His hit film was a masterpiece capturing the gritty truth of the Paris suburbs, but the director of La Haine is now sold on an AI-generated future for cinema.
Mathieu Kassovitz has called the technology the “the last artistic tool we need” and dismissed concerns about AI stealing other artists’ intellectual property, telling the Guardian: “Fuck copyright.”
The award-winning director and actor, who is making an almost entirely AI-enabled film based on a 1940s wartime comic book by Edmond-François Calvo, also predicted that the first AI film stars are around the corner. Kassovitz said that while other film-makers feared that human characters generated by AI might appear soulless, he was recently stunned to see one with “an emotion in his eyes that made me shiver”.
“Right now, everybody’s scared,” he said. “But in a few years from now, you will have really, really good AI superstars. You will have AI actors with millions of followers. They will exist in your phone [and] when they have a promo for the movie, you can talk to them directly.”
His full-throated backing of AI as the future of cinema came at the second World AI film festival, which took place in Cannes. This month, the main Cannes film festival announced an AI ban for films in its official competition. The festival president, Iris Knobloch, has said that “AI imitates very well, but it will never feel deep emotions.”
But Kassovitz, 58, whose 1995 film La Haine won three César awards, said that “in two years from now nobody will care” whether film characters are created by AI or played by actors.
Kassovitz, who has also won acting awards, admitted that it “breaks my heart” to see how convincing an AI performance can be, but he emphasised it still required actors’ involvement with voices.
He also announced that he was setting up an AI film studio in Paris, which he compared to George Lucas creating the Industrial Light and Magic special effects operation in 1975 to produce Star Wars. With rapid advances in video AI, Kassovitz paused preparation on his film adaptation, The Beast is Dead, to explore using the technology. Traditional US and European studios had costed the visual effects he wanted at $50-60m, but with AI it will cost $25m, he said.
His comments came as Hollywood studios start to integrate more AI in their cinema, with investments in AI companies, and tech leaders being hired to steer the new technology. Advocates see it as a tool that could allow for cheaper and more creative film-making, opening up the art to a wider range of makers and enabling more films to be created. David Ellison, the boss of Paramount who recently bought Warner Bros and is the son of the tech billionaire Larry Ellison, said: “AI is here, and it’s going to be transformative across all aspects of the business”.
Last week, Val Kilmer, the star of Batman Forever and Top Gun, who died a year ago, appeared in a trailer for “As Deep as the Grave”, a new film in which his performance is AI-generated with permission from his estate.
But the technology’s critics fear AI-enabled cinema lacks soul and will leave actors, composers and creative craftspeople redundant. Writers, directors and musicians are also fighting back against tech companies training AI models on their copyrighted work without consent or compensation.
Kassovitz dismissed concerns about copyright and said: “La Haine was made from other films. They stole also. I stole shots from Scorsese that he stole from Kurosawa that he stole from Eisenstein. Unless you … created something from the ground up, we’re all thieves. So, as AI steals everything, it doesn’t steal anything.”
However, he also said: “If I see a movie, if I see some guys that are doing La Haine and they are taking the thing and they are doing some stupid shit with it, of course I’m gonna sue them.”
Also speaking at the festival, Tim Kraft, a leading German copyright lawyer, said there were almost 140 pending cases against AI companies over copyright, mostly in the US, but also in Germany.
He said: “It’s only fair and just to have tech platforms to pay for the usage – they make bazillions … we need to urgently find a solution to have the likes of Google and OpenAI to pay for their usage because they operate on our knowledge and copyrighted material”.