Paul Schrader Has the “Perfect Script” to Make His Next Film Entirely with AI

Paul Schrader doesn’t give a flying thought to what others think. He is ready to explore artificial intelligence in filmmaking, telling Vanity Fair that he has the “perfect script to do all AI.”

We know him as the writer of “Taxi Driver,” and “Raging Bull,” and director of “First Reformed” and “Blue Collar,” but Schrader is convinced that films “are going to be more and more AI,” adding, “I think we’re only two years away from the first AI feature.”

He elaborated: “I was just on the phone with someone today about a script I had, and I said, ‘You know, this would be a perfect script to do all AI.’”

Chances are Schrader won’t get to make his next film in AI, unless he wants to be shunned and blacklisted by his industry cohorts, but he seems dead-set on the idea, telling Vanity Fair that embracing the technology is “just a tool.”

When you’re an author, you have to describe someone’s reaction. You use a code — you use a code of words, a certain number of letters, and so forth, and you express their facial reaction. An actor has their own code. Well, now you’re a pixelator, and you can create the face, and you can create the emotion on the face, and you can sculpt it the same way an author sculpts the reaction in a novel or a story.

Schrader has long been open to AI in filmmaking. He frequently posts AI-generated images of himself on Facebook and has admitted to using ChatGPT for script ideas.

“I’M STUNNED,” he wrote. “I just asked chatgpt for ‘an idea for Paul Schrader film.’ Then Paul Thomas Anderson. Then Quentin Tarantino. Then Harmony Korine. Then Ingmar Bergman. Then Rossellini. Lang. Scorsese. Murnau. Capra. Ford. Speilberg [sic]. Lynch. Every idea chatgpt came up with (in a few seconds) was good. And original. And fleshed out. Why should writers sit around for months searching for a good idea when AI can provide one in seconds?”

Wild times.