Soderbergh was openly talking about AI at the festival—a position that isn’t easy to take when there’s still so much backlash. “I was going to have to wear this. I’m going to be expected to speak for them or about this technology,” he says. “That’s the trade off to make the best version of this.”
Others may have not been so keen to discuss it, but were forced to do so at press conferences. Jury member Demi Moore kicked it off on the first day, saying, “AI is here. And so to fight it is to fight something that is a battle that we will lose. So to find ways in which we can work with it, I think, is a more valuable path to take.” She incurred plenty of wrath on social media for it.
Seth Rogen, in town for the animated film Tangle, went the other direction in his comments: “If your instinct is to use AI and skip that creative process, you shouldn’t be a writer, because you’re not writing.” Guillermo del Toro, who has been one of the most outspoken critics of the tech, also made his feeling clear while in town for an anniversary screening of Pan’s Labyrinth. “Fuck AI,” he said, criticizing the idea that “art can be done with a fucking app.”
Nicolas Winding Refn, whose film Her Private Hell played out of competition, said he was more open to the tech, after testing it out on an upcoming project. “For me, it’s like a brush,” he said. “And obviously, no one really knows all the implications of what this is going to do and what’s going to happen, but from the perspective of creativity it’s a new invention. And then it’s what you’re going to do with it.”
Refn isn’t the only director who’s been dabbling; there’s been a major increase in the number of filmmakers who are exploring AI, and some brought their projects to show to buyers this year. The market—where films are packaged and sold to international distributors—was overflowing with AI projects. Doug Liman attended the first couple days of the festival to show footage from Bitcoin, his feature film starring Casey Affleck, Pete Davidson, and Gal Gadot that uses AI technology for the settings and backgrounds in the film, while still enlisting real actors. Liman’s AI company 30 Ninjas is behind the technology needed to make the film, but Liman still brought on traditional department heads, like a cinematographer and production designer, to lead the design of those AI-generated sets.
Also selling in the market at Cannes was Critterz, an animated family film originally made with OpenAI’s Soros. Since the company shut down the program, the team behind the film, which follows little woodland creatures, utilized other AI-generated programs to complete it. “I remember even when we did the announcement last fall, just looking online, there were already pre-boycotts of the film. And it’s fine. I get it,” says Critterz producer Nik Kleverov, founder of creative agency Native Foreign. “I think one of the things that is a misnomer is that we’re trying to stop creativity or replace creatives. I think we actually need creatives more now than ever because strong voices and creative voices are what make the difference between something that is generic AI slop and something that can be a good piece of work.”
