Future of Film: Can AI Turn Anyone into a Movie Maker? (Jenny Krakovsky)

Gabriel Gatehouse (0:00)

I want to start today by playing a snippet from a new film.

SPEAKER_2 (0:03)

I'm not going to kill anybody.

We're keeping a very close eye on you, Mrs Riley. If we don't get him first, he'll get us.

Gabriel Gatehouse (0:11)

It's a period piece set in the north of England in what looks like the 1960s, an ensemble cast of female lead actors, there's a car chase, a bit of emotional drama, some jokes. It looks really, really fun, but kind of unremarkable Hollywood style fare until you get to the end of the two and a half minute trailer. Over a shot of a kid running into a terraced house, the following words appear on screen. One woman, a laptop, new rules.

Hello, this is Radical with Gabriel Gatehouse. The show where we talk to radical people about their ideas, big ideas, sometimes controversial ideas, and we look at them with an open mind and a critical lens.

That clip you just heard is from a film called Boss, and it's made entirely using AI.

None of the actors are human. The music, the action, the sets, the scenery, all of it is generated on a computer using artificial intelligence. In fact, the only thing about the film that is human is its creator, Jenny Krakovsky. Amid all the angst about AI and its impact on the world, including the creative industries, Jenny decided to do something radical. She made a feature length movie on her own, just Jenny in her bedroom on her laptop. It's now finished and coming to a cinema near you. Well, maybe not near you unless you live in the United States, but still, is Boss the cutting edge of a new kind of filmmaking that could revolutionize cinema or is it a nail in the coffin of the film and TV industry as we know it? Let's dig into it with our minds open and our critical faculties switched on. Jenny Krakovsky, I'm delighted to say, the human behind the film is with us in the studio. Welcome to Radical.

Jenny Krakovsky (2:19)

Thank you so much for having me.

Gabriel Gatehouse (2:21)

Jenny, when I first saw you laying out your challenge, I thought, God, this is a really fascinating experiment. But can you just, in brief, what was the challenge you set yourself?

Jenny Krakovsky (2:34)

So I am a traditional filmmaker. I make commercials and documentaries, and I'd been keeping an eye on the AI space online for a few years. I realized that as I described it, the technology was basically at 11 o'clock, if you think about it, an hour to midnight. It's not quite there, but it almost is.

So I set myself a challenge. I've never been particularly online, I've never done any influencing, I had no desire to be in front of the camera. Actually, I was quite afraid of that, and I just thought, yeah, I could make an AI feature film by myself now. I thought, well, I've got scripts that are just collecting dust on my laptop. So rather than wait 10 years to get finance and funding that's so rare, I thought, well, why don't I just try and do it with AI? I thought the one thing I knew from working in advertising was, I knew that if I made the film just all alone in my bedroom, and then let it out into the wild, I thought probably you wouldn't get much traction and no one would care.

Gabriel Gatehouse (3:41)

Sing without a trace.

Jenny Krakovsky (3:42)

Yeah, exactly.

I thought knowing what I know just about social media and marketing and things like that, I thought, well, maybe I could run a do-it-yourself PR campaign alongside it. I thought if I vlog the whole process, not only will it show the work that goes into it and dispel some of the myths about AI filmmaking and so on, but I also thought it gives people a chance to actually invest emotionally in the journey. And it just took off, like the first video that I did is my first ever vlog.

Gabriel Gatehouse (4:17)

I mean, can we just have a look at it? I think we could probably get it up on screen in the studio. There you are.

Jenny Krakovsky (4:24)

Hi, my name is Jenny and my goal is to make a feature film with AI tools in 30 days. So I'm going to be vlogging the whole process all the way along, so that people can see not only the workflow and how I'm going to achieve this, but also the pitfalls along the way, things that I can give my opinion on along the way, what works, what doesn't.