The AI Filmmaker

Not too long ago, a clip went viral on social media – Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt in a fight on top of a building in a city of ruin.

Cruise and Pitt have never been in a movie together, though.

And sure as shit they weren’t in a real fight.

The scene was courtesy of a new AI, Seedance.

The output is pretty scary in terms of realism. It’s still not quite perfect, but I’d argue that in the age of CGI generation, we get a lot of action scenes where characters – even normal everyday people – are defying physics in ways that are unrealistic. (As an aside, this is part of why I think it’s harder to invest in a lot of blockbusters nowadays.)

The voices of Cruise and Pitt are sorta okay – not way off, but off just enough. The expressions are good, although Pitt over-emotes (he’s generally more subtle than that). But, as I keep writing in these AI posts, this is just the beginning of this technology.

Subsequently, lots of Seedance clips emerged – mashups featuring pop culture crossovers, such as Superman fighting the Hulk, Rambo versus the Terminator, Bruce Lee versus John Wick, etc. If you can imagine it, somebody’s probably done it.

There’ve also been short films – check out Jason Zada’s Something in the Soil:

It’s a three-minute film about an old man and his dog in the desert who encounter a giant ant. How good does this look? From the hair in the old man’s beard to the fur of the dog to the ant, which looks just as good (if not better) than many CGI creations.

Is it perfectly human yet? Perfectly real? Not quite. There’s this underlying surreal edge, but that does lend itself to the story’s mystique. Think about Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, which de-aged Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, and Joe Pesci? That had a façade that might’ve better fit an instalment of Grand Theft Auto, but ultimately it also gave the story a mythic quality.

Anyway, back to Seedance: there was talk that this AI had frightened Hollywood and the film industry. I don’t know how much is genuine panic and how much is typical internet click-baiting hysteria. I would suspect the latter is the more the case, since that seems the internet’s primary function nowadays.

For those declaring AI evil or inadequate and that it has no place in civilized society (well, in our society), technology has already impacted the film industry. Films used to go on location or build huge sets. Now we (often) see actors standing in front of giant green scenes where the location is later painted in. It seems a little bit disingenuous to preach one betrayal when it’s always happened.

“But what about actors?” you might ask. “Actors are different!”

Well, again, Hollywood was already messing with this before AI.

In 1976, British actor Peter Cushing played Grand Moff Tarkin in Star Wars: A New Hope. Cushing died in 1994. But in 2016, his likeness was resurrected for Star Wars: Rogue One. Similarly, when Paul Walker tragically died in a car accident, his scenes in Furious 7 were completed through CGI. These are instances Hollywood was creating CGI versions of actors when it suited their needs.

People need to stop pretending that AI is the new interloper. Hollywood (and the film industry, like any industry) has evolved as technology has evolved.

Do we descry CGI?

Well, I do sometimes, because I like shouting at clouds, and practical effects always do much more for me because at least they’re bedded in physically existing. I look at them and they look real – or at least realer than CGI landscapes. We used to have matte paintings for backdrops. CGI’s just the digital equivalent.

I would argue that sci-fi featuring model ships still trumps sci-fi featuring CGI battles, as is the case with Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. I still rate the battle between the USS Reliant and the USS Enterprise in Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan as the best and most meaningful space battle I’ve seen, and that was filmed in 1981 – 82.

(The biggest difference, though, is that writer/director Nicholas Meyer infused the scene with context, and we saw and immediately understood the repercussions from each blow, whereas contemporary films just throw as much shit at the screen as they can, and you rarely understand the stakes in a battle.)

But, on the flip side, as much as I prefer practical effects, I understand why movies now use so much green screen and AI.

Hollywood finds a way to exploit new technology. We all do. Ditch your phone and see how long you last. Or don’t rely on Google Maps to get to a new location. Or don’t get that MRI, and rely on an X-Ray. We all incorporate technology into our lives when it suits us.

I’m eagerly (yes eagerly) awaiting for AI to make filmmaking accessible to genuine creators – and let me clarify what I mean about a genuine creator: somebody who aspires to be a writer, who works on their writing, who pounds out draft after draft after draft, who writes for the love of writing and has a story they’re desperate to tell, as opposed to some glory hound who thinks it’s a get rich quick scheme.

Hollywood might rally against it to look like they’re going to fight the good fight, but AI will empower (some) creators meaningfully. Yes, there’ll be a lot of slop as those lazy glory hounds chase fortune and fame and some more fortune by dealing out shit (as if that’s not already happening), but you’ll also have real craftspeople who get to realize their dreams.

I have scripts I’ve written that would cost hundreds of millions to make. Why did you write a story with such a big budget? you might ask. Because I’m an idiot. And I loved this story. And I wanted to tell it. I’m not going to be the only writer in the world who’s written material that exceeds their capability to make it.

Right now, nobody’s going to give me hundreds of millions to make a movie. If you’d like to, please email me. But I know it’s extremely unlikely (but optimistic me always says, Anything’s possible!). I don’t have the clout to get a major studio to invest in my vision the way, say, somebody like James Gunn could. But imagine I could use AI to make a film out of one of my big budget screenplays?

You wouldn’t watch something with AI actors?

Well, it’s likely you’ve watched animated movies, or Pixar movies with CGI characters. Did you tear up when Bambi’s mother dies in the 1942 animated feature? How about when Dobby, a CGI character, dies in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1? Did you loathe Smeagol in The Return of the King? Did Up’s heartbreaking opening move you to tears?

Of course we invest because when we buy into a story, we suspend disbelief. We accept that there are Jedi Knights fighting an evil Empire, that an eccentric professor could make a time machine out of a DeLorean, or that there’s a school for adolescent wizards, and one boy is prophecised to defeat the old enemy.

Most of us won’t scoff at effects. This is why things like Star Trek: The Original Series and Doctor Who are still pop culture phenomena. I can accept that even though the big lizard Captain Kirk’s fighting looks like rubber and paper mache, it is actually an alien lizard.

I’m suspending disbelief. That’s what we do with movies, unless they insult our intelligence. We accept in Star Trek: The Original Series that a starship bridge would just be blinking lights and dials, and that aliens might only be delineated with pointed ears or beards.

We’re not moved by the practical realization of what we’re seeing. It can certainly help – Superman made us believe that Superman could fly. In 1978, that was amazing. Similarly, when Star Wars: A New Hope came out, the effects wowed us. But it’s not the be-all and end-all.

I’d argue that scores have more of an impact – if you doubt that, go watch E.T.’s climactic scene with John Williams score removed.

It falls flat, and that whole thing looks great. Think of his other scores: how foreboding it is in JAWS (Spielberg said if he ever needed to communicate dread, all he had to do was show the water and play the music), how triumphant and inspiring the music is behind Superman, or how rousing and adventurous it is behind Indiana Jones.

But what we ultimately connect to is the storytelling. That’s where we invest. Something seems real to us, even when it’s not. We find relatability in the characters, no matter how extraordinary they are, or how much their circumstances differ to ours. That’s proven by books. They move us and we’re looking at nothing but words and our imagination.

Another criticism is that AI actors will never have the emotional depth or range. Just the other month, I spoke to a young actress who said her acting teacher talked (loftily) about how he could coax a performance and a range of subtlety out of a human, but you couldn’t do that with AI.

Really?

There are AIs that allow you to tweak input. You don’t think it’ll get to the point where you can’t tell it to deliver a line differently? Or to experiment? Hey, make that one word a little more incredulous, and that next one a little bit angrier. Scowl. Smile. Narrow your eyes. What’s more, you could probably get thirty takes in an hour (as a conservative estimate), whereas with a film, thirty takes – coaching actors, resetting scenes, etc. – would take hours and a lot of money. AI platforms will learn and become adaptive, too, and anticipate our needs.

As it is, we’ve all seen television and movies where the acting is shallow – and I’m not talking about so-so movies. There are big movies with terrible acting. (I also think CGI locations exacerbate this as a risk – it’s harder to find the emotional depth and resonance when you’re standing in front of a green screen, rather than in an actual location that’ll set the scene and mood.)

In this case, I would advocate for AI that’ll allow storytellers who invest countless time and energy into their work, but never get into a position to make it (and, sometimes, if not often, in film and television, hard work doesn’t always open the doors you want them to, and even when it does, some people are very compromised by studios).

And just to be clear, this is not advocating for me to have AI do the writing. It’s a tool to realize vision, no different to creating that vision out of CGI, building it from scratch, or casting the right actor. It’s not a substitute to conceive of an idea, flesh it out, and write it into a story.

I think the funniest thing I’ve seen repeatedly is the AI prejudice. Somebody not too long ago told me they could pick AI-generated pictures from real pictures. Great. Tell me if you’re still saying that in six months. I’ve followed the technology. It’s getting better and better. Don’t think it’ll never bridge that gap – then leap past it.

You’re giving these things tremendous power to improve and evolve (and maybe that’s where there should be control exercised, but given humans made a nuclear bomb, and then decided to keep making bigger and better nuclear bombs, we know they won’t).

They ultimately will.