A Cannes Master Made a Film With No Actors or Crew. Only His Vision Survived
Bruno Dumont has made his new film entirely with AI, and Grimes lends her face to an AI feature opening on 4 December. Every craft is falling to the machine except the director's vision.
Until recently, making a film with artificial intelligence was considered a sin by the film community. But resisting AI is not easy. I myself dusted off one of my epic screenplays, which would need a budget of $100 million to make, and fed its first scene to AI. Within minutes, Google’s Veo, in Gemini, created a one-minute scene that looked like a scene from Lawrence of Arabia. It allowed me to tweak the lighting, the scenery and even the performances of the actors with simple instructions, until I was satisfied with the final scene, without spending a cent.
Recently, Ben Affleck revealed that he used AI in his latest film, and Hollywood stars offered their faces for a price. Now an auteur has gone the furthest. Bruno Dumont has made his entire film with AI, and the singer Grimes has lent her face to another AI feature heading for American cinemas. If these films succeed, the only survivor of the AI revolution will be the director’s vision. Every other craft will probably be eliminated by AI.
“My crew is a machine”
Dumont, a former philosophy teacher, is one of the most austere figures in European cinema and has twice won the Grand Prix at Cannes. His new film, The End, is an English-language science-fiction thriller about an ambitious Los Angeles cop investigating a crime while earthquakes and falling asteroids tear the city apart. He wrote it more than 25 years ago, straight after L’Humanité, and shelved it because the disaster scenes were far beyond any budget he could raise.
In August he took the script out of the drawer and generated it scene by scene from his own storyboards, at home in Paris. He produced the images, the performances and the sound himself, and the film is finished. He directed his virtual actors the way he would direct real ones, asking for more anger or more intensity, changing costumes and hairstyles, and borrowing faces from old paintings for his characters. “I’m like a director working with a crew, except that my crew is a machine,” he said. He is aiming for a festival premiere in 2027.
The irony is delicious. Dumont has long preferred amateurs to professional actors. He filled L’Humanité with amateurs from his native northern France, and one of them, Emmanuel Schotté, walked away with the best actor prize at Cannes in 1999. A quarter of a century later, the director who never needed stars has decided he does not need actors at all.
The vision the machine lacked
Last month AI flopped twice as a film-maker. China’s first all-AI feature, Sanxingdui: Future Past, took about $180,000 against a $1.5 million budget, and Elon Musk’s AI Odyssey was laughed off X. Both came from a machine with no life to put on screen, and audiences felt it.
The End turns that experiment around. The machine supplies the cameras, the lights, the sets, the costumes, the make-up and the faces. The vision belongs to a 68-year-old man who has carried this story for a quarter of a century. If audiences and festival juries respond to Dumont’s film, the craft of film-making will have been handed to the machine, and only the auteur will have kept his job.
A YouTuber, a pop star and 1,000 screens
The same revolution is coming from the opposite end of the business. On 4 December Gods Don’t Give Gifts, billed as the first AI-generated film to get an American theatrical release, opens in cinemas. Its director, Zack London, makes AI clips for 1.6 million YouTube subscribers as Gossip Goblin, and its co-producer, Edward Saatchi of the AI studio Fable, is aiming for nearly 1,000 screens. “AI means I don’t have to write scripts with a budget in mind,” London says, the very reason Dumont turned to the machine.
Grimes plays Zaynith Alda, a disaffected aristocrat in a post-apocalyptic world. She recorded her lines at home. It is a natural role for the singer who, back in 2023, invited fans to make songs with an AI copy of her voice in return for half the royalties. While Cate Blanchett and her colleagues go to court to demand that AI asks first, Grimes has been saying yes for years.
London is submitting his film for the Oscar for best animated feature. The Academy’s new rules say acting must be “demonstrably performed by humans with their consent”. Even here, a dozen human voice actors gave the characters their voices. The machine has learnt to paint a face. It still borrows a human throat to make it speak.
Who survives
For cinematographers, designers, costume makers, lighting crews and actors, these two films are a warning. My own experiment with Veo did all their jobs in minutes, for free. Only one thing came from outside the machine: the scene itself, imagined by a writer years earlier.
Cannes, Berlin and Venice will have to decide in 2027 whether a film with no crew and no actors belongs in competition. Audiences will decide sooner. On 4 December they will say whether they will pay for a YouTuber’s vision rendered by a machine. When The End premieres, they will say whether a great director’s vision is enough to make them forget the machine.
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