Director Gareth Edwards took a small crew to a remote village in the Himalayas to shoot scenes for The Creator.

The new sci-fi movie, which is set during a war between humans and robots with artificial intelligence, follows a former soldier, played by John David Washington, as he finds the secret weapon; a robot in the form of a young child.

During the film’s virtual press conference, Edwards revealed that only he, Washington and a producer were present for the scenes in the remote Himalayan village.

“We didn’t take the sound crew for that little shoot ’cause it was so remote. Everything in that village has to be carried by hand for four days. We flew in on a helicopter thankfully and we were there for about three days,” he explained.

However, the Godzilla director recruited real villagers and got them involved in his movie.

“Everyone that’s in the movie are actually villagers from the little village by the Buddhist temple,” he shared. “Some of the kids agreed to shave their heads and play some of the robot monks and AI and stuff, it was kind of surreal. You think there’s going to be a problem but they all get really excited about being in a Hollywood blockbuster.”

Even though the film is a huge studio blockbuster, Edwards made it with a small crew so they could afford to shoot in eight different countries instead of a studio.

“The cast and the crew are so little that it’s cheaper to fly them anywhere in the world than it is to build a set so suddenly the idea of picking every single best location based on the scene became a reality,” he said. “So we cherry-picked the volcanoes of Indonesia, Buddhist temples in the Himalayas, ruins of Cambodia and floating villages (and so on).”

The Creator is in cinemas now.

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