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Australian director Alex Proyas, best known for The Crow, Dark City and I Robot, could not be more strongly opposed to triple Oscar-winner Guillermo del Toro’s warning last week about the dangers of using artificial intelligence to make films.
The Mexican director of Pan’s Labyrinth, The Shape of Water and Frankenstein sounded the alarm in Los Angeles about the encroachment of AI in the human-led process of making art, saying he would “rather die” than use it to make a film.
“I know Guillermo,” Proyas said, “and he’s a brilliant filmmaker and a very nice man but he’s absolutely wrong on this particular issue. There’s a lot of pushback, of course, and it’s completely understandable. I feel like I’m at the advent of the talkie and it’s the actors with a voice fighting the actors who were silent.”
If that sounds like a big call – that AI will change film as much as sound changed cinema – Proyas is a believer enough to be preparing to shoot a new film in Los Angeles, the sci-fi satire Heaven, using what he calls a hybrid model of AI.
He said a film that might have cost $US100 million ($143 million) to make by traditional methods but was viewed as “uncommercial in the eyes of the mainstream studios” could be shot for a fraction of the cost and be finished much quicker.
Proyas is currently casting Heaven in Sydney. His first film as director since 2016’s Gods of Egypt, it’s about a man who uploads his consciousness to an apparently perfect afterlife but discovers that it’s a long way from paradise.
Proyas is also leading the judging panel for the AI film festival Omni 1.5, which takes place in Sydney’s Haymarket on July 3.
“What I like about generative AI is that it’s allowing a lot more filmmakers who didn’t have access to tell their original stories,” he said. “The gatekeepers have been pushed to the side for the moment.
“Suddenly there’ll be many more new voices – young voices, diverse voices, unique voices – bringing new work and new vision to the screen. That’s why I believe in it and that’s why I’m also actively engaged in creating work deploying AI.”
Proyas said AI films had almost reached the stage of being just as convincing as traditionally made films.
“Every day something new pops up that is truly remarkable,” he said. “The tests we’ve been doing for Heaven are incredible. The line between photo reality and where AI started, which was very bad images of Will Smith eating spaghetti, is blurring more and more.
“Soon it will be invisible, just as in the early days of computer graphics ‘uncanny valley’ was awful and it took a long time for audiences to accept it as a legitimate creative storytelling tool for filmmakers. Now, of course, it’s invisible and AI will follow that same pathway. It’s inevitable.”
Proyas said Heaven still started with him writing the script and only using AI as a research tool, like an “advanced Google”.
“We use real actors – real human actors – and we’re on a set with a crew,” he said. “A much diminished crew, of course, because the tools allow you to do so much more [with] a leaner operation. It’s cheaper as a result because there are fewer mouths to feed in that process.
“But that opens up the possibility of more artists doing world building-type stories in a way that they wouldn’t been able to do in the past.
“So I’m on the set with my real human collaborators – my actors, my camera team, my sound team, my first AD, my script supervisor, my production designer, my costume designer – because all these people are essential to the collaborative human endeavour that I embark on.”
The film would then use propriety AI from Hollywood’s Ex Machina Studios that allowed what it calls “expansive worlds to be realised at a responsible budget while preserving the primacy of real actors, human-authored narratives and guild-aligned production practices”.
While Proyas said it was important to have a conversation about how AI was affecting “the entire fabric of commerce and life”, films from ethical filmmakers would still be human-led.
“The confusion is that people believe that ethical human creators will sit behind a computer and prompt an entire movie that wipes out the humanity and that wipes out the jobs,” he said. “Yes, there might be some people who will do that, and that may be a whole other art form that’s created.
