Director Christopher Nolan says young filmgoing audiences should be commended for “utterly rejecting” AI-generated video and embracing “more tactile, more real” filmmaking techniques.
In his promotional tour for The Odyssey, Nolan praised young filmmakers like Curry Barker and Kane Parsons, whose debut films Obsession and Backrooms have been highly profitable box-office hits. “We’ve got all these great new young voices in movies, making the medium their own and moving it forward,” he told the Telegraph.
The Inception director — known for his love of analog film, particularly the 70mm IMAX format — also marveled at how young viewers are “utterly rejecting” video generated by artificial intelligence, which he has observed directly with his own children.
“I’ve never seen a more rapid wholesale dismissal of a supposedly foundational jump in technology in my lifetime,” he says. “So much energy has been expended on bringing in AI, but if you look at that generation’s reaction, they’re utterly rejecting it.” He cites his own four children – in their late teens and early 20s – as a further example.
“Their judgment of AI slop has been immediate and harsh. 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. And while that doesn’t mean that every aspect of the technology is useless or meaningless, in film-making it’s hitting at exactly the wrong time. After years of driving towards heavily virtual environments, we’re seeing a renewed interest in more tactile, more real forms of storytelling.”
Nolan has a reputation for pushing special effects in film to their limit without the use of computer-generated imagery, such as Oppenheimer’s entirely in-camera recreation of the Manhattan Project’s Trinity Test — the first-ever atomic bomb explosion.
AI’s potential to enhance or even replace conventional filmmaking remains a raging controversy in Hollywood, with top-tier directors embracing the technology and various celebrities attacking it as an affront to their craft. All sides of the battle agree: generative AI will drastically reduce the cost of video and film production.
In the same Telegraph interview, Nolan dismissed concerns about DEI casting in The Odyssey as “irrelevant,” because his critics have not yet seen the full movie.
“These conversations that happen before people see the film,” he said, hearkening back to backlash he experienced with his Batman trilogy. “They’re always irrelevant, because no one having them knows what the film actually is yet.”
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