Jodie Foster apparently watched last year’s Brad Pitt-starring racing drama F1 and had one immediate thought: AI wrote this, didn’t it?
Foster shared her observations on Tuesday, June 30th, at the Aspen Ideas Festival (via Variety), where she appeared alongside former Sony Pictures CEO Michael Lynton for a talk titled “Who Owns the Future of Hollywood.” While she delivered the remark with a laugh and a smile, Foster said the AI association came to her almost instantly.
“I don’t say this disparagingly — how could I? This movie went on to make millions of dollars. But I look at a movie like F1 and I’m like, ‘F1 was made by AI,’” Foster remarked. “Wasn’t it? I mean, the structure was exactly the structure that you would learn in school. The actors say the lines exactly the way it would be written if a computer was writing exactly what would be the right thing for that time. And they were able to dominate the technology to make something big and beautiful and potentially where a lot of the information comes from other places.”
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Given her phrasing, you may or may not be surprised to learn that Foster isn’t exactly anti-AI. She said that the technology is best for “small helpful things,” including previz (where certain film scenes are outlined ahead of production). In fact, Foster revealed that AI was used to create a “dream-like sequence” for her film My Private Life (even as she also admitted that the resulting images “made no sense.”)
Foster indicated that people’s fears of AI replacing actors are already very much a reality, citing how studios often use technology to replicate background actors for large crowd scenes. Foster then explained that “we’re getting rid of a lot of jobs and hopefully, things like unions will be able to come in and say, you can use my actor 20 times, but you’re going to pay him 20 times. And I think that’s fair.”
Later, Foster summarized her AI thoughts by saying, “If we are able to dominate AI consistently over time, we will be able to make things that reflect us, and we can make things better.”
As for why Foster thought F1 may have been penned by AI, we should turn to the review of our own Liz Shannon Miller. Despite generally enjoying the flick, made a few important observations: how Pitt is effectively playing a “somewhat distorted version of his basic movie star persona”; how filmmakers “skipped forward 20 or so laps with a single edit”; and how there are “extremely long stretches of the film where there is at least one corporate logo visible in every single shot.” All of those decisions may not be AI per se, but certainly strike at a kind of “AI-ification” of films, where character development, nuance, and context are often under-emphasized in favor of big, bold action and easy to track narratives.
Still, if we’re trying to get at maximum “vroom vroom,” F1 still delivers: