The Creator: Director Gareth Edwards talks the impeccable timing of his AI-themed war movie

It’s a popular sci-fi story — man vs. machine. 2001: A Space Odyssey showed audiences a cold, intelligent spaceship that had evolved into survival tactics. James Cameron claimed he warned us about the horrors of thinking super computers calculating the unemotional logic behind humans being a threat and turning on us with his Terminator movies. The Matrix films took all the terms of modern tech culture and personified them into virtual representations. Gareth Edwards’ upcoming film, The Creator, is a new twist on an old story that aims to show new dilemmas to the concept.

Deadline reports on Edwards recently participating in a Q&A during an IMAX preview of his new movie. Eerily enough, the recent year and some months have seen huge advancements in artificial intelligence and it is one of the biggest issues that plague Hollywood as studios push the use of the technology to cut financial corners at the behest of creatives. Edwards talks about the timely release of his film during such a turbulent struggle with the budding conflict.

I have a trick with A.I. is to get the timing as a sweet spot window where it’s before the apocalypse and not after, which I think it’s in November — maybe December — and so, I think we got really lucky. The joke would be that when you write a film, especially a science fiction film, I try to avoid putting a date … at some point, you have to so, I picked 2070. Now I feel like an idiot because I should’ve gone for 2023 ’cause everything that’s been unfolding in the last few months is kind of scary and weird.”

Edwards added that as he pitched the idea of the film to executives, they inquired about the purpose of the war between AI and humans as they were confident about the benefits that came with the technology. Edwards said, “The setup of that movie is pretty much the last few months.” He added that his film has a unique sympathetic edge in his version of the human vs. machine war. The Rogue One filmmaker hopes audiences take away certain emotions from the movie, “I hope… empathy for others. I think that’s a strong value that is very important. A.I. was the fairy tale of this story. A.I. was like the other — the people that were different to us, that we kind of want to get rid of. But the second you make an A.I., all kinds of fascinating things start to happen.”

The Creator hits theaters on September 29.