At a time when capitalist forces are driving much of the advancement in artificial intelligence, Alex Proyas sees the use of AI in film-making as a source of artistic liberation.
While many in the film sector see the emergence of artificial intelligence as a threat to their careers, livelihoods and even likenesses, the Australian film-maker behind The Crow, Dark City and I, Robot, believes the technology will make it much easier and cheaper to get projects off the ground.
“The model for film-makers, who are the only people I really care about at the end of the day, is broken … and it’s not AI that’s causing that,” Proyas tells the Guardian.
“It’s the industry, it’s streaming.”
He says residuals that film-makers used to rely on between projects are drying up in the streaming era, and the budgets for projects becoming smaller.
“We need to rebuild it from the ground up. I believe AI can help us do that, because as it lowers the cost threshold to produce stuff, and as every month goes by, it’s lowering it and lowering it, we can do more for less, and we can hopefully retain more ownership of those projects,” he says.
Proyas’s next film, RUR, is the story of a woman seeking to emancipate robots in an island factory from capitalist exploitation. Based on a 1920 Czech satirical play, the film stars Samantha Allsop, Lindsay Farris and Anthony LaPaglia and has been filming since October last year.
Proyas’s company, Heretic Foundation, was established in Alexandria in Sydney in 2020, and Proyas described it at the time as a “soup to nuts production” house for film. He says RUR can be made at a fraction of the US$100m cost it would have been in a traditional studio.
This is partly due to being able to complete much of the work directly in the studio via virtual production through a partnership with technology giant Dell that provides workstations that allow generative AI asset creation in real time as the film is made.
The production time for environment design can be reduced from six months to eight weeks, according to Proyas.
In Proyas’s 2004 film I, Robot – made at a time when AI was much more firmly in the realm of science fiction – the robots had taken on many of the jobs in the world set in 2035, until it went wrong. Asked whether he is concerned about what AI means for jobs in film, particularly areas like visual effects, Proyas says “workforces are going to be streamlined” but people could be retrained.
“I believe there will be work for everyone who embraces and moves forward with the technology as we’ve always done in the film industry,” he says.
The Guardian is speaking to Proyas in the same week Australia’s Productivity Commission came under fire from creative industries for opening discussion on whether AI companies should get free access to everyone’s creative works to train their models on.
Proyas argues that “you don’t need AI to plagiarise” in the “analogue world” already.
“I like to think of AI as rather than artificial intelligence, it’s ‘augmenting intelligence’, because it allows us to streamline, to expedite, to make things more efficient,” he says.
“You will always need a team of human beings. I think of the AIs as one of the part of the collaborative team, which will allow smaller teams to do things better, faster and cheaper.”
As the internet floods with AI-generated slop, Proyas says he is working to bring his skills in directing over the years to get the desired output from AI, refining what it puts out until he is happy with it.
“My role as a director, creator, visual guy has not changed at all. Now I’m working with a smaller human team. My co-collaborators, being the AIs, have got to service my vision. And I know what that is,” he says.
“I don’t sit behind a computer and go, ‘funny cat video, please’. I’m very specific, as I am to my human collaborators.”