Um, what? Bruno Dumont, one of the most uncompromising filmmakers alive, has made his next feature, "The End," entirely with generative AI.
Screen Daily broke the news this morning. Dumont started the English-language sci-fi thriller in August and has already finished it, generating the images, performances and sound himself from his home in Paris. He's aiming for a festival premiere in 2027. The question is who will take it. Dumont is a regular on the festival circuit, especially at Cannes.
If you're not deep into arthouse cinema, here's why this matters. Dumont won the the Grand Prix at Cannes twice, for "Humanity" in 1999 and "Flanders" in 2006. He built his career on non-professional actors, unusual faces you'd never see in a Hollywood movie. Then he pivoted, brilliantly, to deadpan absurdist comedy with "P'tit Quinquin" and "France," two of his best works. His Star Wars parody "The Empire" also won the Silver Bear Jury Prize at Berlin in 2024.
Dumont wrote "The End" more than 25 years ago, right after "Humanity." It follows an ambitious LA cop investigating a crime while the city is torn apart by earthquakes and falling asteroids. The disaster scenes made it far too expensive to shoot, so he shelved it and made "Twentynine Palms" instead. AI is what finally let him make it.
The way he describes the process to Screen is fascinating. He didn’t feed the whole script into a program. He worked scene by scene from his own storyboarding, asking his virtual actors for more anger or intensity, and adjusting everything from costumes to hairstyles. He even used faces from paintings as models for his characters, which is about the most Dumont thing imaginable. "My crew is a machine," he said.
Dumont produced "The End" independently. His reason for using AI is morose..financing auteur films in France keeps getting harder, and this gave him total freedom.
With generative AI, auteur cinema can reclaim radical creative autonomy, bringing previously unachievable visual and poetic worlds to life, free from financial and industry constraints
For what it's worth, Dumont is also developing a non-AI French film, with real actors and a real crew, through Bathysphere Films, the company behind Arthur Harari's "The Unknown." So he isn't abandoning cinema as we know it. Not yet, at least.
Will a major festival program "The End"? Cannes, Berlin and Venice, Dumont’s go-to fests, will all have to answer that in 2027, and I suspect the debate will get ugly. Of all the AI-generated movies that have been greenlit the last few years, this could very well be the most fascinating one.
Um, what? Bruno Dumont, one of the most uncompromising filmmakers alive, has made his next feature, "The End," entirely with generative AI.