Scottish director David Mackenzie, known for Hell or High Water, Young Adam and this year's Fuze, has named an AI project he is trying to get made: Veritas. In an interview Film Stories published on 9 April, he said he wants AI in parts of it and would even welcome results that are a little glitchy.
The title is Latin for truth, and the film would be about AI as well as partly made with it. Mackenzie had told NPR earlier that footage can no longer be treated as proof now that images are so easy to alter. Speaking to Film Stories, he said flawed AI imagery could give viewers a slippery sense of what is real.
He also said Veritas has to be made soon, because the technology moves fast and he expects filmmakers to be placing live actors into AI environments before long. He is unsure how he feels about that but thinks no one can stop it, and said he knows people making AI music that is hard to tell from human work, so he expects artists to take it up more widely. He first mentioned the project, without its title, to NPR while promoting his previous thriller Relay.
Mackenzie stressed he does not want AI in every film. He still sees power in authentic performance and real places, and finds it hard to picture the grittier side of filmmaking being faked.
Film Stories puts him in a growing group of directors open to the technology. Darren Aronofsky's company Primordial Soup made a run of online shorts, On This Day, entirely with Google's AI tools, and Gareth Edwards has said new tools will free up storytelling after a rough transition. Steven Soderbergh has said he used AI imagery for dreamlike sequences in a documentary on John Lennon and Yoko Ono, wants to make a Spanish-American War film with Wagner Moura that would lean heavily on AI, and insists the technology needs close human supervision.
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