James Cameron appeared on the “Boz to the Future” podcast and said the future of blockbuster filmmaking hinges on being able to “cut the cost of [VFX] in half,” and the Oscar winner is trying to figure out how AI might help bring costs down without replacing crew members. Cameron announced in September 2024 that he was joining the board of directors for Stability AI, the company behind the text-to-image model Stable Diffusion.
“In the old days, I would have founded a company to figure it out. I’ve learned maybe that’s not the best way to do it. So I thought, all right, I’ll join the board of a good, competitive company that’s got a good track record,” Cameron said of joining the board. “My goal was not necessarily make a shit pile of money. The goal was to understand the space, to understand what’s on the minds of the developers. What are they targeting? What’s their development cycle? How much resources you have to throw at it to create a new model that does a purpose-built thing, and my goal was to try to integrate it into a VFX workflow.”
“And it’s not just hypothetical,” he continued. “If we want to continue to see the kinds of movies that I’ve always loved and that I like to make and that I will go to see — ‘Dune,’ ‘Dune: Part Two,’ or one of my films or big effects-heavy, CG-heavy films — we’ve got to figure out how to cut the cost of that in half. Now that’s not about laying off half the staff and at the effects company. That’s about doubling their speed to completion on a given shot, so your cadence is faster and your throughput cycle is faster, and artists get to move on and do other cool things and then other cool things, right? That’s my sort of vision for that.”
Cameron has long expressed doubt when it comes to AI taking over Hollywood jobs, and he stressed that AI’s role in the industry should be to help employees manage their workload and not replace them. In an interview with CTV News last year, the director expressed doubt over AI bots being able to write “a good story” and phase out screenwriters.
According to Cameron: “I just don’t personally believe that a disembodied mind that’s just regurgitating what other embodied minds have said — about the life that they’ve had, about love, about lying, about fear, about mortality — and just put it all together into a word salad and then regurgitate it…I don’t believe that’s ever going to have something that’s going to move an audience. You have to be human to write that. I don’t know anyone that’s even thinking about having AI write a screenplay.”
“Let’s wait 20 years, and if an AI wins an Oscar for best screenplay, I think we’ve got to take them seriously,” he added at the time.
In his latest interview, Cameron also said generative AI users should be discouraged from feeding prompts into the software such as “in the style of James Cameron” or “in the style of Zack Snyder,” noting that these kind of ripoffs “make me a little bit queasy.” Social media had a field day earlier this month with AI-created images that were in the style of Studio Ghibli films.
“I aspire to be in the style of Ridley Scott, in the style of Stanley Kubrick. That’s my text prompt that runs in my head as a filmmaker,” Cameron said. “In the style of George Miller: Wide Lens, low, hauling ass, coming up into a tight close up. Yeah, I want to do that. I know my influences. Everybody knows their influences.”
Cameron remains in post-production on the next “Avatar” sequel, “Fire & Ash,” which is set for release Dec. 19 from Disney and 20th Century Studios. Listen to his full interview on the “Boz to the Future” podcast here.
