“The Odyssey” director Christopher Nolan famously doesn’t use a smartphone, so it’s perhaps unsurprising that he isn’t on board with the latest tech buzzphrase.
He pointed to the reaction of his four children, in their late teens and early 20s. “Their judgment of AI slop has been immediate and harsh,” Nolan said. “They see it for what it is very quickly—and it’s much easier for them to identify it—because it grew out of an online world they know really well.”
The technology has hit at “exactly the wrong time” for filmmaking, he argued, pointing to a “renewed interest in more tactile, more real forms of storytelling” after a glut of films featuring virtual environments.
Nolan’s own blockbusters have become famous for their spectacular in-camera effects work, whether crashing a 747 into a building for “Tenet,” landing a Spitfire on a beach for “Dunkirk” or planting entire crops of corn for a chase scene in “Interstellar.”
That said, he’s not averse to using computer-generated VFX himself, like Two-Face’s scarred visage in “The Dark Knight,” and he conceded that not every aspect of generative AI is necessarily “useless or meaningless.”
Generative AI and filmmaking
