Boxcar Bertha director Martin Scorsese has officially joined the AI bandwagon as he helps promote a new storyboard-generating app. Like the final act of Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, the townsfolk have been taken over, and now all speak alike. To the growing horde we can now add Martin Scorsese – the New York filmmaker ... Martin Scorsese | Oh no. Not you as well, Marty
Boxcar Bertha director Martin Scorsese has officially joined the AI bandwagon as he helps promote a new storyboard-generating app.
Like the final act of Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, the townsfolk have been taken over, and now all speak alike. To the growing horde we can now add Martin Scorsese – the New York filmmaker who for decades has championed cinema as an artform.
In a coordinated publicity campaign, which includes an attention-grabbing feature in the New York Times and a glossy-looking infomercial on YouTube, Scorsese has put his name next to Black Forest Labs – the latest in a seemingly endless line of AI tech companies that have sprung up over the past four years or so.
The firm is using Scorsese’s fame and reputation to push a piece of software called FLUX, which appears to be an image-generation platform much Midjourney or all the others you’ll find on the internet. Scorsese, in both the video below and a written statement, says he now plans to use the software to generate his storyboards rather than draw them by hand.
“For 70 years, I’ve been creating my own storyboards,” the filmmaker’s statement reads. “There’s always been this problem of how do you communicate what you see in your head to your cast and crew. There are some things you have to see and feel. I’m interested in the intersection of technology and storytelling, and seeing how that can push the bounds of creativity to create deeper and richer experiences for audiences.
“Remember, cinema is a young medium, only around 125 years old, so we have to be open to how it can evolve. I [used] 3D with Hugo and de-aging technology for The Irishman. Now, with this tool, I can share what I’m visualizing more clearly and efficiently to my creative team—the production designer, art designer, and cinematographer—for them to build on to enrich cinematic intelligence.
“I recently tested this out on a scene and the ability to visualize and immediately share the storyboard was creatively freeing. During the pre-production process, time costs money, and this allowed us to move faster without sacrificing quality or craft.”
The accompanying infomercial shows Scorsese engaging in a ‘storyboarding session’ with a couple of people from Black Forest Labs; the veteran director says he wants to see an old town with a winding street and tightly-huddled houses. A young guy at a laptop punches in a few prompts, and an eerily pristine image of a town emerges on the screen. Scorsese seems impressed.
Scorsese’s endorsement has prompted a wave of emotional responses on social media. There’s anger, disappointment, but some defence, too: the argument being that it’s ‘only’ storyboarding, and that FLUX is merely a tool like Photoshop or whatever app you care to name.
The counter-argument: generative AI takes other artists’ work without permission and compensation. The amount of energy the tech requires is horrific. And the growing adoption of these AI tools means there will be fewer jobs for storyboard artists and other creative jobs.
Read more: Cannes 2026 and the unanswered question about AI in cinema
That’s bad not just for those at the lower end of the filmmaking food chain, but those at the very top, like Scorsese. Filmmaking is a collaborative medium, where dozens of minds all chime in with their own ideas and little pushes on the creative dial. The director may be there as the final arbiter of taste, but a film is only as rich as the editors, cinematographers, lighting engineers, actors and countless other humans involved in a production.
Culture may be in love with the idea of the auteur, but the advent of generative AI may explode that myth; reduce filmmaking down to one guy and a few prompts, and what you have is a recipe for blandness. The images spat out during Scorsese’s session with FLUX may only be intended as a guide for the rest of the crew, but if the production is working from a blueprint where every shot is a re-synthesised copy of an image that already exists, then you’re far more likely to end up with a movie that looks much like any other.
An anecdote shared by the animator and filmmaker Bill Kroyer stuck with me. Last year, he described a period in the early 1980s where he was between animating jobs, having just finished Tron, and to pay the bills, he took on some work as a storyboard artist.
Kroyer ended up working on Wes Craven’s A Nightmare On Elm Street. He took the script, broke it down, and began drawing out how he thought its horror set-pieces should look. He spent so long rendering all those moments in detail that he ended up having his own nightmares.
When Kroyer went to see the finished movie, he was startled to see how closely the camera angles and compositions lined up with what he’d drawn. Craven evidently liked them so much that he used them as the basis for the finished shots, such as the unforgettable moment where a young Johnny Depp is sucked into a demonic bed, which then vomits up a geyser of blood onto the ceiling.
It’s a prime example of how artists collaborate with each other to create the images we see on screen. Had AI been around in the early 1980s, would A Nightmare On Elm Street have looked the same? We suspect not.
A growing number of filmmakers appear to be ignoring the disadvantages of falling back on generative AI. Scorsese has now joined a growing club which includes the likes of George Miller, Gareth Edwards and James Cameron.
Hearteningly, there are still a few big-name hold-outs, including Guillermo del Toro, whose catchy refrain over the past few weeks or so has been “Fuck AI”. But as the huge money thrown around by the tech industry causes more and more Hollywood filmmakers to fall into line, all repeating similar “it’s inevitable” soundbites, del Toro is beginning to resemble Kevin McCarthy in Body Snatchers: the last human in a town where everyone thinks and talks alike.
