THE AI FILMMAKER OUTRUNNING HOLLYWOOD:
Hollywood’s been going insane over AI for the past three years, starting back when the tech was barely capable of generating Will Smith eating spaghetti. SAG-AFTRA went on strike for over 100 days in 2023, and contract negotiations are stalled again; the union’s pushing to make synthetic performers “as expensive as humans” and floating ideas like a “Tilly tax” on AI generated characters (it’s named after Tilly Norwood, an AI-generated “actress”). James Cameron, no Luddite by any stretch of the imagination, called AI-generated performances “horrifying.” Luca Guadagnino (of Call Me by Your Name fame) said AI actors mark “the end of the industry as we know it.”
But [Charles] Curran isn’t “horrified.” He’s excited.
And, unlike the “slop artists” Hollywood fearmongers envision taking their jobs, he’s devoted to the craft.
“I’m a really ferocious film watcher,” Curran says. “I watch over 300, sometimes 400 films a year. I have a film school background and I love cinema. I just genuinely do.”
He’s made movies for 20 years. After film school at the Savannah College of Art and Design, Curran worked in commercial filmmaking, producing movies for Nike, Google, and the World Economic Forum. He released a feature film, See Know Evil, in 2018.
“The people who are the best at storytelling should be the ones with the best tools to tell their story,” he says — not the people who happen to live in LA and know the right people. It’s ironic that Hollywood — supposedly home to culture’s visionaries — struggles to accept AI’s white pill, as Curran sees it.
“If you look at someone like Jia Zhangke in China, who’s an incredible filmmaker, probably one of the most important of the 21st century, he has no qualms about [AI filmmaking],” Curran explains. “He just kind of says, ‘Cinema’s always been a technology-driven art….’”
Curran concedes that AI video isn’t perfect. “It’s just very difficult to keep consistent characters, environments, and geometry without it changing shot to shot.” But the models are improving; these are solvable problems.
They sure are; Curran is the man creating the recent banging videos in support of the Spencer Pratt campaign:
