking about how the process could be changed, streamlined, and made more cost-effective. What they proposed was in some ways a return to Edwards' breakout success, 2010 low-budget smash Monsters, but amplified by a larger budget, and taking advantage of all the technical advances over the years, like the developments in prosumer equipment. Or, as Soffer put it, “all the good stuff about low budget filmmaking, and all the good stuff about higher budget filmmaking. ... I was just soaking it all in and by the end I went, 'Yeah, I agree.'”

It was also clear that this was going to be “a very different kind of filmmaking.” At the same time, it was still going to be a Gareth Edwards film, with his signature visual style – best described as vérité fantastique. "What he's after, always, is truthfulness and immersiveness and honesty in creating an experience for the audience that is not artificial, and is as organic and believable and grounded as possible.” To achieve that in The Creator, the process was simple: Edwards was his own camera operator. “That's how you ensure you get the Gareth Edwards eye,” Soffer laughed.

And being able to capture and complement that eye is central to why he was hired. “The job of a cinematographer is to be a chameleon,” Soffer said, "and adapt to whatever our director needs." Well, that's part of the job. There's also the technical know-how and then there's a third component, which he described as being “the director's confidante, supporter, friend, right hand person, psychiatrist, everything.”

And then there's the cinematographer's role as the on-set diplomat, “and negotiating between production and crew.” They become the conduit for the director's ideas, often in technical terminology, to ensure that everyone's on the same page. And if you're tearing up the old rule book, that's a more vital role than ever.

Basically, what Edwards and Fraser had proposed, and what Soffer was enacting, was a complete redesign of the workflow. Even though they were filming on a $4,000 off-the-shelf Sony FX3, having a big budget allowed for “a healthy pre-production phase,” Soffer said, “that was able to support and give us the time to test and work with our partners at FotoKem, our local team, our post team, our media manager, data wrangler, sound team. There were all these little things to sort out because nobody had used a camera in this way before.”

Part of that planning was about finding cost-effective ways to get a shot that looked exactly like the more expensive choice. Case in point: a moment in a chase scene, inside a crashing ambulance. “It's a classic shot” Soffer said. “Ambulance flips over, everybody falls over, stuff flies through the air. On paper, you read that shot initially and what most people who do is go, ‘Oh, we're going to need a gimbal rig, and we're going to build the interior set of an ambulance on a stage, and then turn it, and have the actors and props and everything react, and we'll get the turn on camera and the low gravity effect and all of it.’ And Gareth, before anybody could utter these words, went, ‘No, no, no, no, no. The shot lasts less than a second. We're not going to go through all that trouble and time to plan, build, design, just for that one shot. Here's what we're going to do. We have an ambulance on set, which was used on set for our exterior shots as well as for interiors. All we have to do is put the camera in the back, handheld, count down 3-2-1, and then just do the old Star Trek trick. Flip the camera 90 degrees, the actors throw themselves across the ambulance, pretend that it's rolling over, the props team are standing outside, off-camera, throwing medical supplies into frame, and you have the shot.’ We did it in 10 minutes, and that's Gareth's approach.”

Once that was all established, the actual filming meant a lot of wild and exciting location shoots, from the coast of Thailand to the heights of Nepal, and that often meant lugging their own equipment around. However, it's hard to say no when you've got “this lovely, sweet Englishman” asking no more of his crew than he asks of himself. “Gareth is the first one leading the pack, carrying the equipment up the mountain,” said Soffer, “so when you have a leader like that there's an infectiousness to that passion and that love of filmmaking and love of the process and dedication. We all felt that we were just keeping up with Gareth the whole time.”

But for Soffer, it was all worth the trip to visit some locations that will stay with him forever. “There were so many where you show up and go, ‘I can't believe this place exists, and I can't believe we're capturing it on camera.’”

The Creator is out now on 4K Ultra HD and Blu-ray from 20th Century Studios/Disney.