Danny Boyle's ‘Ink' TIFF Q&A Cut Short After Audience Member Grills Him on AI Use

I started my two-week festival trek with a Venice screening of Danny Boyle's "Ink," and somehow things came full circle this afternoon when I saw it again as my last watch at TIFF before packing my bags and heading home.

My issues with the film remain. It has a strong first half and a mixed-bag second, and not enough room is given for the story and characters to breathe. Boyle over-directs the whole thing with his trademark kinetic style. I'll give him this: there's no such thing as a "boring" Danny Boyle movie (okay, maybe "Yesterday"). Still, Jack O'Connell is excellent as Larry Lamb, the editor Rupert Murdoch (Guy Pearce) — not depicted as a bad guy here at all — handpicks to turn The Sun into a tabloid.

That said, what you'll be hearing about most online from the "Ink" screening at TIFF is the Q&A that followed, which ended abruptly after an audience member asked Boyle about the film's use of generative AI.

Boyle more or less sidestepped the question, insisting that only "about 30 seconds" of AI was used:

We used a tiny amount of it. It's very much linked with VFX in our world; it's one of the tools they use in the VFX. We try to be very responsible and make sure no actors were out of work because of it, so we would always employ actors if we were going to use a bit of it. There was about thirty seconds of it.

As for the broader implications of AI, he set that aside for another day.

The why of it… is a hugely complicated [question], which I don't think we'll need to go into here. But we will need to go into it, all of us.

Boyle's answer was met with a shout of "Never do that shit again" from the crowd, and the TIFF moderator swiftly brought the Q&A to a close, thanking everyone for coming.

Of course, this didn't come out of nowhere. Questions about AI have been trailing "Ink" since its opening-night slot at Venice. Shortly after the premiere, a few critics flagged what looked like AI-generated depictions of the Kray twins, Margaret Thatcher, and a handful of mice.

Boyle later confirmed that he had used AI and framed it partly as a budget issue. According to Boyle, a real actor was hired and paid to perform the entire Thatcher sequence, and the actor's head was then digitally replaced with Thatcher's. That's the basis for his repeated insistence that no actor lost work.

Thirty seconds out of a two-hour-plus movie is objectively a small amount, and there's a real debate to be had about where "VFX tool" ends and "generative AI" begins. However, a filmmaker of Boyle's stature, with a film positioned for awards season, is going to keep getting asked about this.