James Cameron isn’t ready to hand filmmaking over to artificial intelligence, but he’s open to letting it help behind the scenes.
After famously warning the world about AI with The Terminator in 1984, and doubling down on those concerns as recently as last year, the legendary director has joined Stability AI’s Board of Directors with a very specific goal of finding ways to make big, effects-heavy movies more affordable without sacrificing jobs.
Cameron talked about this shift in perspective on the Boz to the Future podcast, explaining that his interest in AI is all about integration, not replacement.
“The goal was to understand the space, to understand what’s on the minds of the developers. What are they targeting? What’s their development cycle?
“How much resources you have to throw at it to create a new model that does a purpose-built thing, and my goal was to try to integrate it into a VFX workflow.”
Audiences will always want to see movies like Dune: Part Two, Avatar, and other major VFX-driven spectacles, but those kinds of productions aren’t cheap, and if studios want to keep greenlighting them, something’s got to give.
“And it’s not just hypothetical. If we want to continue to see the kinds of movies that I’ve always loved and that I like to make and that I will go to see — Dune, Dune: Part Two, or one of my films or big effects-heavy, CG-heavy films — we’ve got to figure out how to cut the cost of that in half.”
That doesn’t mean cutting people, it means making the pipeline faster and more efficient.
“Now that’s not about laying off half the staff and at the effects company. That’s about doubling their speed to completion on a given shot, so your cadence is faster and your throughput cycle is faster, and artists get to move on and do other cool things and then other cool things, right? That’s my sort of vision for that.”
Cameron’s take isn’t in line with some of the more aggressive AI adoption rhetoric coming from tech companies, and it’s rooted in protecting the artistry that makes these massive movies work.
It’s also an evolution from the filmmaker who, in 2023, scoffed at the idea that AI could ever write a truly great movie.
“I just don’t personally believe that a disembodied mind that’s just regurgitating what other embodied minds have said — about the life that they’ve had, about love, about lying, about fear, about mortality — and just put it all together into a word salad and then regurgitate it … I don’t believe that [they] have something that’s going to move an audience,” Cameron told CTV News.
While he’s willing to let AI help move pixels around faster, he’s still skeptical of it ever writing a script worth caring about.
“Let’s wait 20 years, and if an AI wins an Oscar for Best Screenplay, I think we’ve got to take them seriously.”
Until then, Cameron seems more interested in seeing how AI can serve artists and not replace them.
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