This is per The Wrap, which reported this week on two set visits it performed in recent months to Liman’s movie, about a journalist (Gal Gadot) recruited to do a profile on Dr. Craig Wright (Affleck), a computer scientist who has publicly claimed to be pseudonymous Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto. (Nakamoto, who’d be one of the richest human beings on the planet if he ever came forward and cashed in his crypto wallet, has never been identified, although a lot of people have thrown doubt on Wright’s specific claims.) Liman apparently decided to film his movie on an AI soundstage early on, on account of Nick Shenk’s script including more than 200 locations, “from Antarctica to Antigua To Vegas.” It’s the sort of ludicrous scope that most filmmakers would dismiss as a combination of impractical and incomprehensible. Instead, Liman and his partners at Acme AI & FX built a big-ass gray box and filled it with uniform lighting and famous people, and that’s where the entire movie has been shot.
Now, it’s easy to hear these guys market themselves as “the first fully-generated, studio-quality AI feature film” and immediate lose control of your hands, as they instinctively begin making the universally understood up-and-down hand gesture for “I think this guy is verbally jackin’ off.” So it’s worth dialing into exactly what Liman and his team are actually doing here. For one thing, it’s worth noting that none of the AI is touching anything human: If it is a person, or is on a person, it’s real, with costumes and performances untouched by the computers. (Cueing roughly a million jokes about how Liman’s team made the scenery out of pixels, but left Gal Gadot’s performance untouched.) There’s also what sounds like some minor practical stage building, as things like stairs and furniture that people have to actually interact with are brought into the hellbox so that we don’t have to watch Pete Davidson digitally levitate. But everything else—which is to say, the environments and the backgrounds, as well as the lights—are being generated by computers, with all involved filming everything in what looks like a warehouse covered in gray padding. The claim here is that that process has carved a frankly insane $230 million off the movie’s budget, bringing it down to a still-hefty 70 million bucks. (A lot of which would have been transportation costs, because, again, this script apparently shifts continents like every other minute.)
In effect, this doesn’t sound hugely different from some of the stuff Disney has been getting up to with Industrial Light & Magic’s StageCraft system lately, where, instead of filming on locations or in elaborate sets, actors are surrounded by a giant screen called The Volume—with the major difference that, instead of paying artists to create custom backgrounds to project around performers, Liman and his team are having AI “artists” shit out something far more generic and then gray-screening it in. In terms of jobs, TheWrap piece notes that Killing Satoshi employs 107 cast members, 100 shoot crew, and 54 non-shoot crew, which isn’t super-abnormal for an independent film. (It does note that certain standard departments have just been outright eliminated, most notably the lighting crew, with their work replaced with yet more AI animators.)
As with so much of the endless incursion of AI bullshit into our lives in recent years, though, we keep getting distracted by how much of the messaging surrounding Killing Satoshi reads like a cross between marketing literature and cult propaganda. The simple fact that the movie is billing itself as “fully generated”—despite the fact that everybody involved clearly doesn’t think they can get away with AI actors, and are instead using the tech pretty much entirely to replace sets—feels like a normalization effort; so, too, are the claims from the producers that, when talking to their Hollywood colleagues, “People were saying one thing publicly, but underneath everyone was understanding that, yeah, this is inevitable.” Notably, nobody out in gen pop has seen any footage from the movie, and how bad it may or may not end up looking; the film’s producers are reportedly looking to shop it around in Cannes next month, so it’ll be interesting to see whether international film buyers are willing to stomach the gray abyss of it all.
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