Will the next Goodfellas be made entirely by AI? Or maybe the next “Wolf of Wall Street”? Martin Scorsese probably won’t do that — yet.
But the 83-year-old Oscar-winning director has become the latest auteur to embrace the technology after joining German AI company Black Forest Labs as an advisor. Scorsese is the most high-profile filmmaker to embrace this technology, which has upset many of his peers in Hollywood, and could lead to a paradigm shift in how the film industry embraces its use.
“Movie is a young medium, only 125 years old, so we have to be open to how it evolves,” Scorsese said in a statement announcing the partnership, highlighting how he used Black Forest Labs’ FLUX generation model to assist with storyboarding scenes.
Hollywood’s relationship with AI has oscillated from outright rejection to relatively enthusiastic adoption. Now, the creative community is trying to figure out what Scorsese’s partnership with the Black Forest Institute means for the broader film industry. Some reacted to the news of his partnership with disgust. The reason for this was both his advocacy over AI and a reminder of his past statements defining what is and isn’t considered a “movie”, such as his dismissal of Marvel’s expansive superhero film series.
“My guess is that at 83 years old, his family gave him a lot of money. …He wanted a source of income and felt like the AI was going to flip anyway, so he doesn’t care about that,” I Love Booster director Boots Riley speculated in a post for X on Tuesday, adding that if he doesn’t, “just do the extra thing.”
While it’s too early to tell how extensive his partnership will be (Scorsese’s team declines to share further information, including whether he’s investing in AI companies), the deal does hint at a film industry that may soon decide AI is inevitable. Here are five takeaways.
Creatives are increasingly interested in AI
Scorsese is the latest Oscar winner to perform using AI. It’s not his first time. With his announcement, he joins the ranks of Avatar creator James Cameron. Cameron joined StabilityAI’s board in 2024 to speak out about how the technology could be used to streamline the way big-budget films like “Avatar” and “Dune” are made.
“We’ve got to figure out how to cut that cost in half,” Prime Minister David Cameron told the Boss to the Future podcast last year. “This isn’t about firing half your staff or your effects company. It’s about doubling the speed at which you get certain shots done, so your cadence is faster, your throughput cycles are faster, and your artists can move on and do other great things and then do some other great things. That’s my vision.”
“Traffic” director Steven Soderbergh has gone a step further, using Meta’s AI tools to create sequences for his Cannes Film Festival documentary “John Lennon: The Last Interview,” and plans to use the technology “heavily” in Wagner Moura’s upcoming Spanish-American war film. Soderbergh sees AI as a creative tool comparable to CGI, and claims that the sequences in Lennon’s document would not have been possible without AI tools.
Soderbergh wants to be “transparent” about his use of technology, but he said directors should go for it if that’s the best way to make a movie.
“My moral obligation to myself, to Sean[Lennon]and Yoko[Ono]and to the audience is the best version of this movie,” Soderbergh told Deadline. “And luckily, at the right time, we had some tools in our hands, and I know we ended up with the best version of this movie.”
For Hollywood’s upper-class creators, the best versions of their films are likely to include AI.
Introducing authors who are putting all their efforts into AI
Scorsese has publicly stated that he only uses FLUX as a storyboarding aid, allowing him to better translate his mental vision of a scene into something his crew can bring to life, but his examples of its use illustrate the technology’s influence in the early stages of filmmaking. But now there are no limits to how directors can incorporate it into a film’s workflow.
Soderbergh’s aforementioned adaptation of the Lennon documentary resulted in large-scale sequences being generated by AI, a choice Soderbergh claimed was made to achieve maximum comedic effect. But director Doug Liman, in his “Bitcoin” work with former Relativity Media executive Ryan Kavanaugh’s company Acme AI and FX, fully integrated AI into the $70 million production, which used AI to generate scene backgrounds and direct lighting. The upcoming “Stop That Train” also didn’t use Acme’s AI generation for visual effects, but AI assisted in background workflow processes, people familiar with the matter told Variety.
This shows how even though AI may not be obvious on screen, filmmakers are leveraging the technology to make movies as efficiently as possible and at a much lower cost.
Cost savings with AI…it’s hard to ignore
Scorsese’s films are generally prestigious blockbusters, and their multi-month production schedules tend to match Scorsese’s ambitions. But companies touting AI tools for movies, as well as filmmakers who have used them, claim that they can help significantly shorten production schedules.
Acme claims its tools can reduce movie shooting schedules by 60% to 70%. The 100-person production crew behind Amazon MGM’s Ben Kingsley-starring show “The Old Stories: Moses” was also able to shoot the three-part series in one week on a Los Angeles soundstage, using AI to generate backgrounds within minutes of actors shooting a scene.
The show’s director, John Irwin, who also produced “David’s House” with the help of AI, told the Los Angeles Times that these tools could keep the show’s production costs low and bring back production jobs that were previously outsourced. He believes studios want to greenlight more projects but are scared of rising production costs, a problem that AI can solve. (He produced a four-minute sizzle reel for “Moses,” a prequel to “David,” entirely in AI in January, which was greenlit by Amazon later that month, shot in February, and premiered in May.)
“I think the bigger threat of job loss in our industry is really how expensive things are going to be and how long they’re going to take to make,” Irwin told the Los Angeles Times. “If we can do things faster and we can make things at a price point where studios say yes, we can hire more people in total and create jobs. ”
Is there a generative future led by filmmakers?
Parallel to the integration of AI into the filmmaking process is the rise of fully AI-generated films. The industry is starting to become more receptive to them, potentially paving the way for bold-name directors to take the “helm” of AI projects.
Next week’s Tribeca Festival will premiere “Dreams of Violets,” a 75-minute AI-generated docudrama focused on Iran’s civil resistance movement earlier this year. The film’s presence at the festival caused some controversy, but Tribeca co-founder Jane Rosenthal defended the move to Variety magazine, arguing that the film should be seen in the context of the ongoing Iran war. (Director Ash Kusha said he wanted to tell the story with human actors, but his current lack of access to Iran made that impossible. The $2,000 film was made over three months at his home in London.)
Other AI-generated films are also inching closer to other major festivals, such as Hell Grind, a 95-minute AI-generated action-adventure film that premiered at the Cannes Film Festival’s Film Marketplace last month. The movie cost $500,000 to make.
Such developments have excited filmmakers such as “Rogue One” director Gareth Edwards and “American Gigolo” director Paul Schrader. At Amazon’s AI on the Lot event last month, Schrader touted a future where extras would be replaced by AI, while Edwards said there were plans to make hybrid generative AI movies.
If filmmakers of this caliber are already touting such use cases, what’s stopping someone like Scorsese from bringing this technology to the screen?
There are still people who hate AI
One possible answer is some of Scorsese’s colleagues.
To be fair, Scorsese’s hiring doesn’t mean we collectively embrace AI. Some filmmakers are staunchly anti-AI. For example, “Pan’s Labyrinth” director Guillermo del Toro last month criticized people who believe “art can be made with shitty apps,” and last year said he “would rather die” than use generative AI in his films.
Director Steven Spielberg, arguably one of Hollywood’s top filmmakers, recently said on Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson’s IMO podcast that AI should not be the “last word” in the creative process of how filmmakers decide how to make a movie. Rather, he said, it should remain “a tool in a production designer’s big toolbox.”
“I don’t think there’s an alternative to the soul. I don’t think it’s an algorithm that can be invented,” Spielberg said. “Computers that think they feel more than we feel are anathema to my upbringing and how I will practice my own producing and directing work in the future.”
And Christopher Nolan, president of the Directors Guild of America, told reporters in February that he believed directors must navigate “a myriad of issues” surrounding “control of our films and how they are manipulated through AI” as the union negotiates new contracts with Hollywood studios, which began negotiations last month.
“We have a responsibility to our members to not only look to the future and consider what innovation means and what will change, but also to remain calm,” he said. “We don’t want innovation to be just an excuse to pay our members less.”
So is Scorsese’s introduction of AI technology a major milestone or just a footnote in a broader discussion? It all depends on how the technology develops throughout this iterative era. Even filmmakers as bullish about AI as Edwards don’t know what that era will bring.
“I don’t know where it’s going to go,” Edwards said. “I think anyone who says they know exactly what’s going to happen over the next five years is just a liar.”
