The Crow and I, Robot director Alex Proyas is the latest filmmaker to turn to generative AI with his current project, Heaven. It’s been a decade since Alex Proyas directed his last movie – the fascinatingly ramshackle fantasy, Gods Of Egypt, starring Gerard Butler. It cost $140m to make and wasn’t screened for critics in ... I, Robot director Alex Proyas is making a new, ‘AI-enabled’ sci-fi film
The Crow and I, Robot director Alex Proyas is the latest filmmaker to turn to generative AI with his current project, Heaven.
It’s been a decade since Alex Proyas directed his last movie – the fascinatingly ramshackle fantasy, Gods Of Egypt, starring Gerard Butler. It cost $140m to make and wasn’t screened for critics in the UK.
Proyas has popped up occasionally with other project, including an adaptation of Karel Capek’s 1920 play, R.U.R, about a robot uprising. Now, it sounds as though the Dark City and I, Robot filmmaker is throwing his energies into another project – Heaven, described as a “dark satire” in the vein of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, to quote Deadline.
The same outlet reports that Heaven is going to be looking for pre-sales investments at the Cannes Film Festival, and that, in order to bring its visual effects to the screen at a lower cost, the movie will use generative AI.
That AI imagery will be provided by Ex Machina Studios, an LA-based firm co-founded by Tom Ryan, former boss of Paramount Streaming per its LinkedIn page.
Heaven is said to be about a “desperate bureaucrat” who retreats into a “technologically perfected afterlife” but then discovers that it’s a “carefully constructed illusion with terrifying consequences.”
That perfected afterlife will be realised by Ex Machina, which, according to the company’s own blurb, is capable of making “expansive worlds to be realised at a responsible budget” while remaining committed to “100 percent guild compliance.”
Setting the tech itself aside – this website has made its stance on generative AI fairly clear already – it’s striking how many similar projects are in the works.
Poker Face star Natasha Lyonne triggered an online backlash when she announced Uncanny Valley, which she plans to direct and star in. Co-written by actor Brit Marling, it’s about a teenage girl who becomes “engrossed in an augmented reality game, which begins to blur the lines between real and virtual worlds,” to quote our own post from last June.
Oscar-nominated director David Mackenzie, who made the wonderful Hell Or High Water and the thrillers Relay and Fuze, has also talked about using AI “in some areas” to create a “slightly glitchy… slippery reality” for a project he has in the works called Veritas.
Assuming any of these projects happen, we could soon be in for a collection of films that all use gen-AI to create wobbly, Philip K Dick-esque realms from the uncanny valley.
