Will Filmmakers Bring AI-Powered Movies into Focus?

We were literally sitting at the Oscars in tuxedos being like, wait, did are we filmmakers?

We just do it.

And it's because of this camera.

in the same way DSLR canon camera could democratize who the filmmakers What was exciting was that AI was coming, and it felt like it was a moment that could democratize animation or VFX as you start to see the means of production going from inside the studio gates to outside of the studio gates, that's that's the change that's coming..

these companies have no idea don't understand what tools we need.

when realized that they didn't know our industry, that was the opportunity well, what about the animation jobs those jobs were shipped overseas ten years ago.

Same with VFX And now we've got a chance to kind of make right.

But. Hi, I'm Dan Price, kicking off the next episode of The Intelligence Shift, an episode dedicated to the movie industry.

I'm here at the Tribeca Film Festival where you can see movie makers, movie lovers alike are here to celebrate cinema.

This year's special because the first year an AI powered movie has been submitted accepted.

Movies hold a special cultural significance.

They've always used technology combined with great human talent to make art.

But now you got this incredibly powerful new technology, AI.

What does it mean for the filmmaker?

The creator?

The producers?

The audience members?

Does it further democratize filmmaking and how will it be disruptive?

we're working through it right now.

The human reaction to all of this change has been wild, and leaning into this is Bryn Mooser.

Bryn is an award winning filmmaker.

He's won a Peabody, an Emmy nominated twice for Oscars, Before that, he was a humanitarian in the Peace Corps, went on to make documentaries like lifeboat on her Shoulders, Body Team 12.

He's now the co-founder and CEO of Asteria, a business designed to bring AI to moviemaking to make it better and thrive.

A stereo film is creating new tools that help speed up production, make it more efficient, and give a creative boost to the artist.

Both studios and independent filmmakers alike.

These tools are developed by filmmakers for filmmakers intended to address some of the hardest challenges facing the industry We're going to get into what it means to the filmmaker, what it means to productions, what it means to the cost of making a movie.

The industry is going to have to figure out the practical matter of where to apply AI, and Brennan is bringing his experience to figure that out.

We got a lot to cover.

Let's go have a conversation with them.

Welcome to the intelligence shift.

Thanks for having me.

Yeah, thanks for being here.

So today's episode is about the movie industry, and you've been busy accomplishing a lot in that industry.

Just maybe tell us a little bit about yourself.

me, I've always been fascinated as a filmmaker at these moments of intersection between technology and media and entertainment.

And we're at arguably the biggest one that's ever happened for our industry, probably since the invention of the camera.

And I think what's important for me and for our team at hysteria is how do we figure out how, in that moment, to build tools for filmmakers that can unlock more of what they're able to do rather than replace them?

Because we're at a moment where there's a lot of uncertainty, people are trying to figure out what's going to happen, and we think it's important to have filmmakers at the table.

so you play different roles in your career.

You've produced movies.

now an AI startup just maybe give us some more background on your career.

Sure.

I like many filmmakers of my generation, I'm background as in documentary, which I still love as as an art form because it's really like the truest form of independent cinema.

So as a documentarian myself, when I went to film school, you know, it was impossible or virtually impossible to ever make a film that looked as good as something you'd see on the big screen.

Like you just couldn't afford to shoot on 35 millimeter.

Then when the canon 5G came out the door and you could put a cinema lens on Me and my co-directing partner, David Dark, we got one of those.

We started making movies.

I think our second movie was nominated for an Oscar.

We were literally sitting at the Oscars in tuxedos being like, wait, did are we filmmakers?

We just do it.

And it's because of this camera.

Like it was literally because this camera came out and all of a sudden you could afford a couple thousand dollars, you could afford something that if you did the right thing, you told a great story and you aimed it in the right direction.

You learned how to master it.

Then you could make something look great and stand up against everybody else.

And that was a moment for me in my own career where I saw a technology democratize who the storytellers were and who the filmmakers were.

And that happened for all my contemporaries.

I can documentary and we see it in Indie Film two, right?

Like more and more people are able to access the means of production.

And so I fascinated at those moments.

Right.

when I first started to see AI and what it could do, just the simple stuff with daily like it can generate an image that was exciting.

I remember there was like a face filter on TikTok, where or Snapchat where you could turn into like a Pixar character.

And it came out like three years ago and everybody was sending it around.

It was funny, but I remember looking at it being like, has anybody at Pixar seen this?

Like, has any real animator seen this?

And could it be helpful in the real professional workflows?

And it didn't feel like people were making that connection.

Like they were just saying, oh, this is something on social media, not well, what if we harness this tool somehow?

Like, could it be helpful?

And so, you know, I think in the same way that I saw in my own career how a DSLR canon camera could democratize who the filmmakers were.

What was exciting was that AI was coming, and it felt like it was a moment that could democratize animation or VFX and Sci-Fi, which historically have been out of reach for most filmmakers.

But moviemaking has been enabled by new technologies for a very long time.

For some reason, you were on the lookout for that next disruption, right?

That next discontinuity in moviemaking that was made possible by AI.

Why is there that resistance to this wave of technological disruption?

So they're often times when we find these moments of change, there is an old way that is holding on to something quite hard because they're entrenched with power.

They're the ones that are benefiting from the system in the old way.

And then there is people on the other side of that change, that epoch, who are waiting in the wings to kind of become the future of the industry.

And I've always thought that, you know, the harder that this old way holds on to it without being open to the change, the more difficult this moment of disruption is.

And in our industry, in Hollywood, in the entertainment industry, it's a tough time, right?

Like we went through a lot.

We went to the strikes and there were fires.

People are it's hard to shoot stuff in California, like it's a hard time in the industry.

There's consolidation, there's change happening at all of the levels at the studios.

And so in this moment, like what we need is we we need to try to solve the critical problems at the industry.

And the biggest one being the cost of production is too high.

And so if you can bring those costs down, then you can do it in the right way.

Then hopefully you can unfreeze some of this and actually like start to make more stuff and hire more people.

So that's the goal.

But yeah, there's always a resistance that happens in these moments.

And by the way, with AI there are real valid concerns around AI, right?

Like there's the concerns that people have around copyright, the concerns that people have around the environmental impacts of AI, the concerns that people have around this stuff creates a lot of AI.

Slop is real.

And I think that it's critical that for those of us that are building, we don't avoid those issues, but we actually try to build solutions that address those issues, or at least, you know, take them seriously so that we understand the concerns of the community.

Yeah.

So I noticed in in many of the credits associated with your name, and you know, what you've been recognized for and won awards for.

There's a very strong humanitarian theme.

And now you're doing AI.

Yeah.

How has that sort of that human bent influenced your thinking about how you're taking on this role in your AI venture?

Yeah, I mean, my I think I learned early on in life that I was happiest in life when I was in service of others.

That's how I ended up in the humanitarian side of my life.

I went to the Peace Corps.

I was in the Peace Corps.

I was in Haiti for a long time after the earthquake.

Like, I've always loved being of service in those ways. Right.

I'm drawn to that.

as a former Peace Corps volunteer, that part of the Peace Corps mission is very much entrenched in my own way of thinking, like when Kennedy built a Peace Corps was about these three tenants.

One go help people somewhere in the world to tell them about America and have them have a better understanding of culture here.

And then the third was to bring that story home.

So, like, for me, there's always been this really deep feeling, which is like the best way to help people understand the world is to, you know, if they can't travel then themselves and get that experience is to help them better understand through storytelling.

So I've always believed that documentary has been a great way to do that.

Technology has been an enabler to actually help do that at a greater level.

Right.

people can have a documentary camera like myself, go all over the world, tell these stories of, you know, far off places.

As technology continues to get cheaper and democratize.

People can tell their own stories, right?

Which is like always been I think the goal of this.

Right.

Not like how do you go around and tell stories of people all over the world, but really, how do you enable them to tell their own stories?

And we saw that happening as like cameras got better on the phone or social media right?

Like, you see it all over the world on TikTok.

All of a sudden, storytellers emerge in these places who are telling their own stories.

They don't need somebody to come over there and tell their story.

Now AI comes along, and I think what was exciting about that was that it was the next big leap for that.

It's not like, how do you turn the camera on your phone on yourself and, you know, tell some funny story, but how do you create and make stories that have historically only been possible at the studios, And that is thrilling to me.

Right. Because that's about not the 150,000 people who work in Hollywood and making tools that help them do what they do better.

But it's actually for the like, 2 billion people who are making TikToks every single globally.

Yeah yeah.

And so we'll get into a stereo in just a minute.

But before we do you talked about it's an industry under some duress, going through lots of change.

You know what's interesting to you that's going on right now?

I mean, the industry has been struggling for a long time.

I mean, arguably for the last decade or in the birth of streaming, where we've just seen all of these big changes happen in an industry that slow to catch up with that.

Right.

Like the change from broadcast to streaming to renting movies.

Right. Like,

all of these changes are happening and it's now starting to reflect and in who the filmmakers are and what stories that they can tell.

So I think Hollywood, we've gone through a rough couple of years, starting with the strikes, and then we had the fires.

It's been really hard to get stuff shot in Los Angeles.

Production is way down, although the city is working on it.

We've got a long way to go.

you know, at the core of that is just sort of like the reality about the cost of production for the studios has gotten too high.

And so at the studio level, they're trying to figure out how do they produce these film and TV projects that they've already greenlit or they already want to do, and they just have to figure out how to bring costs down by 30% or so.

and that's part of what we're helping to do with this series is helping the studios figure that out.

But I think when you pull that back and think about what that means for for individual filmmakers, it's really exciting, right?

It's like, how do you use this technology to basically enable this permissionless filmmaking that I'm talking about?

Right. Like right now, if you want to make a big movie, you have to go to a studio to make And that's been the way it's been for, whatever, 120 years, right?

100 years ago, you had to go to the guys at MGM because they owned the camera.

There were only ten cameras, right?

And the soundstage.

And so, like, if you want to make a movie, you had to go to them.

And we know what happened with going to them, what that entailed and what you would have to sacrifice and what you would have to do.

And so I think as you start to see the means of production going from inside the studio gates to outside of the studio gates, that's that's the change that's coming..

And you are sharing.

There are some great examples of that type of innovation that's happening.

you know, the story I think of the early summer is like backrooms and obsession.

Two very young filmmakers who are largely get their start on YouTube, being able to make two of the biggest movies of the year.

Right? Like backrooms, I think being a 24th largest box office opening, he's the youngest ever get number one Kane Parsons, and it outperforms Star Wars, Mandalorian and Grogu.

Like this is a sea change, and they both happen at the same kind of weekend or in the same month.

And so every conversation right now inside Hollywood is like, how do we repeat this?

they're learning the wrong lesson from it.

You know, I think ultimately the things that I get most excited is the power of having your own audience, right?

Like the the power of being able to create something permissionless, put it up on YouTube and build an audience that way and have a relationship with them.

That's what's like missing totally in Hollywood, right?

Like when you talk to YouTubers who are great, I had these kids in the Stokes twins who were like the fifth most followed YouTube They obsess about it.

They read the comments.

They think about the a B test stuff.

I mean, when you hear them talk about it, it's.

These guys are thinking like, you know, the best marketing machine at any studio, and it's brilliant to watch it.

And they're just they do it because they're passionate about it.

Or the other example is my best friend here in New York, Kareem Rama, who has a show subway takes and keep the meter running there, you know, very popular on TikTok and Instagram.

He just launched Keep the Meter Running, which is a YouTube show.

He had offers from every, you know, CNN HBO all every studio and streamer who wanted to do that show.

Kareem wanted to just do that show on YouTube.

And what Kareem says is that, you know, it's TV.

Like when I walk down the street with Kareem, people stop him all the time and they say, hey man, you know, subway takes my favorite show on TV.

And he's always like nudging me like, did you see they said TV?

They didn't say, it's my favorite show on my phone, you know?

And so for for audiences like this idea that this show is the same as subway takes is the same as succession is the same, like that's what's happening.

And Hollywood, like hasn't figured out what lesson to learn from that, right.

Like but they target segments in the the market.

They have their target audience.

You're just saying that the are examples of obsessive micro targeting, where they've tailored the content for a very specific audience.

And I think it's I mean, it's not even like so micro targeting. Right?

Because if you look at like the Stokes twins, I think their videos do on average 130 million views on YouTube video. Right.

video. Right.

It's amazing.

How much does euphoria get like 8 million or something, right?

Like so I think that it's not it's less about that and more about like a direct relationship with their audiences.

Right. So it's like the ability to know what they want, what they're thinking about, what I'm talking about, their fans or their audience, like what they're interested in that stuff is, you know, it's I think it's really inspiring when you hear those people who are making that stuff talk about that, they understand it better.

We don't really talk like indie filmmakers don't talk about their audience like that.

You know, they're like indie filmmakers who are doing a deal at an indie film studio.

They're like, I'm going to make this.

And it's it's it's so amazing because it's like, I'm a genius.

And if people don't understand it, then, like, they're not a genius.

And it's like, that's been the kind of vibe and that doesn't work anymore, right?

Because it's like people are actually like, I've been making this video, it seems to resonate, or people had this idea that I should change it a little bit.

And then that is what was the real breakthrough.

So this is moviemaking for that audience.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

And like, you know, those numbers are real.

Like how many people are really watching and engaging with that stuff is is very real.

So I think that the next couple of years in Hollywood is going to be challenging interesting weird times.

You know, I was always say that like when filmmakers come in or actors come in and they're really scared about this moment in in time.

They're like, oh, I'm really scared AI is going to take my job.

I'm always like, it's not going to take your job.

You know, like the future of of AI or the future of like a genetic AI postcard code world that we're living in.

The things that matter is like taste and curation and passion and go to market.

Like essentially it comes down to, can you make something that people want and can you get it in front of them?

Right.

And the tools to make that thing have democratized.

The barriers have gone down, right.

Whether that's you can engineer your own thing.

You don't need an engineer to make software, or that means you don't need a VFX crew to do a movie. Right?

So like that moment about taste curation, relationship with audience, getting in front of people, go to market.

Like those things become interesting.

And I tell filmmakers, like when we went from renting movies at blockbuster to streaming like people who loved movies didn't go away or filmmakers didn't go away, blockbuster went away.

You know, like we stopped shooting on film.

Filmmakers and photographers don't go away.

But like, Kodak is in trouble.

And so I think it's like important reminders in these moments that like the the people who can adapt and have a story to tell are, are great and arguably have actually more opportunities coming.

But the businesses that were built around an old system are in trouble.

Yeah, so I'm happy to be on this side of that conversation.

Yeah, we we constantly get trapped by the Or.

Yeah.

When there's an and that really unlocks a ton of value and not just the moviemaking industry.

We talked recently about music making.

Same thing.

What about Black Forest Labs?

Any thoughts on their recent news?

think what we see all the time is a change in perception from the industry.

Like I remember three years ago, I spoke at Sundance on AI and it was like, people are throwing like tomatoes at me and like Trader Bran.

How could you?

And then I went back.

The next year, I did another talk there, and it was sort of like a warmer room.

And then this year gave a talk that was like standing room only sold out conversation about AI for indie filmmaking.

And there was only curiosity in the room.

You know, there was not negativity.

Not to say that it doesn't exist in the way people think about it, but like, everybody was leaning in in a sense of trying to understand what.

This is.

This was like three months ago, right.

That changed.

And we see the same thing happen, even with the kind of legends in our own industry.

Right.

Like you have Guillermo del Toro at Cannes saying f*** AI, which is easier for Gilmore del Toro to say, who sits in, you know, there's maybe only four filmmakers that are like Guillermo that can get any movie greenlit and don't have the pressures of, like, it having to perform X, Y, and Z.

So I hope that those filmmakers continue to make films however they want to write like this is not about forcing it.

That's the end.

But but then, you know, Steven Spielberg, I think, said, you know, don't tell me what tools I can use.

And then Martin Scorsese came out and was showing how, you know, these tools could really help with storyboarding.

And so, you know, there's this video that's going around of him storyboarding using AI generated images.

And he says that Cecil B DeMille used to use a watercolorist to make his storyboards.

And I think that's part of that change that I was describing at Sundance, where it's like when I first was talking about it, you know, most of that room had never used ChatGPT before to do research or to do whatever.

Right. And now most people have some sort of relationship with AI in their own lives, So we see that moment where people start to understand, how could this help in the work that I do?

And we tell filmmakers all the time, like it's optional to use AI, it's not optional to learn about it.

Right?

Like this is just it's critical that we know what's coming and what's going to It's a leadership moment.

Yeah.

I think you can have fear about the future, and that future can still be good, It's interesting to see some Hollywood heavyweights getting behind this.

And and I am kind of fascinated especially given all the noise around AI, that you're able to have a pretty positive conversation about it with people in the industry.

Well, I. Think that it's undeniable how powerful this technology is or can be in the production process.

Right? they put Dolly out.

And then everybody wrote these articles like Hollywood's Over and Cooked.

And it wasn't true.

It wasn't the whole story.

It's not cooked.

But, you know, that was the moment for me when I started to be like, wow, this is very interesting.

Like, there's only been two times before Dolly that a technology has come around that's been able to generate an image or make it move like a camera and a computer.

And now there's this new thing, right?

And if you tried to make a movie right now, Guillermo del Toro, whoever, and it said, I'm going to make this movie, but it'll never touch a computer, it would be virtually impossible, right?

Right.

And what was pretty obvious when I met these AI companies was that the same would be true for AI.

Like what I was seeing behind the curtain two and a half years ago was, wow, this is going to be for sure.

It's going to replace the current render engine for animation.

And and if you add this intelligent layer to it that understands the movie you're working on, that is going to be very powerful and will be a part of every part of the way that we do production.

So that was very clear to me in meeting these companies.

It was like, it's transformational, it's inevitable.

If we know history.

And then the third one was these companies have no idea what they're building or why they're building it.

Like they don't understand how we make movies.

They don't understand what tools we need.

And beyond that, I think even when I met some of these companies in the early days, it was like, I don't even think they know why we make movies, don't even think they were intentional on it.

And so when I sat in those rooms and realized that they didn't know our industry, that was the opportunity right what was also clear if you don't speak the language and you don't have companies that are built of people who only want to make movies, like at.

We're a studio full of 40 filmmakers technologists who love making movies.

There's no plan B, you know, there's not like we're like, oh, check out this thing.

We could make movies, but like, or do health care, AI or defense or surveillance.

Like that's not interesting, right?

And every other AI company would I would meet them was clear that they were just saw this as an opportunity.

Right.

But once they realized, as you do very quickly in Hollywood, that making movies is hard, annoying, it's challenging.

like all those things.

Then they would pivot out of it.

You have to have a team of people who, like, understand those challenges, are willing to go through all those challenges because that's like, I'm only going to make movies, right?

Like that's it.

And so I think that to me, when I had those conversations, I was really like it was very clear to me that these kind of big AI companies that were coming in thinking that they were going to disrupt Hollywood would only be around for a little bit of time.

And then that happened, Tell us more about your CEO.

You've got Moon Valley, a great specialized model around I think it's Mary.

So tell us about a stereo.

Yeah. So it is stereo.

You know, it's very much in the mold of the companies that came before us that transformed industries in these moments of change, like ILM or Pixar or the Imagineers, early Disney, which is like, how do you bring together creatives and technologists?

And so at a stereo where 40 filmmakers, engineers, researchers, everything is centered around research and technology.

So everybody is building software building workflows.

And essentially we're trying to just answer this big question, which is if we know that the technology of AI is transformational and we know that it's inevitable, then how do we figure out how these workflows are built for the true adoption into the industry?

Right.

Like if we talk about that moment of change where we have an old way in a new way, like how do we help bring this old way into it and do that?

Because, you know, I think that we still have a lot of love for the industry in Hollywood, but also because that moment is a lot of friction if that is done well. Right.

So like, how do you start thinking about what are the challenges, whether that's copyright, whether that's building, putting the tools in the hands of artists and not to replace them.

And then we also think about these billions of people who are outside the studio gates.

How do we democratize and build tools for them or help with independent filmmaking for them?

At the core, I think we talked about it earlier, like, what are those?

What are the reasons that people have so much criticism on AI?

From the very beginning?

We've we've spent a lot of time asking people those questions.

So when people come to me and say, like, I hate AI, then I'm always like, why?

What is it?

You know? And through those learnings, I think the big thing at the beginning was clear was copyright, right?

Which is like and it's still an open question, like to me, until this problem of copyright is solved, whether that's through the courts, whether that's through the way that the models are trained or whether that's just through giving up, it'll always be a barrier for for AI in Hollywood.

Right.

And so there's a question about the input and the output of the models and copyright.

And so the last couple of years, we partnered with an AI research company called Moon Valley.

And we trained this model called Mary, which was really like the only professional grade visual intelligence model that the studios could, could really open source and work with that was trained only on licensed data.

So we spent a lot of time with rights holders getting the rights holders to train that.

And I think the thesis was like, if you can build an alternative for the studios that is clean, then it's really like at that point about showing that it's possible because I think there's an idea in AI that we talked about earlier that like the cat's out of the bag, So, so as stereotypes.

What are you doing to do it the right way?

Yeah.

Well I think that the the right way.

First of all, is to understand how movies are made.

And then what we do is we think about the entire production process and think about all the places where if you put the technology as the render engine underneath existing teams and workflows, you can compress the time that it takes to make that right like forget money for a second time and money are related in this way, but really we're talking about time.

And so in the example, in the way that this video about Martin Scorsese talking about storyboarding, like for a filmmaker like him to just sit in a room and be able to speak the words, the images that are in his head and see them right away without waiting, as Cecil Beaton did for a watercolorist who then does a watercolor.

And then he goes, like, I actually know I want that car to be over one inch, starts over and does that watercolor.

That's just like a time savings, right?

It's not only a time savings, but it's like closer distance between the creative mind and the output.

That's very exciting, you know?

And so all of those parts are how we spend a lot of time thinking about it.

it's really about like building pretty complicated workflows that are unique for every project that we're doing in studio, that we're doing, and then implementing those into existing teams at the studios.

That's on the one side, right?

Which is just like, how do you optimize in a responsible way, the current workflows inside the studios with AI?

And that means that you have to do a lot of, you know, political conversations, getting teams into it, showing people one at a time, like how this technology can work because there's a lot of fear and you have to be sensitive to that.

And then on the other side, it's about like, you know, we have a slate of films that we're financing ourselves or with partners that I think is is really exciting, which is like, if you can save that time for the studios, you can do that for independent filmmakers.

So that's more of like what we saw with backrooms or obsession, right?

Like filmmakers who have a story to tell.

Now being able to do it on a bigger canvas and we're building workflows for those.

Yeah.

And I want to come back to the the reaction to AI, but just sticking for a second on your business model.

So who are you serving?

Who is it?

The individual.

Is it the studio?

Is it everyone?

Mostly I would say like our the our business mostly comes from the studios.

So we're backed by CAA and Comcast.

We spend a lot of time at the, at the studios.

We're working on everything from feature animated films at the studios to series, animated series and then building.

Sometimes we get called in to help create a new workflow for maybe a complicated VFX workflow when there's not, I think, a budget to do that, but the director wants to make something bigger.

We come in and do that, but, you know, in the part that that is a big part of our business is filmmakers, some of the greatest filmmakers who are coming in who are saying, hey, this is a movie I've been trying to make for ten years at the studio.

It's 80 million.

I've got investors who would do it at 25.

Like, can we figure out how to do that together?

So we spend time on the development side, building that out, taking our studio, which is in Los Angeles, our studio built in 1916, built for silent movies.

There was no electricity when it was built.

There was no roof on it.

They only shot in the daytime, made 11 Charlie Chaplin movies in there.

And then, you know that building I love because it's also been through all these technological changes.

Yeah, it was like built for silent movies.

And then they had to grapple with sound coming and then color and then computers and now AI.

But we take that old stage, which was literally built for silent movies with scenic backdrops, and we're shooting those in kind of like this gray box technology, which is using AI, using real actors, but then using AI for a lot of the other things, like the replacing the background set extension, changing the time period, all those things, and that starts to be able

to unlock a whole bunch new movies that can't be made at the prices or at the studios right now.

So who's on the team?

Who's doing that work?

Do you employ engineers, creative types like who's who's working at a stereo?

It's funny, like I, I'm very optimistic about the future and as a creative. Right.

And the thing I'm obsessed with Claude Code and Codex and what that has been able to do.

So like an image model comes out and that's that's cool, but like it's useless until somebody goes, well, actually you should put it into x, y, z and make it make sense.

What happened with cloud code, I would say at the beginning of the year is that it further, I think, made that thesis true, because what has been so thrilling about it is that the magic, the missing piece is like, do you know how to build something that is needed?

Right?

And there's no better people that know how to build something that's needed than like filmmakers or VFX artist or animators, right?

And so my team is built up of those people, right?

But like the ones that are the most curious of those.

So people that come from Disney or Pixar, wherever else, but it's always people who have been tinkering with technology and who are like, kind of hell bent on trying to figure out this piece of it, like putting together the team was really, you know, exciting because when I thought about it and my partner Ben Michelle, we sat together, we were like, we want to think of this like, as that moment in a heist movie

like Ocean's 11, where they say, we're putting together a crew and we need like, somebody who's great at picking locks and somebody great this.

And we spent a lot of time on discord and TikTok, finding folks from all over the world who were figuring out pieces of the puzzle.

You know, like there's a guy in Dallas who can take any video and turn it into, like, Wallace and Gromit claymation.

It was going viral.

You know, he did like Smells Like Teen Spirit Nirvana video so we were like, we need that guy.

Like, he's figuring out a part of the pipeline.

So if you start to put all those people together under one roof, and it's very important that everybody is under one roof and together in the studio, then you start to see the breakthroughs happen at that scale.

It doesn't come from, I think, somebody who's just sits on zoom and slack all day and in a basement in Belarus somewhere, who's a genius, right, like that, doesn't who's not committed, doesn't care about the company that they're working for, is just happy to move on to the next company that poaching them.

That's not interesting to me.

It's like, how do you find people who want to show up every single day, who are inspired, who are excited about it, and who are having breakthroughs like, you know, weekly?

So what's interesting about what you just said is when we look across industries at who's being successful with AI, the teams look very much like you just described.

They're multidisciplinary, made up of different specialties.

Call it what you will, but this concept of a Ford deployed engineer, somebody who understands the industry and understands how to bring AI and that engineering talent into the industry makes the difference.

That's it.

I mean, we do a thing in my office.

It's called Team Thursdays and Thursdays at the studio.

There's you're not allowed to set meetings for Thursdays.

So everybody has a clear calendar on Thursdays.

And we start on the stage sitting around in a circle, and everybody starts showing each other the work that they've been doing.

Then we show stuff that we've been inspired seeing online that week, and then we all work together on one project every Thursday.

It's a different project every Thursday, and that's like very intentional because we have to figure out or we had to figure out a way where we can actually get everybody together and talking more, because we're so spread out of everything that we're doing, even though we're all in-house out of studio, it's still very hard to to like, you know, have that space to actually be creative together.

My, my mentor was Tony Shea, who started Zappos.

And Tony, sold it to Amazon.

And Tony was a genius about corporate culture, you know.

And he would always talk about how important in the companies he was building and the buildings he was building.

Collisions were, you know, he would literally design his buildings famously in downtown Las Vegas, he separated the parking garage from where everybody worked, so that people would have to park their car and go through the lobby and collide with each other on their way to work, you know, hey, how's it going?

You know, otherwise you're just, like, in your car.

You go to the office and then you go back down.

And so, like, I've always been inspired by the way that Tony thought about building physical spaces.

Steve Jobs the same way, thought about building physical space, which is like finding those moments of people being together to try to work on a project at the same time.

So just sticking with the theme of specialists, we were talking about the the models.

We've got these big model providers investing a ton in LMS. And now we have the emergence of a lot of small language models, specialty models that are industry or business specific, making getting value from the proprietary data that they've curated. Yeah.

curated. Yeah.

How does how does that interaction work?

Is there a place for small language models in this industry?

I would say, like the thing that's important to remember about the way that AI is sort of going to come into Hollywood, like I sort of think it's it's important to level set the first thing, which is basically there's a lot of noise about all of these things that AI can do, right?

So like every day you open up social media and it's like Hollywood's cooked.

Look at this.

Brad Pitt and Tom cruise are fighting on a rooftop for some.

And then everybody talks about that for a while.

It's important to sort of just remember what is actually happening.

There are two things at play that make AI such a sort of revolutionary moment for the way things are made in Hollywood.

One is because of chips like Nvidia or AMD or whatever, like rendering is real time or near real time, and that is huge.

That's irrespective of AI, right?

That just means a lot.

Like now we're in a world where you can render things in real time.

So that is a huge impact on animation and VFX.

So that's one.

Two is, is when you put an intelligence behind that rendering so that these AI models understand the IP and the world that you're creating.

That is the next big leap.

So when you put intelligence and fast rendering together, that's 90% of like what the power of what AI can do.

Everything else is sort of like a tool on top, like lip sync.

And this that's all.

It all comes back to these two elements.

The rendering is the compute.

The intelligence though is the model right.

And that combination. Yeah.

And where that model.

So when you're talking about specialized models it's really about like training small models or fine tuning models on the IP that you're working on.

Right.

So like we wanted to recreate this conversation using AI and do another 20 episodes of Just Me and You talking, which I think we should do.

It would be amazing.

Then you would train a model on what we're wearing, on how we're talking on, you know, the way that we're interacting like this.

And that's when you start to see, really the value and the leaps forward for AI.

What's fascinating about that is that when we first started, the first thinking around all this stuff was that you would train models or fine tuned models on just what people looked like, right?

So we would take an image of both of us and it would know how we looked.

Right. And so you could see a video of me and you talking and be like, oh yeah, that looks like them.

it didn't move like us, right?

So the next level of models was about like how we move.

And get the physics right.

Yeah.

You train another model that like you have ways that you move.

I have different ways that I move.

And all of a sudden you start seeing it and it sounds like us and it looks like us and it moves like us.

The next wave of fine tuning, which I think is fascinating and that we're working on now, is that you actually also start training on, like the psychology of us.

Right? So now, you know, you also put it in everything you've written, worked on whatever else, like every interview you've done in the past.

So now not only do you understand how you talk and move, but you also understand how you would respond to most questions and even what questions you would ask.

And so when you start to see the future of what fine tuning in these small models can do, it's it's really pretty exciting.

And there's, you know, I don't think we even know what the effect of that stuff is going to do, but it starts to be quite interesting.

The example I had about the kid on our team who was taking video and turning it into Wallace and Gromit.

I showed it to a friend of mine who was doing Wallace and Gromit at Aardman for ten years, and I said, hey, look at this thing.

Look this guy on our team, he can make this video smells like Teen Spirit, like Wallace and Gromit.

he said, yeah, that looks like Wallace and Gromit, but that's not how they move.

And like, for me, I don't know how they move.

Like, you know, I'm a fan, but I don't know it well enough.

It takes somebody who was literally thinking about how they move for ten years.

And so that was was those kind of conversations that started to push us into starting to think about how you train models deeper and deeper.

Yeah.

So you see a world where the LMS are foundational, but there's a lot of value being created by the SLS.

Yeah. I mean, I think you have to you have to fine tune when you are trying to do things at the highest level.

Sure.

When when we work with a studio and there are teams who are like the best, you can't do.

yeah, that looks kind of like him.

Right.

Like it's like it has to look.

Exactly.

You know, or you're doing a superhero like you can't make it like, oh yeah.

That, you know, kind of looks like the.

Whole precision matters.

Yeah.

And what do you think about the use of AI to produce and make movies?

I'm not a real fan of it.

I mean, living in New York City.

I we support all the film festivals.

A lot of independent films, you know.

And I just think in terms of the strategy that we have for our producers, people who write the screenwriters, and more importantly, the actors, that this is going to impact them.

I mean, we like the real thing.

It's the thing.

And I just think now that we're, you know, people have to fight to retain their images instead of, you know, going out there and being able to work.

And now you're competing already with fellow actors in the business who trained for this craft many years.

Now, on top of that, you have to fight against images that aren't even real.

And that's not something that I want to support.

I believe in the arts.

My daughter is studying to be in the art show totally against And even if it created new opportunity for the creator to make movies that they wouldn't have been able to make in the past.

So for the independent filmmaker trying to break into the movie industry, Is that interesting at all?

Maybe.

But I think there should be restrictions and limits as to what you can actually use AI AI for.

So if you're talking about imaging in terms of background and scenery, if you don't have the money to actually go somewhere and shoot the mountains, but you want to create an AI image, I think that may be fair, but in terms of actual taking away from actual people and using, you know, images to portray people instead of actually getting real live actors.

I'm so if it takes something away from the artists or the actors, a bad thing, but if it adds something or creates new opportunity, I think I can, I think I can, I can draw the line there and be fair because I'm trying.

I see the both sides, but I'm really strongly supportive of the artist.

So, Marie, you're a movie fan? Yes.

fan? Yes.

How do you feel about AI and moviemaking?

I love Mr. Scorsese, but I don't think it's a good idea.

Have you ever seen one?

The wrong audience for that.

I've seen the slop that's online.

The low quality.

Yeah. Okay.

But you haven't seen the high quality stuff yet, if that exists.

I guess Thanks for talking to us.

So, big movie fans.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Have you ever seen an AI made movie?

I have not seen an AI made movie.

Would you be open to that?

It's an.

I have a complicated feeling on it.

I feel like you guys can speak to a little bit.

I don't know.

I mean, is it written by AI?

Like like like I feel like AI is similar to, like, like CGI or animated movies, but if it's, like, written by a.

I'm not interested in that.

Is it performed by like, I don't want to see an AI actor.

I feel like I feel like I'd watch that and see if it's any good.

I would watch it.

I would watch it for comedic effect.

Yeah. Fair enough.

What if it was okay?

What if it was high quality, written by a human, but it was powered.

The production was powered by AI.

So you still have the human element?

Yeah.

I mean, I don't think that far from an animated movie.

I mean, the text already doing that.

Disney does it all the time.

So you're open to it opens a different question.

Thanks for doing this.

So let's get back to the reaction.

And it's been a big one.

And it seems to be intensifying the there's a fear about AI and what it means to to jobs, particularly in the creative space.

And, you know, we don't want to be dismissive of the reaction.

We kind of want to understand it.

But how do you gauge that that reaction?

And is the fear distracting us from the opportunity at this point?

It's fascinating to me that the the big companies are a little nervous right now about this disruptive power of AI that that small companies can play up and be disruptive.

You've given some examples today, in fact.

And yet the the the small company, the little guy is nervous about what AI does to their future.

How do you make sense?

All all of that.

Yeah. I mean it's it's such a dynamic moment across industries, right.

Where I think we see it played out this like classic innovators dilemma, like the the future of these things can't come from the big companies because they're building the very disruptions that will take them out.

Right.

Which is why you see, like Netflix buying Ben Affleck's company and are positive like that, you know, or we saw in the past Disney buying Pixar like that.

Innovation has to come from outside.

for me personally, I've spent the last two and a half years inside of Hollywood really trying to help the industry and how to adopt this in the right At a certain point, that resistance to it becomes too much, right when I start thinking about where my energy goes, which is like, again, back to this idea that there's 150,000 people in Hollywood and make movies like,

do you optimize and spend all your time optimizing for those people, or do you start to think about the 2 billion people a month who are putting out stuff on social media and TikTok?

Right.

Those are storytellers, and those people can be filmmakers as well, too, right?

And that is what I think is very interesting.

Right. So say there's 2 billion people who are making who are, you know, content creators on, on TikTok.

And let's say, you know, 5% of them are great storytellers or have a story to tell.

That's a big deal, right?

Like, what you're about to see is a whole new group of filmmakers, you know, tens, hundreds of millions of people who are able to make stuff that historically only the studios can make.

we really see a world where it's like, if people can create great characters and and own those characters, that's a first.

So I think that there's a moment where in any of these changes where sort of like the fortune favors the bold and people that lean in, and I've spent enough time, like, truly inside the industry getting stuck in this minutia conversation about like, oh, but what about the gaffer on this one movie?

And it's like, look, jobs are going to change.

But like, I don't know, the industry is not in a great place right now too.

So it's like that gaffer actually isn't working in Hollywood like that.

That hair and makeup person, like, can't get a job in Hollywood like they can, or those everybody has to go over to Vancouver like the animators who are complaining about, well, what about the animation jobs like those jobs were shipped overseas ten years ago.

Same with VFX like that.

That is something that I think we should have been mad about ten years ago.

And now we've got a chance to kind of make right.

And and so for me, it's about like in this moment, the importance of some hope and optimism and speed and passion and like, can we build faster than Silicon Valley?

AI companies can try to swallow us all up, right.

And so there's a real mission to what we're doing I think so.

So there's a, a what about segment of the industry.

And probably what good has come from that segment of the industry is the cautions.

Right.

What do we, you know, focus on to do this responsibly.

But at some point you're saying you got to get in position for the future and you got to invest in the direction of the industry?

Yeah.

And by the way, at some point, you know, or don't like, that's fine.

But like, you know, get out of the way a little bit or don't be so critical of everybody else trying to do this right.

It's sort of like if people want to continue to be purists and make every, you know, thing on film or whatever.

I remember there was some actor who was saying, anybody who uses AI and writing isn't a real writer.

And and then everybody was cheering that person at this thing.

And I was like, okay, so we're like, what have you got to, like, right on a typewriter?

Like, right with like a pen and a quill, you have to like, hunt a **** quail to like, where do you stop this?

And there are people who would be like, yeah, you shouldn't.

You know, a real writer only writes on typewriter or something like, you know, it's just like, you know, the position of people to be like telling other artists what tools they can use.

It's crazy to me.

That's crazy.

And so for me, my energy is spent with people who want to lean in and are curious about it and who want to take the hill.

There's a moment coming where somebody's going to make the Toy Story moment that happens, right?

Like Toy Story famously, like it's Pixar's first film, like it comes out.

There's no denying that computers of the future of animation, right.

Or the the the classic story about Jurassic Park where ILM makes the dinosaur walk cycle and Spielberg season is like, we're never going back to doing everything on stop motion.

We're going to go do CGI, and CGI is born.

There's these moments that happens.

That moment is coming for for AI, and it's going to be a moment where not creatively like, oh wow, I didn't know that was AI looks so great.

and it will change everything when that happens, right?

And so that is where I spend my time doing right.

Because when that happens, it is a a deluge of like filmmakers opportunities.

The industry will shift quickly into that thing.

They'll fund more of those movies, like a lot will happen.

And we just want to make sure that we're set up for that moment when it happens.

What shouldn't change about the industry?

So that's that's a very positive outlook on Hollywood in the industry and how things can be better with AI.

What shouldn't change about the industry?

I don't know, the industry.

Come on.

Needs a power washing.

What what shouldn't change about filmmaking?

Yeah. Is.

Starting with human ideas and having human guidance and authorship through the whole process.

Like when we think about production, think about all the places where the technology can compress the time.

Part of that, when we think about that is, how do you find all those places where you can compress the time while keeping your creative people in charge at the center of it?

That's it.

So the creatives need to be at the center of it has to start with, you know, I've been kicking around this idea forever.

I can't stop thinking about it.

That's about this.

And then this happens and how it's made to get to be that final product that will change.

But that part needs to remain, and that's not the industry.

Like I think the industry needs to change everything.

But filmmaking as a human centered creative process needs to keep that human heart.

You know, if the industry were to have it their way in ten years, it would sort of just be like, okay, now serve this customer ten more episodes of whatever they want, but, you know, do it without any humans.

And, you know, like that.

There's a dystopian direction that this goes, but we need to make sure that it stays human the whole time. I agree.

Let's end on a fun note, okay?

Okay. You've got this incredibly powerful new technology AI.

You can go back in history and remake any movie.

Which movie would it be?

Yeah, that's a great question.

We're we're working on Metropolis right now, which is the Fritz Lang movie which was set in 2026.

And there are these movies that were visions of the future, like Metropolis, that are so prescient and so powerful or late by Chris Marker, which was the inspiration for 12 monkeys that I just I would love more audiences to see and understand that we've been grappling with and thinking about these things, robots, the future humans love for a long time.

So stay tuned, I hope.

I hope we do something amazing with Metropolis.

Yeah, the irony would be using AI and bots to create a movie about that future with boss.

100%. Great.

I've had a wonderful time saying to you, thank you so much.

Thank you for spending the time with me.

Good.

It was a great conversation with Brin.

He swam deep.

When I talk about combining expertise with passion.

That was Brynn.

He's clearly optimistic about the future of moviemaking and the important role that AI will play.

he feels like it's an opportunity to further democratize moviemaking with this new, powerful technology.

I had a few takeaways.

One is the role of technology.

It's always been important to moviemaking, and AI is perhaps the most powerful technology this industry has faced.

It represents a lot of opportunity, but there's also a big human reaction that we have to understand and figure out and work through.

But it's clear that it will be critical to get in position for this new reality that we're all facing.

It also struck me that there were some great leadership moments in that conversation.

Sean Astin, the president of SAG, for instance, talking about how AI might represent an existential threat.

But it also is pretty cool and shows a lot of potential for a different style of moviemaking.

Or Martin Scorsese announcing the new deal with Black Forest Labs to make movies with AI, or Steven Spielberg, who said, let the artist choose the tools and technologies they use to make their art.

These are leaders shining a light on the path forward, and that's just what this journey needs right now.

I hope you enjoyed the episode.

See you next time.