Los Angeles: Legendary Hollywood filmmaker James Cameron has said that the future of blockbuster cinema depends on being able to “cut the cost of (VFX) in half”, by utilising AI to reduce production charges while simultaneously preserving jobs.
Speaking at the Meta hosted ‘Boz To The Future’ podcast, Cameron said: “If we want to continue to see the kinds of movies that I’ve always loved and that I like to make—‘Dune’, ‘Dune: Part Two’, or one of my films—we’ve got to figure out how to cut the cost of that in half,” he said, according to Variety.
Trying to understand how AI might help bring costs down without replacing crew members, Cameron announced in September 2024 that he was joining the board of directors for Stability AI, the company behind the text-to-image model Stable Diffusion.
Explaining his intentions behind joining the company, he said: “The goal was to understand the space, to understand what’s on the minds of the developers. What are they targeting? What’s their development cycle? How much resources you have to throw at it to create a new model that does a purpose-built thing, and my goal was to try to integrate it into a VFX workflow.”
Clarifying that the approach wasn’t about layoffs, he said: “Now that’s not about laying off half the staff. 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.”
The ‘Avatar’ director, who was himself once a vocal critic of AI has greatly advocated for the technology’s use in filmmaking to undercut costs, and utilised a lot of advanced AI to deliver groundbreaking VFX, which was seen in his films such as ‘Aliens’, ‘The Abyss’, ‘Terminator 2’, ‘Titanic’, ‘Avatar’, and ‘Avatar 2’.
Nonetheless, he has expressed a lot of doubt regarding whether AI is really responsible for taking away jobs, stressing that the role of bots in the industry should be to help employees manage their workload and not replace them.
In his latest interview, the ‘Terminator’ director also discouraged generative AI users from feeding prompts into the software such as “in the style of James Cameron” or “in the style of Zack Snyder,” noting that these kinds of ripoffs “make me a little bit queasy.”
UNI
