IBC
article here
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Haine (Hate) but its writer director Mathieu Kassovitz now believes actors and all below the line crafts could soon be superseded by AI.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.”
No comments:
Post a Comment