Hollywood star Brad Pitt believes artificial intelligence could help revive mid-budget filmmaking, though he remains more cautious about the technology being used to replicate actors' performances.
In a new interview with Esquire, the Oscar-winning actor said AI, when used as a creative tool, could help bring films with budgets in the range of USD 40 million to USD 90 million to the screen by making expensive visual effects more accessible.
"There's a lot of pushback against AI, but AI is going to be the very thing that, if used as a tool, is going to help these mid-budget films, USD 40 to 90 million-budgeted films, get made," Brad said.
However, Brad also said he had more complicated feelings about AI being used to reproduce an actor's performance.
Asked whether AI could replicate one of his performances, he said the outcome would depend on the person directing the technology and the creative choices being made.
"Well, it depends on who's creating it, you know? Who's behind it, who's telling the story. Who's saying, 'I want to see this emotion from him,' and then being able to mine through whatever AI provides and going, 'More in this direction,' and tailoring it in that way," Brad said.
"So they could, but the final product might not be my choices and what I found and discovered in the thing," he added.
Brad described the use of AI in movies as "gonna be a very interesting experiment", while also discussing the increasingly common practice of body scanning actors for visual effects.
Body scans can be used in stunt work, battle sequences and de-ageing, but have also raised concerns among performers over ownership, licensing and how their digital likenesses could be used in the future.
"They're telling us all to scan ourselves," Brad said. "I've been scanned for the last 20 years, and I've always put in my contract: I own them and I destroy them. I should have kept them! All this time I've always had them destroyed, because I'm paranoid Ozark boy." Brad also said he recently heard an AI-generated song that impressed him, although he felt it lacked something compared with a performance by a real singer.
"I heard an AI song the other day that was pretty damn good," he said, adding that it had "a repetitive nature to it".
"It's not going to be the same as hearing her voice - a woman's voice, a person's voice," he said.
Brad’s next film is Heart of the Beast, in which he plays a special forces soldier who survives a plane crash with his dog.
He will subsequently reprise his Oscar-winning role as stuntman Cliff Booth in The Adventures of Cliff Booth, a follow-up to Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood directed by David Fincher.
