Zack Snyder not It seems we’re very worried about AI disrupting the world of film, bringing dozens of newbies into the fold. On WIRED The big interview event On Tuesday in San Francisco, the director told editor-in-chief Hemal Jhaveri that “every person has a pretty good movie camera on their phone, and yet we don’t have (at least at this second) millions of incredible movies uploaded from people’s pockets.”
That doesn’t mean I think Hollywood creatives can avoid AI entirely. “Right now it’s important to educate yourself and understand what you can and can’t do, especially when it exists in image creation and storytelling,” Snyder said. “You have to understand what it is and what it’s not capable of doing, and you have to be able to use it as a tool instead of standing on the sidelines with your hands on your hips.”
While Snyder says he still sometimes questions the “why” of AI filmmaking, wondering what the point of using the technology would be if you just wanted to film footage of someone sitting in a chair in a living room, for For example, it also recognizes the potential of technology to make some shots more accessible. “AI doesn’t care if a house is on fire, if it’s on Mars, or if it’s underwater,” he told Jhaveri. “All the things that might cost a filmmaker a lot of money to film are no different, for AI.”
Snyder says he’s especially intrigued by the idea of an AI that can understand a film or the filmmaker’s aesthetic core, as if it were able to film an actor’s performance and then sync it to a set world created by the production designer in a kind of “aesthetic bench”. If an AI could understand what you really want (the “dust motes,” a backlight, the general layout of the stage) instead of simply conveying its interpretation of what it thinks you’re asking, then, think, “the concept It’s pretty amazing.”
As a director who has made several films, superhero and otherwise, with a huge variety of visual effects, Snyder says he is no stranger to “a very virtual world when it comes to filmmaking.” Still, he says, he has always seen artistic performance at the forefront of what we ultimately see on screen. Everything that isn’t an actor is simply “context,” he says.
“My favorite movies are those in which I can feel the director’s hand. “I want that human point of view to move me narratively through a story in a way that I wouldn’t have thought about or couldn’t imagine what would happen next,” Snyder says. “As an audience, that’s what we pay for and that’s what we crave. However, how we get to that very human thing… well, that could change.”
The way audiences watch movies could also change, Snyder says, acknowledging that streaming services like Netflix have become an absolute juggernaut in the movie world. The films and shows he has made for the platform have been seen by millions more eyes than could have seen them in the cinema, he says, and even films classified as “blockbusters” have attracted and will undoubtedly attract a larger audience if they are in a larger audience. streaming service that they would do at the box office.
As a director, Snyder says, as long as you’re aware that you’re making something exclusively for streaming, then you’re up for the challenge. “I find it rude to say that I am not an artist if my film is not in the cinema,” he told Jhaveri. “If you’re the streamer, you’re paying for the movie, and if you say, ‘This is our format and 250 million people will probably watch it on their phones’ from the beginning of our conversation, then I have to know that that’s the reality. And if that’s the case, then you should be fine with whatever happens next.”