‘We’re expanding the cinematic toolbox’: AI fault lines on show at Cannes
Darren Aronofsky among proponents of using technology, while Guillermo del Toro says he would ‘rather die’
Under a white marquee on Cannes’ Croisette beach, with the Mediterranean glistening behind him and superyachts drifting across the horizon, the director Darren Aronofsky addressed an audience of executives and tech evangelists gathered for an “AI for Talent” summit.
“There’s so much pushback against AI,” said Aronofsky, who has faced criticism over his embrace of generative AI projects though his new studio, Primordial Soup, at a time when artificial intelligence has become one of the film industry’s most divisive fault lines.
“AI is a terrible word, because it’s a catchphrase for so many different things,” continued the director of Requiem for a Dream, The Wrestler, and Black Swan. “The thing we deal with when we’re talking to Chat GPT about the weather, or how to spend three days in Cannes, is very different to the AI we’re using to generate images. It’s not impersonating a person, it’s actually a tool.”
If Cannes is a barometer for the film industry’s anxieties and obsessions, this year the subject of AI dominated more than any other. From beachside summits and yacht parties to press conferences, leading figures debated whether AI was cinema’s next creative revolution or an existential threat to film-makers.
Aronofsky’s Primordial Soup has partnered with Google DeepMind on projects including Dustin Yellin’s short Goodnight Lamby, which premiered in Cannes.
He argued that the technology could solve practical and ethical production problems, citing one project in which AI tools allowed film-makers to avoid using a real newborn baby on set by digitally transforming what an actor was holding into “a live baby”. “None of these movies would exist without this technology,” he said. “They’re not replacing anything, they’re purely additive.”
Elsewhere in Cannes, AI startups and studios competed to position themselves at the forefront of Hollywood’s next transformation. During an event hosted on a yacht by the generative video platform Higgsfield, the film-maker Chuck Russell unveiled two AI-driven sci-fi features by his company Neumorphic AI. “AI technologies are expanding the cinematic toolbox to a scale we’ve never had before,” he said.
AI also became a talking point because of Oscar-winner Steven Soderbergh’s new documentary, John Lennon: The Last Interview. Created in partnership with Meta, the film reconstructs Lennon and Yoko Ono’s final radio conversation on 8 December 1980, using AI for about 10% of its imagery.
Soderbergh described the stylised sequences – including crying infants in 1960s clothing and cavemen acting out Lennon’s reflections on masculinity – as “thematic surrealism”, insisting they were intended as metaphor rather than deception.
“It’s essentially in the way that you would use VFX or CGI or any sort of non-photographic technology,” he said recently. “My moral obligation is honesty in how we achieved certain things.”
But the divisions over AI now run across the industry. Guillermo del Toro recently said he would “rather die” than use AI in his films, while others such as Reese Witherspoon have invested heavily in AI storytelling tools. The late Val Kilmer recently appeared posthumously in a trailer using an AI-generated recreation of his performance.
Studio executives have said hybrid AI productions could allow several mid-budget films to be made for the price of a single blockbuster. Last year, the unveiling of Tilly Norwood, an AI-generated “actress” marketed as a potential Hollywood star, prompted backlash from actors and unions.
While films primarily generated by AI have been banned from Cannes’ main competition, leading figures urged the industry to adapt.
Aronofsky described fears that computers would soon replace human storytellers as “science fiction”, and framed the technology as part of cinema’s long technological evolution, comparing it to the arrival of sound, portable cameras and visual effects, and said it could create countless jobs.
“A Guillermo del Toro, a Leonardo DiCaprio movie at Imax will always exist, and I will continue to make movies like that,” he said. “Storytelling is not going away. These tools are hopefully going to make it easier for many new storytellers to tell stories and connect.”
Serving on this year’s competition jury, Demi Moore said: “AI is here, to fight it is a battle that we will lose.” Moore acknowledged concerns about protecting artists, but insisted technology could never replace the “human soul and spirit” at the centre of film-making.
Peter Jackson, who received an honorary Palme d’Or, defended more limited uses of AI, comparing it to the stop-motion techniques pioneered in early cinema. “AI used in the right way, it’s just a tool like any other tool,” he said. “But like anything, it’s going to come down to the imagination and originality of the person feeding the instructions into the AI program. Is it actually interesting? Is it funny? Is it imaginative?”
Meanwhile Seth Rogen dismissed the idea of AI-assisted screenwriting while promoting his animated film Tangles. “If your instinct is to use AI, you shouldn’t be a writer,” he said, mocking the flood of AI-generated clips online as “the most stupid dog shit I’ve ever seen in my life”.
Dominic Lees, leader of the Synthetic Media Research Network, said Cannes had “embraced” the AI controversy for several years. In 2024, the competition film Emilia Pérez used AI voice modification technology to extend the vocal range of Karla Sofía Gascón.
“And the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is trying to steady the boat after major rows over the use of AI to improve Adrien Brody’s Hungarian accent in The Brutalist, but it is making a mess of it,” Lees added.
“New rules say that acting must be ‘demonstrably performed by humans’ – but no one knows if the tweaking of Brody’s accent would have lost him the Oscar that he won for the film.”