‘Like a billionaire on acid’: Star Wars director Gareth Edwards comes out in favour of AI

Jurassic World Rebirth and Rogue One director Gareth Edwards has enthusiastically endorsed the use of generative AI in film-making, saying “it is a fucking genius at helping you” and “it’s going to be better than CGI”.Edwards was speaking at AI on the Lot, an event in Culver City, California, organised by Amazon, and in remarks reported by the Hollywood Reporter said: “I can’t see a reason why you wouldn’t become interested in this stuff as a film-maker. It’s so clearly a tool that might be up there with the camera. It’s going to be better than CGI.”Edwards said that AI is most useful in the preparatory stages of film-making, saying: “It’s only good for iteration and discovering what the movie should be, and then once you know what it is, go in and start making it your movie.”He added: “It has no taste whatsoever. It is a fucking genius at helping you. I view it like having a second-unit director who is a billionaire on acid. Like, it’ll do anything you ask, not a problem. Sometimes, it’ll [go] batshit crazy. And you’ll give it notes, and it’ll be like, ‘I don’t do notes. I’ll just do something totally different.’ But it’s worth it.”Edwards’ positive view of AI was echoed by veteran writer and director Paul Schrader, who was also speaking at the event. In remarks reported by Deadline, Schrader said: “I don’t think the real future of AI commercially is in all this flash, all these monsters – that’s just jacked-up special effects on steroids,” he said. “The real tip of the spear is when we can create an AI protagonist, not a hybrid, and that movie makes money. When you do the new Clint Eastwood, but you don’t say the words ‘Clint Eastwood’ to AI, you just describe him. And he comes up as Clint Eastwood.”Schrader added: “And the movie comes out, and us carbon-based fools spend our money empathising and caring about silicon-based creations.”Schrader, director of American Gigolo and First Reformed as well as the writer of the Martin Scorsese-directed Taxi Driver, said that extras were also no longer needed. “Why are we paying extras $180 a day when they look so plastic? We not only pay them, we have to clothe them and feed them. Why don’t we just make them? We can and we will.”So far, films using gen AI images have not gone down well with critics, including Steven Soderbergh’s documentary John Lennon: The Last Interview, whose AI inserts the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw described as “blandly generic and very mediocre”.Edwards, however, said that the pace of change in AI technology meant that it was impossible to predict its future. “We don’t know where it’s going to go. I think anybody saying they know exactly what’s going to happen over the next five years is just a liar.”