Intelligent by design - Sir David Attenborough interview

IBC Daily Executive Issue 2011

Sir David Attenborough explains the vital role technology has played in the evolution of natural history filmmaking.

“Watching time lapse photography of flower buds opening is marvellous in 2D but in 3D it really is transcendental,” says Sir David Attenborough. “You experience the sensation of being able to touch the plant.”

Technology has come a long way since Attenborough’s first foray into filmmaking in the 1950’s but his relationship with innovative recording equipment has been almost as intimate as it has with some of his subjects. While the 85-year-old is among other things a world respected broadcaster and iconic presenter, synonymous with the natural history genre he has helped define, his success has in part been built on a natural affinity and enthusiasm for new storytelling tools.

“In 1952 TV was regarded by the BBC’s governors as essentially electronic,” says the distinguished recipient of IBC’s International Honour for Excellence. “The serious business of broadcasting took place in TV studios – or on radio – and when you asked for extra money to make a film the reaction was ‘what for?’. It was extremely difficult to get funding.

“TV was 405-line monochrome and the telecine machines only had one gauge – 35mm – for reels which cost a fortune and weighed a ton,” he recalls. “It simply wasn’t possible to make the sort of film I wanted to make in Africa in 35mm so I asked to use 16mm and was told in no uncertain terms that 16mm was for amateurs.

“I persisted and put my case to the head of TV who finally agreed to allow me to take 16mm on location (for Zoo Quest) and I became the first user of that format at the BBC. The difficulties didn’t end there because the standard that BBC staff cameramen worked to was also 35mm and most wouldn’t touch 16 with a barge pole so I had to employ freelancers.”

Attenborough recalls that the Cine Special he took on his first expeditions used a side-loading reel running 2 minutes 40 seconds, that it operated for just 40 second bursts and only then by winding it up.

“As you can imagine it was extremely difficult to film any kind of continuity of animal behaviour and there was no way of synchronising sound with picture so I couldn’t talk to camera,” he says.

In the mid-1960s Attenborough was appointed Controller of BBC2, during which time he also helped usher in colour transmissions.  But programme making and the natural world was too big a draw and after resigning in 1973 he spent three years planning and filming Life on Earth which debuted in 1979 to universal acclaim. It was the most ambitious project yet achieved by the BBC Natural History Unit.

“Natural history is full of marvellous opportunities for colour and showing birds of paradise in black and white was a very frustrating thing to have to do,” he says. “Colour meant natural history could be so much more visually exciting and Life on Earth was expressly designed to take advantage of this.”

Another major technical advance, crucial to the evolution of the genre, was the commercial jet plane. “Suddenly you could schedule round-the-world trips to capture environments at different times of the year where previously a trip to Australia to film a three-minute sequence of some owls was just not practical.”

Cheaper, faster flights made 13-hour long series economical.  “Every series that followed was a response to a technical advance,” he says. “The Private Life of Plants was a direct response to the introduction of servers which allowed you to film continuously over long periods, to generate amazing time lapse footage. Infra-red cameras enabled us to film the nocturnal behaviour of mammals (The Life of Mammals) that had not been possible before. Cool lighting systems and highly light-sensitive cameras allowed us to film insects on a macro scale whereas previously the poor things had been scared by the light and heat and had exhibited abnormal behaviour.

“Digital of course made a huge difference with cameras that can operate soundlessly without scaring wildlife, that you record hours of footage on just waiting for something to happen, and also miniaturised so you can put them in hides.”

The last big technical change, he suggests, was the introduction of gyro-mounted helicopters which enabled aerial shots of wildlife activity, of wolves hunting buffalo for example, that had never been seen before.

More recently Attenborough has been pioneering 3DTV documentaries, closely involved in the production of Flying Monsters 3D (Atlantic Productions for Sky) which was the first of its kind to win a BAFTA.

“3D works under certain circumstances and depends on how you produce it,” he says. “Right now, the technology is limiting although the results can be liberating. It takes four-to-five people to lift the cameras and 30 minutes to change a lens, which is no way to react to fast moving animal behaviour. The systems are very temperamental which means you could be sitting around for an hour and half while the cameras are aligned.

“Frankly it’s a nightmare to anyone accustomed to crawling through the bushes trying to get close to nervous animals with a small camera capable of capturing sound and vision. You can’t do it with 3D – at the moment.”

The restrictions on the use of long lenses, which tend to create a flat, cardboard-like effect, are equally limiting.

“If you ask a cameraman to go to South America and film landscapes in 3D but they are not allowed to use lenses longer than 75mm then they are simply not going to be able to bring back content as good as it would be in 2D. Audience’s expectations will be let down and that is to be avoided at all costs.

“That’s why you have to choose your subjects carefully to exploit the value of 3D. I chose to work with fossils (for Flying Monsters 3D) and deliberately that of a creature which moved in three dimensions so that its 40ft wing span can fly over the audience if you wish it to.”

Atlantic Productions’ follow-up is Bachelor King, a 3D narrative documentary currently in postproduction about penguins on the island of South Georgia. Again, it was Attenborough’s choice.

“The thing about 150,000 penguins on a beach is that they look identical so that when they move or you lose track of them during filming you can simply construct the story from another one,” he says. “The beach’s other inhabitants included seals, and they don’t move too fast either.”

He believes that the future for 3D depends on technical development. “At the moment the big problem with 3DTV is that you have to wear glasses which occlude light. That means you can’t see the person next to you, read a newspaper or do anything you would normally do other than watch the TV and that means you have to have event programming.”

Although he has just completed another landmark production Frozen Planet, following the cycle of the polar seasons, which took three years to film and saw him film at the north pole for the first time, Attenborough continues to search for new worlds to explore.

“We still know remarkably little about the deep ocean because our technology is limited by pressure at depth – but that would make for an incredible subject,” he says. “As for the next thing after 3D, that could be holograms. Imagine that – creatures popping out of your TV and appearing in your living room.”

Mathieu Kassovitz tells filmmakers: “Adapt or die”

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The French director and actor has ditched CGI for AI in his next film and says AI is part of the creative dialogue

There’s no more propulsive, streetwise or analogue movie than 1995’s Cannes Film lauded classic La Haine (Hate) but its writer director Mathieu Kassovitz now believes actors and all below the line crafts could soon be superseded by AI.

So much so that he is rewiring the production of his latest film with AI from set design to performance.

“I’m preparing a film that simply couldn’t be made without AI,” he says, describing The Big War, his adaptation of French comic-strip artist Edmond Calvo’s 1945 masterpiece La Bête est Morte! Featuring animal characters and set during the Nazi occupation of France during World War II, Kassovitz’ version of the satire will be photorealistic.

“The comic is very Walt Disney, but I’m making a very realistic film,” he explained to IBC365 at the World AI Film Festival in Cannes. “Realistic rabbits in realistic forests, with tanks, with the human war in the background, and rabbits fighting big bad wolves in the forest.”

Quotes from VFX studios in France and the US ranged between 50 to 60 million dollars.  “For a film for children, but about war, that’s not a risk I want to take. Not a risk financiers should take. And it’s not good for cinema. I like films whose commercial ambition matches their budget.”

During the 3–5 years of prep “AI arrived,” and everything changed. “I subscribed to one of these models and typed: ‘little rabbit in a burning forest’. The images weren’t what they are today, but already they were astonishing. And that completely changed how I thought about the film.”

What AI unlocked was not just cost reduction — though he says the film’s budget has been slashed by almost two thirds — but creative freedom.

“Traditionally, making this film would require going into forests with a crew, filming ping-pong balls placed where the characters will be, then a team comes to volumetrically scan the place, then I wait six months before seeing my characters in the environment. It gives me very few editing choices. And it’s a physically demanding but not very interesting shoot. No actors; just a soundtrack and ping-pong balls.”

“Now, I can generate and iterate on images much more freely. For example, my characters are 70 cm tall. If I shoot at 35mm from 1.2 metres, I see their feet touching the ground.  Showing just that simple detail of contact with the ground explodes the cost of a VFX shot. Previously, I had to avoid this. Now, all 760 shots can be staged differently. I can generate the environments and the character as I want them and with far greater naturalism than the best VFX today.”

Kassovitz recently paused pre-production to pour resources into a new studio and hiring coders and engineers to program and train bespoke tools for the film.

He compares the moment to George Lucas inventing the tools he needed for Star Wars. “He had a script, but the VFX of the time weren’t good enough or were too expensive, so he built his own tools.”

“For the past couple of years, we’ve been working with designers to develop our characters, costumes, and environments. We create everything first, then use AI as a tool to build on that foundation.”

The challenge isn’t generating images. “AI can give you a 100 million dollar image on your screen in five minutes,” he says. “The challenge is control. If I ask a character to move left, will it move left consistently? Can I actually make a full film this way?

“To do that, we need to build tools on top of existing models—layers, APIs, systems that allow us to control outputs precisely for filmmaking purposes.

“Right now, AI is like the early internet. A powerful framework that’s open to everyone, but still chaotic. The real value comes from building the tools that sit on top of it—the ‘clients,’ in a way—that make it usable.”

For Kassovitz, AI is not replacing the collaborative nature of filmmaking; not yet. “Cinema is never the work of one person. It’s 50 people… actors, technicians, editors and everyone brings something to the table. Now we have something that we can all gather around and say: ‘here’s what I give you, what do you give me back?’ And from there, a creative ping pong begins.

“If I were someone like Ridley Scott, maybe I could get write my own cheque. If I were Terry Gilliam maybe I could illustrate characters and sets but I can’t. I rely on people who are good at that to provide the spark which we then feed into the machine. The AI expands and refine those ideas. It isn’t just executing instructions. It becomes part of the creative dialogue.”

And yet, Kassovitz has seen something in AI that startled even him. Taking out his phone he shows IBC365 a video from a 20-minute AI-made film of a wizened old man staring back in close-up.

“I felt an emotion that gave me chills. Genuine emotion in the character’s eyes, just like you would expect from a human actor. That’s when I thought, we have a problem.  Because honestly, I’m not sure you could always get that from a real actor in the same way. In fact, you cannot have an actor that looks like that.”

The implications for actors as well as technical crafts are profound. “They have to adapt or die,” he says. “That’s how it’s always worked. When blue screen came in, it changed sets. When digital cameras replaced film, it changed workflows. In every revolution you have some artisanal layers that have to evolve.”

That doesn’t mean everything disappears. For example, stop-motion animation still exists. “It’s slower, more labour-intensive, but it has a unique quality that audiences can feel. If you’re passionate enough to spend years on something like that, it will show and it will be different from what AI produces.

“There will always be credits. There will always be heads of department. Unfortunately, some roles will disappear or be recycled elsewhere. But it’s like when digital arrived: suddenly cameras became accessible. Before digital, you couldn’t touch a camera unless you were certified. Today it’s accessible to everyone. Is that good or bad? I think it’s good.”

He predicts the rise of AI “superstars” - entirely digital actors with millions of followers. “I guarantee you that in a few years people will want to see the Tom Cruise that they have in their head and not the real Tom Cruise… and Tom Cruise would say, you know what? Give me my money, have fun.

“In my case, for The Big War, I’m not really using traditional actors on screen. I’m working with animated characters like rabbits and animals. The actors I do work with are voice actors. But even there, AI gives me more freedom. I don’t have to put performers in motion-capture suits with cameras strapped to their heads. I can focus more on creative direction and performance.

“In a few years, audiences may not even question it. Younger generations won’t necessarily care whether something is AI-generated or not. Unless it’s explicitly labelled, they may not even be able to tell the difference.”#

He is blunt about the industry’s anxieties. “Yes, AI can produce a lot of crap, but humans have produced crap for 40 years too. What matters is authorship. The only limit is my taste. I feed the machine with my inspiration, and I must get back something that feels like what I’d get from a human team.”

Kassovitz was dismissive of attempts to reward filmmakers for AI models trained on their work – even his own.

“In La Haine I stole shots from Scorsese who stole from Kurosawa who stole from Eisenstein. That’s the fucking rule.”

A scene of Vinz (Vincent Cassel) posing with his hand as a gun in front of a mirror is an acknowledged lift from Taxi Driver. A rooftop scene where one of the characters clicks his fingers to turn off the lights on the Eiffel Tower “like they do in movies” is another. “I stole that from an Italian film,” Kassovitz says.   

“What matters is intent. If I see some guys that are doing La Haine… and they’re doing some stupid shit with it, of course I’m gonna say, what the fuck are you doing? I’m going to sue you. Come and ask me, you can have my permission, we can work on it. No problem. But theft is theft with or without AI.”

He admits to having lost some love for cinema in the decades since La Haine’s release “because VFX are everywhere, even in intimate films. I no longer know what I’m looking at,” he says. “is it real snow? A real car? A real apartment? It kills emotion. But now we’re no longer in fake reality — we’re in recreated reality.

“We were lucky to know analogue. To go from 16mm to Super 8 and 35mm to 70mm The next generation won’t know that and that’s tragic. But it will push people to be more personal, more creative — to do things AI can’t do.”

The future, he believes, lies in specialised cinematic models: “If we create cinema‑specific models trained only on films — millions of hours of art — we might create the last artistic tool we’ll ever need.”

Building the new production map

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Mexico, Thailand, and Morocco are racing to expand their studio infrastructure, each reshaping their screen industries through a mix of incentives, training, and strategic investment. In the process they are transforming local talent pools, attracting global projects, and redefining regional filmmaking power.

In 1996, when James Cameron and 20th Century Fox went hunting for a coastline to build the world of Titanic they inadvertently reshaped Mexico’s film landscape. Rosarito, once a small fishing town, saw hotels, vendors, and real estate spring up around the prefab studio overnight.

“That’s what detonated the film boom in Baja,” says Luisa Gómez de Silva, who got her break assisting on the production and went on to produce All Is Lost (2013) and Paramount+ shows Lady Scorpions and Kung Fu Games (both 2024) at the facility.

 “Most of the technical crew came from Mexico City, and most didn’t speak English. Those of us from the border did speak English but lacked technical experience, so we learned from each other. Many who started as maintenance workers are now gaffers, key grips, carpenters, decorators, costume designers, and sound mixers working internationally. They call us the ‘Titanic generation’.”

Before Titanic, Mexico’s major studio infrastructure was concentrated in Mexico City -primarily at 80-year Estudios Churubusco. Baja Studios created a new production hub hosting Tomorrow Never Dies, Pearl Harbour, Master and Commander, and more.

In the last decade, new stages such as Estudios GGM and Maravilla Studios have opened around the capital but the infrastructure isn’t evenly distributed. When Baja Studios closed in 2023 for refurbishment, water‑tank‑dependent productions had nowhere comparable to go. (The studio recently reopened its water tank and office spaces). Several projects relocated abroad, including biblical drama Mary which ultimately shot at Atlas Studios in Morocco.

Seeing Mexico as a strategic hub for Latin America, in part due to its proximity to Los Angeles, streamers have begun to decentralise production beyond the capital. 

“A vast majority of the economy and population is in the Mexico City area but culturally important cities exist across the country,” explains Francisco Ramos, Netflix VP Content for Latin America. “We’ve brought productions to more than 50 cities in 25 [of 32] states so far. Previously, we’d only go for a day or two for a location. Now we’re setting entire stories elsewhere.”

Mexico was home to Netflix first local-language original outside of the US (Club of Crows / Club de Cuervos in 2015. “Until then, the industry mostly produced either indie features or telenovelas, all produced in‑house by broadcasters. Those networks had studio infrastructure, but the ecosystem wasn’t built to sustain a modern production environment with incentives and recurring high‑end work.”

In 2018, when miniseries La Casa de las Flores (The House of Flowers) shot in Guadalajara Netflix had to import heads of department. On successive projects, more of the crew were local.

“There’s a snowball effect as talent relocates,” he says. “People used to feel their careers couldn’t take off unless they moved to Mexico City. Now, with production happening locally, that’s changing. We’re seeing private companies wanting to build stages in Guadalajara, and Monterrey. When we start producing in a new city, infrastructure follows.”

Todd Haynes recently directed Pedro Pascal in period romance De Noche for Christine Vachon’s Killer Films in Guadalajara.

At the same time, Netflix is investing $2m into Churubusco to improve facilities. “We want to help make it a place where we, our competitors, and independent producers can work, and bring it closer to state-of-the-art standards,” he says. “It’s similar to how we operate in the U.S. and UK: making studios not only modern but sustainable.”

Other regions are still developing. South of the country, around Mérida in Yucatán for example, offers striking locations but limited crew. “Pretty much 95% had to be outsourced,” says Gómez de Silva of period drama Pedro Pan currently in production with Andy García and Paz Vega. “We brought equipment and crew from Mexico City and Baja.”

For years, Mexico’s only financial incentive was a VAT reimbursement – “helpful, but not competitive” says Gómez de Silva. Jalisco broke ground with a 20% cash rebate, drawing streamer productions to Guadalajara and Puerto Vallarta.

Now, a 30% national tax credit is finally in place. “It’s not the cash rebate producers hoped for, but it’s a major step forward,” she says. Productions must spend at least 40m pesos (about $2.3m) and can receive up to that amount back, provided 70% of the budget is spent in Mexico. “Rules of operation are expected soon, and producers are already budgeting with the incentive in mind.”

With a $1bn investment over four years (2025-2028) Netflix aims to increase output beyond 20 titles a year and to push domestic production to a higher level of quality.

“Alongside the investment, our public policy teams are working with state and federal governments, and with industry associations to upskill talent,” Ramos says. “If we have the best studios, the best post‑production, the best VFX, but not extraordinary writers, directors, producers, production designers, then the industry can’t scale.”

Proximity to the U.S. is a huge advantage, says Ramos helping Mexico develop faster than the rest of Latin America.

“If we make more high‑end series and films, the kind the market couldn’t previously execute, then in five years, people won’t even realise how much the industry has levelled up. Producing something like The Crown requires extraordinary craft and scale. Very few countries can do that. But long‑term thinking pays off.”

 

 

Thailand

Until the 2020s Thailand’s film and TV industry largely catered to a domestic market with occasional Hollywood productions like The Deer Hunter (1978), Good Morning Vietnam (1986) and The Beach (2000) flying in to shoot locations.

“After those early international productions, filmmakers and producers advised that Thailand needed more advanced studio facilities,” explains Sujitra Jampathong, Acting Deputy Director of Foreign Affairs and Corporate Communications at The Studio Park. “Directors and cinematographers told us they required high-quality sound stages. So in 2018, we built Thailand’s first international-standard sound stage studio.”

Netflix action feature Extraction (2020) was the first major project to shoot at the facility near Bangkok “which helped demonstrate that Thailand could support large-scale international productions.”

It boasts five soundstages including Thailand's largest at 2,400 sqm, and recently housed Disney sci-fi series Alien: Earth – just one of 546 international productions hosted by the country last year, according to the Thailand Film Office. Nearly half of those were commercials shoots and 6.6% were features generating a record 7.7 billion THB ($233m) of which the US contributed over 56%. A 30% cash rebate effective from January 2025 is one factor in the boom.

“Thailand has a decades-long legacy as a top global filming destination and over the years, the production industry learned from and adopted international production standards,” says Malobika Banerji, Snr Director, Content, SEA for Netflix. “This has spurred the growth of local production infrastructure and technical expertise.”

Netflix invested $200m in local content between 2021 to 2024, employing more than 13,500 cast and crew across Thailand. More than 33 Thai titles have charted Netflix’s global top 10.

It has funded 500 people through an entry level training program and also established a training scheme to “level-up” professionals to “meet the growing needs of the local production industry. “In Thailand, our sessions have focused on script supervision, sound design, and VFX,” Banerji says. Its 2026 release slate includes director Taweewat Wantha’s My Dearest Assassin.

More space is being built: Bangkok Studios is a 185,806 sqm development which aims to establish a “pivotal hub” in the global entertainment industry.

“It’s important that we continue to build more high-quality soundstages in Thailand,” asserts Gong Suphanakhan, Director, Production Management for Netflix in the region. “These are increasingly essential to the growth of local productions as they enable more sustainable and efficient ways of working. They help lower the industry’s environmental footprint by reducing travel, and allow for greater control during filming which minimises fixes in post-production.”

 

 

Morocco

Productions like Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey usually come to Morocco for the exteriors but increasing global demand for studio space is being seized on by producer Khadijah Alami to base more work in the country.

Alami founded Oasis Studios in Ouarzazate in the same region as Atlas Studios (xxxx) and plans to build another 1,000 sqm stage, plus a backlot and standing sets with ancillary facilities.

She is also leading a €70m ($80.4m) project to build a 80 hectare complex located between Rabat and Casablanca. Construction on Argan Studios is expected to begin in May and the first stages operational early 2027.

“In Morocco, productions tend to go to the US, UK, or Europe to shoot interiors on soundstages,” Alami says. “We lose that part of the business. So the goal is to build proper, high-standard stages so productions can do everything here: stages, standing sets, and locations.”

The 30% cash rebate on eligible spend introduced in 2022 is “one of the easiest in the world to access,” she claims. “You need to spend €1m ($1.14m) and shoot for 18 days - no cultural tests or complicated criteria. Every production that has applied has received reimbursement without delays. Foreign productions can open a temporary bank account in Morocco without registering an SPV locally. Once the account is open, VAT exemption is granted within 48 hours. Productions control their own funds, and the rebate is paid directly into their account—no commissions, no intermediaries. Put all that together, and Morocco becomes significantly more cost‑effective than Europe.”

Alami envisions Argan Studios as a model that can be replicated in other parts of Morocco and across the continent. There are tentative initiatives in Ghana and Tanzania, backed by actor and producer Idris Elba to build West and/or East African filmmaking hubs based around new studios from scratch.  

“Idris’s project in Ghana is a good initiative but what Africa needs—and what Morocco has—is government involvement and a national strategy,” Alami says.

Aside from studio infrastructure, she says there needs to be a clear permitting system, financial facilities, training programmes, political stability and a long‑term vision.

“Morocco’s advantage is decades of experience. Our crews have worked with productions from all over the world. Even if they don’t speak the language, they know the craft. Training on the ground is what matters most.”

Alami is on the advisory board of Next Narrative Africa Fund which supports African content. One of her goals is to create a network between African countries. “For example, if Ghana has a film but lacks crew, they could bring Moroccan crew to train their teams on site—or send their trainees to Morocco,” she explains. “But governments need to collaborate to make these programmes possible.”

Seven talking points from the World AI Film Festival in Cannes

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The second World AI Film Festival (WAIFF) showcased films, shorts, advertising and micro-series created using at least three generative AI tools, including one for image creation.

It took place from April 21-22 in Cannes. 

A jury led by French filmmaker Agnès Jaoui and festival president Gong Li handed the best film prize to 12-minute short Costa Verde, a personal story about childhood from French writer-director Léo Cannone, produced by the UK’s New Forest Films. 

Screen rounds up seven key talking points from the festival.

AI tools are evolving fast 

“Last year’s best films wouldn’t make the official selection of 54 films this year,” said WAIFF artistic director Julien Raout of the quality of this year’s titles. “The tools have evolved faster than any technology we’ve ever seen in video creation.” 

Last year’s inaugural edition attracted 1,500 submissions from 80 countries. This year, the numbers exploded to over 7,000 submissions, of which 1,300 were from South Korea.

However, films from US creators were thin on the ground. “Hollywood studios are scared,” suggested WAIFF founder Marco Fandi. “They should embrace AI and help the evolution.”

An edition of WAIFF is launching in Los Angeles in October.

Established filmmakers are turning to AI

Veteran French filmmaker Claude Lelouch talked about embarking on his 52nd feature using AI. “My last films didn’t do very well. Since I’m struggling to find money, I’m turning to AI,” he admitted. “AI is a camera that gives you images even before you’ve filmed anything. It will change cinema.”

Actor-director Mathieu Kassovitz explained he had paused pre-production on his animated feature God Of War to build AI tools superior, in his view, to CGI.

“A project that might have cost $50-60m is now closer to $25m using AI,” he said. “But it is not just about cost. AI is also generating ideas. It becomes part of the creative dialogue.”

The key challenge was not image generation, he said, but control. “If I ask a character to move left, will it move left consistently? Can I actually make a full film this way? To do that, we need to build tools on top of existing models – layers, APIs, systems that allow us to control outputs precisely for filmmaking purposes.”

AI fears need to be faced

French filmmaker Jaoui said she felt “terrorised by AI and all the fantasies it represents,” which is partly why she accepted the invitation to sit on this year’s WAIFF jury.

“Whether we like it or not, AI exists and we might as well go and see what it is exactly, rather than being overwhelmed by our fears and rumours,” Jaoui said.

“To be an actor is unique in the way we are exposing our soul, and from what I have seen so far, there is no emotion in AI,” said actor and festival juror Elsa Zylberstein. “AI might work for action, VFX and period films, but not the human dramas that I care most about.”

Yet Generative AI is advancing at pace. The AI‑generated characters in last year’s entries “looked wooden,” according to Raout. “Now you can feel emotion with micro‑expressions, proper lip‑sync and believable faces.”

Actors and craftspeople working in production design and cinematography will have to adapt, insisted Kassovitz.

“That’s how it’s always worked. When bluescreen came in, it changed sets. When digital cameras replaced film, it changed workflows. Every technological shift forces parts of the industry to evolve.

“Younger generations won’t necessarily care whether something is AI-generated or not,” he claimed. “Unless it’s explicitly labelled, they may not even be able to tell the difference.”

New copyright model is needed

While evangelising the use of AI as “augmented imagination”, musician Jean-Michel Jarre, the festival’s ambassador, called for copyright regulation and artist remuneration.

“Human creation is the foundation of generative AI. At some point, we must stop being treated merely as data suppliers and instead be treated as business partners,” he said. 

The need to establish rules for AI is urgent, he added. “We need to bring together cinema, music, books, video games, literature, journalism and reach global agreements. I don’t believe we can apply traditional copyright philosophy anymore, simply because most algorithms can no longer identify the exact origin of their sources. It will be difficult to demand traditional copyright remuneration. We need a new model.”

Launching a ‘Netflix of AI’

WAIFF insists its primary purpose is to surface new creators. Landi cited this year’s standout film Beginning, winner of the Emotion award, by Jordanian filmmaker Ibraheem Diab as an example of the unexpected voices emerging through AI‑enabled production. 

“We received 86 films from Iran,” he added. “We want to provide a window for these new talents to show their creativity.”

WAIFF is developing its own online distribution platform which could launch in the next few months. “We want to launch a ‘Netflix for AI films’,” Raout revealed. “We already have at least 500 very strong films, far beyond the official selection, and we want to showcase them to audiences and be a place where creators can monetise their work and maintain control of their IP.”

As to whether audiences want AI content, Raout was in no doubt. “Young people are bored with low‑effort AI fakes. They want real creators using AI as a tool to tell meaningful stories. They want new voices with new ideas, not the same stories recycled by big production companies.”

Feature-length fiction AI films are coming soon 

In 2025, WAIFF allowed submissions for films to be as short as one minute. This year, it raised the bar to 10 minutes for shorts while entries into the long-form category had to be at least 25 minutes long. 

The winner of the long-form category was Napoléon III, Le Prix De L’Audace, a docu-series produced by Federation Studios, directed by Edouard Jacques, already broadcast on Canal+ and TV5 Quebec. 

“We received some feature‑length submissions, but not many,” said Raout. “Next year, we’ll have full AI fiction features over an hour long.”

A technological tipping point may already have been breached. “For the first time, I cannot tell whether a shot was filmed or generated,” said Gilles Guerraz, CEO at AI training agency Nextrend. “The technology is here. But without artistic intention, AI alone won’t create meaningful work.”

Cannes provocation or cooperation?

The festival shifted location from Nice to Cannes just a few weeks ahead of the 79th Cannes Film Festival. 

While WAIFF entries must include use of Generative AI, the Cannes Film Festival has outlawed the technology as a principal authoring tool. Nonetheless, AI is permitted for technical processes such as sound restoration, provided its use is acknowledged. Meanwhile, the Marché du Film’s Cannes Next program includes an ‘AI for Talent’ summit. 

The lines are blurring. “One day, there will no need for a separate AI film festival,” said WAIFF’s Landi. “One day it will all just be film.”