Jodie Foster touched down in Colorado to spend some time with media executive and former Sony boss Michael Lynton, discussing who owns the future of Hollywood during a session at the Aspen Ideas Festival.
As part of their Tuesday conversation, they talked about the forces reshaping the film business and how the pandemic, labor strikes and audience habits have also had an impact. And they also examined the most urgent topic that nearly everyone in town is talking about these days: artificial intelligence.
“If we are able to dominate AI consistently over time, yes, we will make things that reflect us and we can make things better,” Foster told Lynton in front of a live audience. “Will we be able to dominate technology? That particular technology longer than a couple of years? I don’t know.”
Lynton then said he wasn’t sure either before asking Foster whether she believed AI could actually replace writers or actors. “We’re already doing that,” Foster said of actors. “Face-swapping and all the things you guys can do on your iPhone, we can do them even better with real fancy people.”
Foster, an Academy Award-winning actress who has also worked as a filmmaker and producer, then continued the thought by explaining how she often thinks of “movies that are already out there” and how those titles seemingly have been crafted by AI. She used Joseph Kosinski’s F1 starring Brad Pitt as an example.
“I don’t say this disparagingly, how could I? This movie went on to make millions of dollars but look at a movie like F1. I’m, like, F1 was made by AI,” she said. “Wasn’t it? The structure was exactly the structure that you would learn in school. The actors say the lines exactly the way it would be written if a computer was writing exactly what would be the right thing for that time. And they were able to dominate the technology to make something big and beautiful and, potentially, where a lot of the information comes from other places.”
Foster seemed to be using F1 as an example rather than claiming it was actually created by AI, but it’s a curious sentiment nonetheless, as the film has an impressive pedigree. It was nominated for four Academy Awards, including best picture, and it won an Oscar for best sound. Kosinski wrote the screenplay alongside Oscar-nominated scribe Ehren Kruger, and the film was produced by an A-list roster that includes Jerry Bruckheimer, Kosinski, Pitt, Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner, Lewis Hamilton and Chad Oman.
In a making of the film feature, THR’s Beatrice Verhoeven reported that Koskinski and his team “relied as much as possible on practical effects” while leaning on digital magic for certain sequences. Said VFX supervisor Ryan Tudhope: “We had two or three of our APXGP cars on the track, so in visual effects, we would replace those and add other cars in the background to make it feel like they were within the race.” Other times, they replaced cars on the tracks to avoid major accidents. “Some damage was too risky,” Tudhope said. “So we’d use a smaller vehicle, an F3 car, and a stunt driver would do the stunt and we would later replace that with our APXGP car.”
See Foster’s appearance at the Aspen Ideas Festival below.
