AI’s promise to indie filmmakers: faster, cheaper, lonelier

Independent filmmakers Brad Tangonan, Hal Watmough, Tabitha Swanson, Keenan MacWilliam, and Sander van Bellegem participated in Google Flow Sessions, a five-week program that provided access to AI tools to create short films, which were later screened at Soho House New York late last year, as part of an exploration into how artificial intelligence can democratize filmmaking for resource-constrained creators while examining its impact on artistic expression and collaboration. Tangonan's 'Murmuray,' a family story about a Filipino man encountering his mother in a mystical forest, exemplifies this approach, with the filmmaker maintaining creative control by writing traditionally and using AI tools like Google's Nano Banana Pro to generate visual elements matching his established style. Similarly, MacWilliam's 'Mimesis' incorporated her own scanned flora and fauna collection rather than relying on generic AI-generated content, demonstrating how these tools can enhance rather than replace human creativity. Despite the democratizing potential of AI in filmmaking, significant concerns remain about its impact on creativity and employment. High-profile directors like Guillermo del Toro, James Cameron, and Werner Herzog have expressed strong reservations, with Cameron calling AI-generated emotions 'horrifying' and Herzog asserting that AI films 'have no soul.' These critics argue that AI merely produces a 'blended average' of existing human work rather than true creative expression. However, participating filmmakers counter that AI is merely a tool that requires human creative direction to produce meaningful content, with Tangonan noting that 'if you have a voice and a creative perspective and a style, then you're going to get something different.' The tension between efficiency and quality represents a critical challenge for the industry. While AI can reduce production costs and enable ambitious visual effects that would otherwise be prohibitively expensive, it also threatens to replace collaborative filmmaking processes with isolated creation. As filmmaker Hal Watmough noted, filmmaking should remain 'a collaborative process' because 'the more people that are involved, the more accessible it is by everyone and the more it reaches and connects with people.' The broader industry faces similar dilemmas as studios increasingly adopt risk-averse approaches to original content creation, potentially accelerating AI adoption not for creative enhancement but purely for cost reduction, raising questions about what kind of filmmaking survives when the industry prioritizes speed and scale over quality.