Gareth Edwards "worked backwards" making 'The Creator' by scouting futuristic-looking locations and building the film around them.
The moviemaker has admitted he took a more budget-friendly approach to special effects when putting the blockbuster together - admitting the team didn't start designing the sci-fi world until they had finished shooting on location and had started post-production.
Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, he explained: "It harkens back to 'Monsters', my first film, where we had very little money. We traveled around the world, found amazing locations, invented scenes to some extent and reverse engineered the film. We kind of worked backwards. So I wanted to do that with a Hollywood budget and using people at Industrial Light and Magic. I thought that would be a really super exciting way to make a film."
He added: "We went to eight different countries around the world. We traveled 10,000 miles, and we went to the Himalayas, Indonesian volcanoes and floating villages in Thailand, et cetera. We shot all these different scenes from the film, and then in post-production, I hit screen grab on my laptop and gave those images to people like [production designer] James Clyne and Industrial Light Magic."
He insisted the technique was much more efficient, adding: "Halfway through the edit, that’s when we started designing the world, and it was much more efficient. We didn’t do anything outside of the frame. Everything is a hundred percent on screen, and we didn’t build sets or do things that never ended up in the movie. "
One example he gave was a scene set in an underground lab, which they filmed in a particle accelerator in Thailand revealing it took the place of an expensive custom-built set and they only needed to change "20 or 30 percent" during the editing process.
He concluded: "It’s more creative, easier and cheaper, and I don’t want to go back to the other way of doing a big film, if I can help it."
