The showrunner thinks AI will be good for burgeoning filmmakers, but not for Hollywood blockbusters. Jonathan Nolan saw this coming. As a screenwriter, he's worked on several of his brother Christopher Nolan's films, from to the movies. Partnered with his wife Lisa Joy, he created HBO's and executive produced Amazon Prime's . But before that, he cut his TV teeth creating, a CBS procedural about a solitary tech billionaire who creates a piece of surveillance software aimed at stopping crime before it happens. It was fiction, but it's hard not to feel its prescience. With, now in its second season, Nolan also has his sights on the future. Based on the video game series of the same name, it's about a postapocalyptic America where everyone must survive in any way they can. So, what does Nolan see happening in the coming decades? For one, he doesn't think AI is going to replace human filmmakers. In fact, he thinks it could help aspiring directors get a foot in the door. He'd also like to see the demise of (most) social media--but understands that may never happen. For this week's episode of The Big Interview podcast, I asked Nolan about all of those things and more. Below you'll find his thoughts on writing Batman movies, classic cars, and what he'd actually bring to his own doomsday bunker. Thank you for having me. I'm delighted to have you here in person in New York. I'm from Canada so my barometer is a little off, but I tend to think of New York as wimpy cold. No, no, this is real. The older I get the weaker and more frail. So I can't tolerate [it]. I've been in LA for 25 years.

Kleber Mendonça Filho wants his films to reclaim lost history. For Kleber Mendonça Filho, filmmaking is an act of both provocation and preservation. Mendonça was born in 1968, in the early years of a ruthless military dictatorship--a time when cinema, like much else, was harshly constrained. His mother, Joselice Jucá, was a historian who studied Brazil's abolitionist movement, and she taught him that filling gaps in the cultural memory was a way to expose concealed truths. His relationship with film is inextricably linked with his home town, Recife--a port city where attractive beaches and high-rise developments coexist with sprawling favelas and rampant crime. In his youth, Mendonça was fascinated by the city's grand cinema palaces. He carried a Super 8 camera to the tops of marquees and shot dizzying images; he spent hours in projection booths, learning the mechanics of how films reached the screen. Over time, Mendonça watched those theatres fall into decline, an experience that he likened to being aboard a ship as it wrecked. But even as Recife lost its allure, he made the city a fixture of his films--a way of vindicating its place in history. His first narrative feature, "Neighboring Sounds," takes place on a street where he lived as a child, a setting that he spent years documenting. Later, he made "Pictures of Ghosts," a documentary about Recife told largely through its cinemas.

Amazon's Used Over 350 AI Shots in Season 2. Its Creator Isn't Sorry The show, which follows David's ascent to King of Israel, used four times as much AI this season, including for many of its battle scenes. A dusty visual overlay partially obscures crowds of men in the desert, sword-fighting in armor and on horseback. With some wardrobe tweaks, this scene could look like something out of or . But showrunner Jon Erwin says he didn't have the budget to bring these scenes to life. Instead, he used AI .

The Director of a Raunchy 3-Hour Dracula Movie Says AI Is Gross and Slimy. That's Why He Used It Radu Jude is the internet's favorite filmmaker. In 2021, the Romanian writer-director bagged the prestigious Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival for, a black comedy about a school teacher whose career is threatened when a hardcore porno she makes with her husband goes viral. Shot largely on the streets of Bucharest during Covid-19 lockdowns, the film documents the eerie, empty aesthetic of urban centers in the era and captures real citizens snarling and cursing at the camera and at the film's lead actress. His follow-up, 2023's, nailed a different strain of post-Covid alienation. Its heroine, Angela (Ilinca Manolache), toils away 9 to 5 making shady workplace safety videos for a faceless multinational while moonlighting on TikTok, pretending to be a misogynist influencer (modeled after Romania's own model of toxic masculinity, Andrew Tate).

In Guillermo del Toro's "Frankenstein," a Vast Vision Gets Netflixed Down to Size The latest reanimation of Mary Shelley's classic tale, starring Oscar Isaac and Jacob Elordi, is a labyrinthine tour of a filmmaker's career-long obsessions. Earlier this year, Quentin Tarantino, when asked to parse the high points of his filmography in an interview, described the two-part "Kill Bill" (2003-04) as "the movie I was born to make." He added, "I think'Inglourious Basterds' is my masterpiece, but'Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood' is my favorite." Might these be distinctions without a difference? I'm generally wary of artistic-birthright narratives, not least because a filmmaker of remarkable talent, consistent vision, and good fortune might well wind up with multiple candidates for the honor.

English actor Christopher Lee famously played the blood-sucking Dracula in ten different films. Here he plays the infamous vampire in'Dracula A.D. 1972,' directed by Alan Gibson. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. This spooky season, as you binge horror flicks, peep the Halloween décor, and peruse potential costumes, pay attention to the fake blood and you'll notice something odd: It all looks wildly different . Some of it's thin and watery, and some is viscous and goopy.

The filmmaker could not get Tiggy the alien to cooperate. He just needed the glistening brown creature to turn its head. But Tiggy, who was sitting in the passenger's seat of a cop car, kept disobeying. At first Tiggy rotated his gaze only slightly. Then he looked to the wrong side of the camera. Then his skin turned splotchy, like an overripe fruit. The filmmaker was not on a movie set, or Mars. He was sitting at his home computer in Los Angeles using a piece of AI software called FLUX Kontext to generate and regenerate images of the alien, waiting for a workable one to appear. He'd used a different AI tool, Midjourney, to generate the very first image of Tiggy (prompt: "fat blob alien with a tiny mouth and tiny lips"); one called ElevenLabs to create the timbre of Tiggy's voice (the filmmaker's voice overlaid with a synthetic one, then pitch-shifted way up); and yet another called Runway to describe the precise shot he wanted in this scene ("close up on the little alien as they ride in the passenger seat, shallow depth of field").

One of Chantal Akerman's Best Films Is in Legal Limbo The Belgian-born director's 1994 coming-of-age masterwork, about a precocious teen-ager's romantic audacity, can't be reissued because of its needle drops. Much of direction is production: the material conditions under which a movie is made plays a major role in the creative process. Movie lovers tend to think of producers as dictators of formulas, oppressors of originality, the enemies of art, but that just reflects the unfortunate history of studio filmmaking in Hollywood and elsewhere. In fact, producing a movie can be a kind of art in itself, a practical imagining of possibilities for filmmakers that they wouldn't themselves have come up with. The complete retrospective of Chantal Akerman's work that runs at from September 11th to October 16th includes a superb instance of this phenomenon--of visionary production fostering directorial artistry--in her "Portrait of a Young Girl at the End of the 60s in Brussels," an hour-long movie from 1994.

In an interview with Fox News Digital, filmmaker David Zucker declared that he would not be watching "The Naked Gun" starring Liam Neeson, stating the entire concept of a "Naked Gun" reboot was unoriginal and played out. The director of the first two "Naked Gun" movies said he will not be seeing the 2025 reboot of his classic spoof series. In an interview with Fox News Digital, filmmaker David Zucker declared that he would not be watching "The Naked Gun" starring Liam Neeson, stating the entire concept of a "Naked Gun" reboot was unoriginal and played out. "I don't see any reason to see it," he said. "And so, it's like, well, Jim Abrahams said, if your daughter became a prostitute, would you go watch her work?"

There are many filmmakers in Hollywood who view AI as antithetical to their creative process. This tension played a major role during the Hollywood strikes in 2023, with many on the picket lines expressing fears about job loss via automation. Talukdar, conversely, argues that AI tools will actually create new types of jobs, and enable studios to push their budgets further rather than slashing them. "There's this idea that instead of spending 50 million on a movie, you can now do it for 5 million, and there's some truth in that," he says. "But the other way to think about it--which is how every studio that we talked to is thinking about it--is now for that 50 million and for the same 100 people on that project, they're just going to be able to do what would have cost them 100 million before," he says.