SXSWORLD

1 2 SXS W O R L D | F E B R U A R Y 2 0 1 7 | SXSW.COM Gareth Edwards, photo by Jonathan Olley Emerging from Hyperspace with Gareth Edwards By Neil MilleR "I believe this helicopter is following me," explains director Gareth Edwards as he chats over the phone on the same weekend in December that his latest movie, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is beginning its own assault on the worldwide box office charts (even with a December 16 release, the film was still the U.S. market's second top grossing release of 2016). While the helicopter in the background isn't actually following him as he walks the streets of Los Angeles, it wouldn't be the most atypical thing that happened to him that day. As Edwards had explained moments earlier, this was the day in which he finally had a chance to sleep late following a long flight back to the states from the London premiere of Rogue One. When asked how long it had been since he had been able to get that much sleep, he joked, "Probably just before South by Southwest in 2010."  To hear him tell it, you'd think that the intervening time, 2,472 days to be exact, was spent in the whirlwind of hyperspace. The switch on his life's hyperdrive was flipped following the debut of his first film, the languid and innovative sci-fi thriller Monsters, at a midnight screening in the Alamo Drafthouse on the opening Friday night of SXSW 2010. "I remember Tim League [Alamo Drafthouse CEO who, at the time, was curating the SXFantastic midnight program] had met us off the plane," he recalls six-and-a-half years later. "And he said, 'Did you manage to replace the text?' And I thought I was being funny and I said, 'Oh yeah, it's a much nicer font now. It's a sans serif with a nice embossed chrome tex- ture.' And you could see him sort of laughing like, 'Yeah, very funny. But did you f—king finish it?' "  Months earlier, Edwards had presented a very rough version of Monsters to League and the SXSW program- ming team, with text in place of fighter jets and the film's unique alien life forms. While the film was accepted into the festival, it presented him with a tight turnaround to get it finished before the premiere. A longtime visual effects artist, Edwards was able to complete the work on Monsters in the tight window and present it at SXSW.  "If we hadn't had that deadline," he recalls. "I'm not sure what would have happened to the film. It might've dragged on and on. I didn't have the energy to go another few months. It was like sprinting to the end of a mara- thon." Yet while those last few months before the premiere of Monsters sound harrowing, they were nothing com- pared to what came after that first screening.  "We went on stage after, and we just couldn't tell if people liked it, because everyone's polite to the director," he says of the post-premiere Q&A. "Even if it's a rubbish film, people will come up and shake your hand. And to be honest, it feels like a big anti-climax. You've worked like

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