It's Over
Tribeca is proudly premiering an AI-generated film and my internal alarm bells are sounding louder than ever.
I took a break from writing my latest screenplay to check my email and what I saw in my inbox shattered my world:
“Tribeca Festival Sets First Premiere of Fully AI-Generated Film ‘Dreams of Violets.’”
I’ve spent my entire life working to become a writer-director of cinema. It’s been an arduous journey marked by trial and error, financial setbacks, detours in stand-up comedy and growth and healing exercises — but my commitment has never wavered. For a teenager in rural Michigan in the early 2000s, I didn’t have the wherewithal to understand how the industry worked when I got started. I had zero comprehension of how one “makes it” save for a book I’d gotten at the library called “How to Break Into Hollywood,” that harped on about the importance of owning an answering machine (which was irrelevant due to the recent advent of the cell-phone). The concept of film school was a non-topic as I was unsure which filmic discipline I was best suited for — not to mention it seemed utterly illogical to my eager teen-brain to waste time learning about movies, when I had already made a few on my parents camcorder. So, given my clearest guidepost at that time was Madonna’s infamous rise to superstardom, I was convinced that as long as I simply showed up in Los Angeles with a dream and a willingness to work hard, I would find my way in no time.
Suffice it to say I spent 18 years dabbling in improv, acting, stand-up comedy, producing and directing — acquiring skills as a self-taught screenwriter, editor, colorist and script consultant along the way. It began to become clear that writing was the thing that came easy and finding a way to film the stories I wrote down was the thing that drove me. But after writing, producing and starring in a feature film, I crashed hard and landed in a pit of despair that resulted in years of intensive therapies to heal from complex-PTSD that had stemmed from severe trauma in my formative years. Finally, at the end of all of that I came into my own. I let go of the idea that I had to do it all to succeed and finally leaned into doing what I should have been doing all along: writing and directing. It was one long, roundabout journey, but I had finally discovered my true calling.
I’ve now directed several short films, and at 39 years old — 21 years after embarking on my journey in Hollywood — I am finally ready to direct a feature film. I have been working tirelessly on finishing the screenplay for my debut feature, and while AI has been creeping into the background, I truly believed the safeguards would be in place. This art-form was too respected, too beloved, to intricate to be replaced by artificial intelligence…
And then Tribeca announces this news.
I read the article accompanying the announcement and I’m downright livid. I came right to Substack to unleash my fury. My absolute rage over the fact that some guy who wanted to tell a story didn’t have access to a crew or actors — so he turned to AI and voila! His “film” emerged, which according to Tribeca co-founder Jane Rosenthal serves as “a powerful example of how emerging technologies like AI can be used not simply as tools of innovation, but as vehicles for deeply human storytelling.”
Deeply human?
Listen, I get it. We all yearn to tell stories. We are driven by a desire to connect sequences of events and shape them into narratives. This is literally what separates humans from other living creatures. Our distant relatives saw tracks in the dirt met by a different set of tracks that erased the first set — and we ascertained that a predator had succeeded in getting its prey. Humans have been explorers, excavating and studying patterns and using our findings to tell stories and explain otherwise unknowable events since the dawn of our conscious reality. So of course every person on Earth has a movie inside of them they dream of making…
But just because they have one inside of them doesn’t necessarily mean it is meant to come to fruition (I’m sure I speak for all filmmakers when I say nothing is worse than being cornered by rando-Joe at some social event as he regales you with his big sci-fi movie idea after he’s found out you’re in the movie business).
Cinema is a craft. It is an art-form. It is a particular discipline within the realm of storytelling that rivals no other. Those who get the privilege of utilizing this art-form have put in years of discipline and hard work and knowledge and respect for the craft.
And now AI is going to allow every Richard, Dick and Harry who doesn’t know the first thing about this most sacred and collaborative art-form to make their own movies willy-nilly on a whim. Because they felt like it and there’s a computer program that can do it for them!
Maybe I sound like a fearful, gate-keeping asshole. But I think it goes deeper than that.
The thing about stories, the thing about art — is that it’s messy. We oftentimes don’t know what a thing is until we stand back and observe the thing we made in its final state. Because it ultimately comes from the great unseeable place of creation within our subconscious. We might have an inkling, but we’ll never know for sure all the many experiences and emotions that spawned the idea, nor the images that appeared alongside it in the sea of our imagination. That is what makes it magical. Just like the genetic material of two beings coming together to create a brand new human that shares traits with its creators while simultaneously harboring its own separate identity — a film is a living, breathing entity comprised of the DNA of all who took part in its conception. And once created it, too, takes on a life of its own.
That is what the act of creation is all about. And AI is taking that away — because ultimately IT is performing the actual act of creating, not the human prompting it.
According to the individual who instructed the AI to create “Dream of Violets,” which centers on a real-world massacre in Iran — “The film exists because the dead deserve to be witnessed and because the families inside Iran, who cannot speak, deserve someone outside who refuses to forget.”
While I understand that sharing about the tragic realities in Iran are necessary, I feel like this is a manipulative effort on the “filmmakers” part. He’s using tragedy as a gateway to a career in film to serve his ego. I know that’s quite a statement, and it may sound insensitive, but I stand by it. Because if he REALLY felt the world needed to be aware of the violent injustices taking place, he would get his feet on the ground in Iran and film the truth on his iPhone. In fact, TikTok is filled with the ACTUAL TRUTH of what’s going on — the privileged and disconnected in America seeing it at a prestigious film festival isn’t going to prompt change. It isn’t going to inspire further revolution. It isn’t going to get anyone out of the comfort of their theater seat to do anything real about it. The term “urgency” was used in the article — but since when has the festival circuit been urgent about anything? If it were really an urgent story to tell, he’d put it on social media and call it a day. Instead, he’s decided to infiltrate the artistic cinema space, so yeah, I call bullshit.
Look, storytelling IS a powerful vehicle for change. I know that. And we definitely need films to spread awareness of the realities of circumstances in the Middle East. But there are a million creative ways to do this using human beings and human craft without ever needing to generate any “footage” with AI — and that is what storytellers who genuinely CARE must strive to do. Especially because, when we actually get to the root of the matter — instability in Iran is the direct result of the American Empire. And right now, at this point in history, all the violence and oppression catalyzed by America can be traced back to a group of billionaire techno-oligarchs that make money on the war-machine — and who also happen to be responsible for the advent of AI. So if the supposed “filmmaker” really cared about changing the world and waking people up to the atrocities perpetrated in the Middle East, he wouldn’t use a tool KNOWN to wreak havoc on communities worldwide. A product KNOWN to strip our land of resources and be profiteered by those same techno-oligarchs.
Anyone capable of critical thinking can agree that the common denominator for all current human suffering is corporate, Capitalist greed. And I’d say any filmmaker that turns to AI — stripping vulnerable communities of precious water reserves and perpetuating further extraction of precious minerals like cobalt around the globe, which leads to violence and displacement — is partaking in the antithesis of what storytelling is meant for.
In one capacity or another, I’ve given my life over to the craft of cinema and the art of storytelling. For AI to come in now fills me with intense grief. But my personal heartbreak is nothing compared to the road humanity seems to be venturing down. If we don’t raise the alarm bells and pull the plug on AI now, we’re willingly participating in the curation of a future of further separatism, constant one-upping of ideas, and even less collaboration and human connection. Late-stage Capitalism has already squeezed creative spaces to favor quantity of output over quality of content — but now we’re at an even more pivotal crossroads. We either choose to preserve the sacred art of storytelling through film, or we choose to put temporary, individual validation and data points over the sanctity of all human life — and quite literally, throw the baby out with the bathwater.