Zack Snyder Thinks Hollywood Needs To Get On Board With AI or Get Left Behind

Zack Snyder doesn’t it seems that all the worry about AI disrupting the world of filmmaking, has brought a lot of newbies to the river. At WIRED’s The Big Interview event in San Francisco on Tuesday, the director told managing editor Hemal Jhaveri that “everybody has a good film camera on their phone and yet we don’t have—at this moment, anyway—millions of really good movies loaded into people’s pockets. “

That doesn’t mean he thinks Hollywood creators can avoid AI entirely. “Educating yourself and understanding what you can and can’t do is important right now, especially when it comes to photography and storytelling,” Snyder said. “You have to understand what it is and what it can’t do, and you have to be able to use it as a tool instead of standing on the sidelines with your hands on your hips.”

While Snyder says he still sometimes wonders “why” AI is being filmed, asking what the point of using the technology would be if you just want to shoot pictures of a person sitting in a chair in a living room, for example, he also acknowledges the technology’s power to make other images more accessible. “AI doesn’t care if the house is on fire or if it’s on Mars or underwater,” he told Jhaveri. “All the things that would cost a lot of money for a filmmaker to shoot, for AI, it’s no different.”

Snyder says that he is very impressed by the idea of ​​an AI that can understand a movie or the aesthetic context of a filmmaker, such as if he was able to shoot an actor’s performance and match it with the world created by the production designer of the sets in a kind of “beauty bank.” If the AI ​​could understand what it was really looking for—”dust features,” backlighting, a complete set of textures—rather than just presenting its own interpretation of what it thinks it’s asking, then, he thinks, “the idea is great.”

As a director who has made dozens of movies, superheroes and more, with a huge range of VFX, Snyder says he’s no stranger to the “visual world when it comes to filmmaking.” However, he says, he always sees the artistic performance before what we finally see on the screen. Everything that is not an actor is “the essence,” he says.

“My favorite films are the ones where I feel the hand of the director. I want that human perspective to move me in a way that tells a story in a way that I wouldn’t have imagined or imagined what would happen next,” Snyder said. “As listeners, that’s what we pay for and that’s what we’re hungry for. How do we get to that human thing, or … well, that can change. “

The way audiences see movies can also change, Snyder said, acknowledging that broadcasters like Netflix have become an absolute juggernaut in the world of cinema. He says that the movies and plays that made it to the stage were seen by millions and millions of people than what could be seen in the theater, he says, even the movies that are considered “blockbusters” have had and will undoubtedly attract more viewers if they are in a big group. streaming service than they would on a box.

As a director, Snyder says, as long as he knows he’s making something that will only be broadcast, he’ll be up for the challenge. “It feels silly to say that I am not an artist if my film is not in theatres,” he told Jhaveri. “If you’re a broadcaster, you’re paying for a movie, and if you say, ‘This is our format and 250 million people are going to watch it on their phones, maybe’ at the beginning of our conversation, then I have to know that’s true. And if that’s the case, I have to have everything that happens after that.”