James Cameron is exploring how AI can help the film industry “cut costs in half” without “laying off half the staff”
James Cameron has revealed he is exploring how AI can help the film industry.
Speaking in a new interview on the Boz To The Future podcast, The Avatar franchise creator and director said the future of blockbuster filmmaking hinges on being able to “cut the cost of [visual effects] in half”, and he is trying to figure out how AI might help bring costs down without replacing crew members.
Last September, Cameron joined the board of directors for Stability AI. “In the old days, I would have founded a company to figure it out. I’ve learned maybe that’s not the best way to do it. So I thought, all right, I’ll join the board of a good, competitive company that’s got a good track record,” Cameron said of the decision.
“My goal was not necessarily make a shit pile of money. The goal was to understand the space, to understand what’s on the minds of the developers. What are they targeting? What’s their development cycle? How much resources you have to throw at it to create a new model that does a purpose-built thing, and my goal was to try to integrate it into a VFX workflow.”
He went on to say that audiences want to continue to see movies like “Dune and Dune: Part Two, or one of my films or big effects-heavy, CG-heavy films – we’ve got to figure out how to cut the cost of that in half.”
He added: “Now that’s not about laying off half the staff and at the effects company. That’s about doubling their speed to completion on a given shot, so your cadence is faster and your throughput cycle is faster, and artists get to move on and do other cool things and then other cool things, right? That’s my sort of vision for that.”
Cameron also said generative AI users should be discouraged from feeding prompts into the software such as “in the style of James Cameron” or “in the style of Zack Snyder,” noting that these kinds of ripoffs “make me a little bit queasy.”
Earlier this year, he reportedly confirmed the forthcoming Avatar movie Fire And Ash will include an anti-AI disclaimer and will open with a title card that reads “no generative AI was used in the making of this movie”.
Previously, the director said he doesn’t believe the technology behind AI will be able to replace writers, saying: “It’s never an issue of who wrote it, it’s a question of, is it a good story?”
“I just don’t personally believe that a disembodied mind that’s just regurgitating what other embodied minds have said — about the life that they’ve had, about love, about lying, about fear, about mortality — and just put it all together into a word salad and then regurgitate it … I don’t believe that have something that’s going to move an audience,” Cameron continued.”
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Damian Jones
NME
