Zack Snyder doesn’t seems to be all that worries AI disrupt the cinematic world, bringing numerous newcomers into the fold. At WIRED’s Act of the Great Interview in San Francisco on Tuesday, the director He told managing editor Hemal Jhaveri that “everyone has a pretty good movie camera on their phone, and yet we don’t have millions of amazing movies hanging out of our pockets right now anyway of the people.”
That’s not to say I think Hollywood creatives can avoid AI altogether. “Educating yourself and understanding what you can and can’t do is important right now, especially as it exists in imaging and storytelling,” Snyder said. “You have to understand what he is and isn’t capable of, and you have to be able to use him as a tool instead of standing on the sidelines with your hands on your hips.”
Although Snyder says he still sometimes questions the “why” of making movies with artificial intelligence, wondering what the point of using the technology is if all you want to do is record footage of someone sitting in a chair in a living room, for example, also recognizes the potential of technology to make some photographs more accessible. “AI doesn’t care if a house is on fire or if it’s on Mars or if it’s underwater,” he told Jhaveri. “All the things that might cost a filmmaker a lot of money to shoot are no different, for AI.”
Snyder says he’s particularly intrigued by the idea of an AI that can understand the aesthetic core of a film or a filmmaker, like if it could film an actor’s performance and then sync it to a world of sets created by the production designer in a kind of “aesthetic bank”. If an artificial intelligence could understand what it really wants: the “dust specks”, a general backlit set design, instead of conveying his interpretation of the that he thinks he’s asking, then, he thinks, “the concept is pretty awesome.”
As a director who has made several films, superhero and otherwise, with a wide range of visual effects, Snyder says he is no stranger to “a very virtual world when it comes to filmmaking.” Even so, he says, he has always seen an artistic performance in front of what we finally see on the screen. Everything that isn’t an actor is just “context,” he says.
“My favorite films are those where I can feel the director’s hand. I want that human point of view to move me in a narrative way through a story in a way that I wouldn’t have thought or could imagine what would happen next,” says Snyder. “As an audience, that’s what we pay for and that’s what we’re hungry for. How do we get to that human thing, but…well, that could change.”
The way audiences watch movies could also change, Snyder says, acknowledging that streamers like it netflix they have become an absolute master in the world of cinema. The films and shows he has made for the platform have been seen by millions more eyes than could have seen them in the theater, he says, and even films classified as “blockbusters” have and they will certainly attract a larger audience if they are in greater numbers. streaming service than they would at the box office.
As a director, Snyder says, as long as he knows he’s making something that’s exclusively for streaming, he’s up for the challenge. “It feels rude to say I am not an artiste if my film is not in the theatre,” he told Jhaveri. “If you’re the broadcaster, you’re paying for the film, and if you say, ‘This is our format, and 250 million people are going to watch it on their phones, probably,’ at the beginning of our conversation, then I have to know that that’s the reality. And if that’s the case, I should be fine with whatever happens next.”
