How a trip to Area 51 inspired 'The Creator's terrifying USS NOMAD
What do birds of prey and Area 51 have in common? They all had a part in the design of The Creator's horrifying weapon of mass destruction: the USS NOMAD.
A massive space station with the capacity to destroy entire cities, NOMAD (North American Orbital Mobile Aerospace Defense) looms large over The Creator. Its scale and sinister presence help it stand out as one of the film's most impressive sci-fi elements, even as it competes with beautifully realized artificial intelligence of all shapes and sizes.
In the early stages of the film's development, though, The Creator's director Gareth Edwards envisioned NOMAD quite differently.
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"[NOMAD] actually started off as a ring around the entire world. Originally, the world was divided completely," Edwards told Mashable. "I experimented with the idea of the ring just staying still and with the idea of it orbiting."
Questions about the logic of the ring design — including how humans could build something so advanced during the war on AI — led Edwards to simplifying the idea to the mobile defense platform we see in the film. The final design, with its lengthy wingspan and circular space in the center, was itself a combination of several different influences.
"We were trying to [emulate] a bird of prey, so that when [NOMAD] was in the sky, it looks like a bird. There's an instinctive reaction that, I think, as mammals," Edwards explained. "Then the other [inspiration] was an eye, like an all-seeing circle looking down on you.
"We tried that, and we tried the bird of prey thing," he continued. "And then at one point, we were like, 'Let's just do both!' When we fuse them together and cut a big negative chunk out of it, it got really interesting."
NOMAD's onscreen power doesn't just stem from its menacing design, but from the atmosphere The Creator generates around it. That includes the rumbling, droning soundscape that accompanies its arrival in the film, as well as any of its missile launches. That sound design comes courtesy of sound designers Erik Aadahl and Ethan Van der Ryn, who also worked with Edwards on 2014's Godzilla.
"With NOMAD, I wanted it to feel audio-wise like something you can't quite hear. It's in a range that's very low, but it's nearly subconscious to start with," said Edwards. "But it sounds so dangerous that if you were to stand under it for more than a few seconds, you might get cancer."
This sense of danger continues with NOMAD's targeting system, which appears as huge swaths of blue light zooming over the countryside. It gives the sense of being tracked down by the bird of prey-like NOMAD. Edwards revealed that it was inspired by a moment when he and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story concept artist Matt Allsopp fled Area 51.
"We had the freakiest experience of our life," Edwards said of that moment. "We were chased, followed by security and night vision, all the way back to Las Vegas. And whilst we went over one of the mountains, a giant grid pattern got projected down across the mountains in front of us by a laser.
"I thought I was going to get arrested, I didn't know what they were doing," he continued. "Maybe they were playing war games or just messing with us. But we turned into two little girls, and we actually spent the night in the same room because we were worried that we were going to get deported. So I've always wanted to put that idea of a projected grid into a film; it felt very scary. And this is my first chance to really do it."
The Creator is now playing in theaters.
Topics Film
Belen Edwards is an Entertainment Reporter at Mashable. She covers movies and TV with a focus on fantasy and science fiction, adaptations, animation, and more nerdy goodness. She is a member of the Critics Choice Association and the Television Critics Association, as well as a Tomatometer-approved critic.
