Steven Soderbergh has never been opposed to integrating new technologies into his famously speedy filmmaking process. But imagine how much quicker he could pump out three movies a year if he used the plagiarism machine? Imagine no longer. In a disappointing new interview with Filmmaker Magazine about his upcoming, offbeat art heist movie, The Christophers, Soderbergh explains how he’s using AI to complete his upcoming John Lennon and Yoko Ono documentary and an epic about the Spanish-American War.
In the interview, Soderbergh admits that he’s been working with AI to create “thematically surreal images” for a nearly complete documentary about John and Yoko. The documentary will explore the couple’s work outside of music, relying on a three-hour interview the couple did with RKO Radio hours before he was killed. But the only way to create “images that are kind of a surreal version of what their words try to transmit” is by using AI, a process he’s found “really fun because you need a Ph.D. in literature to tell it what to do.” In his estimation, about 90 percent of the 90-minute film is archival stills, with “little pockets of images we created whenever they start talking philosophically.” That amounts to about 10 minutes of pure Liverpudlian slop reserved for when there is “no literal component for what they’re saying.” Unsurprisingly, the AI industry has used enough energy, poisoned enough water sources, and ingested enough Beatles documentaries to spit out interstitial images that the human mind couldn’t possibly create. Still, he admits that it “desperately requires very close human supervision.” Sounds like a real time-saver.
Soderbergh must have liked the process of finding just the right way to prompt his AI to get the perfect psychedelic and surreal John Lennon image. In addition to the documentary, Soderbergh tells Filmmaker that he’s using “a lot of AI” for a planned movie about the Spanish-American War, starring Wagner Moura. “It’s a weird time to be making movies,” Soderbergh says. Boy, is it ever.
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