James Cameron has made a career out of diving into new filmmaking technology, and artificial intelligence is no exception. On the podcast “Boz to the Future” hosted by Meta chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth, the “Avatar” director had a wide-ranging talk about why he sees potential in the technology and what elements of how it is being used makes him “queasy.”
Cameron’s last film, “Avatar: The Way of Water,” is one of the highest-grossing films of all time with $2.3 billion worldwide, but was also one of the most expensive films to make with a reported $460 million budget. The director told Bosworth that with Hollywood becoming more cost-conscious since the pandemic and industry strikes, AI could be a key to reducing budgets for the sort of blockbusters he’s been known to make by increasing efficiency.
However, he was also quick to clarify that his vision of increased efficiency isn’t about laying off below-the-line workers in areas like visual effects, which are considered to potentially be among the first to be heavily overhauled by AI.
“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,” he explained.
Cameron also addressed AI issues going on outside of the filmmaking process, such as the surge in OpenAI-generated images made in the style of Studio Ghibli films. He admitted that the trend of people using OpenAI to create images and video “in the style of” Hayao Miyazaki or other filmmakers, including himself, “makes me a little bit queasy” and believes that such usage should be discouraged.
At the same time, Cameron said he thinks that lawmakers and Hollywood companies and unions are taking the wrong approach by focusing on regulating AI through how it uses copyrighted material for training models. He sees the human brain as “a three-and-a-half-pound meat computer” that uses influences in so much of art and other creative endeavors.
“I aspire to be in the style of Ridley Scott, in the style of Stanley Kubrick. That’s my text prompt that runs in my head as a filmmaker,” Cameron shared. “In the style of George Miller: Wide Lens, low, hauling ass, coming up into a tight close-up. Yeah, I want to do that. I know my influences. Everybody knows their influences.”
Because of that, he believes Hollywood and regulators should be focused on the output of generative AI rather than the input.
“If I exactly copy ‘Star Wars,’ I’ll get sued. Actually, I won’t even get that far. Everybody’ll say, ‘Hey, it’s too much like ‘Star Wars,’ we’re going to get sued now.’ I won’t even get the money. And as a screenwriter, you have a kind of built in ethical filter that says, ‘I know my sources, I know what I liked, I know what I’m emulating.’ I also know that I have to move it far enough away that it’s my own independent creation,” he explained.
“So I think the whole thing needs to be managed from a legal perspective, as to what’s the output, not what’s the input. You can’t control my input, you can’t tell me what to view and what to see and where to go. My input is whatever I choose it to be, and whatever has accumulated throughout my life. My output, every script I write, should be judged on whether it’s too close, too plagiaristic,” he added.
Cameron’s next film, “Avatar: Fire and Ash,” will be released in theaters on Dec. 19. Watch his full hour-long interview with Andrew Bosworth in the video above.
