Steven Soderbergh doesn’t feel “threatened” by AI.
Steven Soderbergh is comfortable about using AI during the filmmaking process
The 63-year-old director has declared that he will be using “a lot” of the technology in his new picture about the Spanish-American war and feels “obligated” to use it in the filmmaking process if it enhances the product.
Soderbergh told Variety: “I’m just not threatened by it. I’m only scared of things I don’t understand. So I felt obligated to engage with it, to figure out what it is and what it can do.”
The Traffic filmmaker explained how AI was particularly useful for him during production on his forthcoming documentary about Beatles legend John Lennon.
Soderbergh said: “It turned out to be a very good tool for certain passages of the Lennon documentary where I needed surrealistic imagery that was impossible to shoot. It allowed me to solve a creative problem about how to visualise what John and Yoko (Ono) are speaking about philosophically.
“Ten years ago, I would have needed to engage a visual effects house at an unbelievable cost to come up with this stuff. No longer. My job is to deliver a good movie, period. And this tool showed up at a moment when I needed it.”
The Oscar-winning director stressed that the world is still in the “early stages” of understanding AI and has called for people not to rush into making doom-laden predictions about the tech.
He said: “I don’t think it’s the solution to everything, and I don’t think it’s the death of everything. We’re in the very early stages. Five years from now, we all may be going, ‘That was a fun phase.’ We may end up not using it as much as we thought we were going to. “There are some people that I have absolute love and respect for that refuse to engage with it. That’s their privilege. But I’m not built that way. You show me a new tool. I want to get my hands on it and see what’s going on.”
Soderbergh’s latest movie The Christophers centres on ageing painter Julian Sklar (Sir Ian McKellen) – who hires assistant Lori Butler (Michaela Coel) to dispose of his works – and the director says the movie explores something that every creative fears.
He said: “That’s the terror for every creative person. I call it the slackening. It’s night sweat material for me. I’m very interested in the lives of artists. How can somebody maintain their output right up to the end? What is it about their personality that enabled them to keep their level high? And why does the opposite happen? What makes someone incapable of sustaining that quality? Nobody wants to be described as an artist whose stuff fell off.”
The Erin Brockovich filmmaker added: “But also, how do you determine that? Sometimes critics are wrong. Sometimes your work showed up too soon, and you were ahead of the audience.
“I focus on what I can control, which is the method of making things. I set up circumstances and environments with trusted collaborators that allow for the alchemy that creates good stuff to take place. All I can do is bring the ingredients together in a pot. That’s the best chance you’ve got of making something that tastes good.”