The film community is in meltdown after acclaimed director Martin Scorsese promoted a new AI startup called Black Forest Labs, saying that he’s already using its tech to help plan his movies.
Scorsese revealed this collaboration in a statement to The New York Times on Tuesday, which was accompanied by the release of a new promotional video from Black Forest Labs depicting the 83-year-old film legend using its AI image generation tool for storyboarding, the process of visualizing scenes using illustrations in preparation for filming. According to the reporting, Scorsese signed on as a partner and an adviser to the venture last year.
Such shilling by a venerated artist for AI was, in the eyes of many filmgoers, the opposite of “Absolute Cinema.”
“Cannot stress enough how disappointing it is that Martin Scorsese is collaborating with an AI company and putting a stain on his name so late in his life and career,” wrote one cineaste.
“Putting storyboard artists out of work is bad and that should not be a controversial opinion,” another fumed.
For film journalist Richard Newby, the reaction was visceral. “I feel like I’m going to throw up,” he tweeted.
It’s easy to understand where they’re coming from, since Scorsese is one of the most revered filmmakers alive. The “GoodFellas” and “Mean Streets” director spearheaded a movement that cast off the shackles of the stodgy old studio system and ushered in a Renaissance of Hollywood filmmaking that embraced authorial intent, drawing on a deep reverence for foreign filmmakers — from Akira Kurosawa to the duo of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger — to create something more stylistic and transgressive, while taking a unflinching eye to social issues of the day.
Beyond his role behind the camera, Scorsese has also been an important champion of overlooked international films, and has helped preserve cinema history through his Film Foundation. For him to throw his weight behind AI is a big victory for the industry — and a gut punch to artists who view the tech as not only a threat to their livelihoods, but to creativity itself.
That said, Scorsese is being conspicuously limited in how he praises AI, though this is likely to be little consolation to the anti-AI crowd. In the promotional video and in his remarks to the NYT, he was careful to stress that he only uses AI for storyboarding, claiming that it’s allowed his team “to move faster without sacrificing quality or craft” during preproduction.
“For 70 years, I’ve been creating my own storyboards,” Scorsese told the NYT in a statement (which is notable, since it definitely reads more like a company-approved release than something he’s said in one of his many insightful interviews.) “There’s always been this problem of how do you communicate what you see in your head to your cast and crew. There are some things you have to see and feel.”
“Now with this tool,” he added, “I can share what I’m visualizing more clearly and efficiently to my creative team — the production designer, art designer and cinematographer.”
The sense of betrayal hit one Scorsese fan especially close to home.
“Scorsese’s storyboards for Taxi Driver were a big inspiration for me, a poor artist, to feel confident drawing ideas to share with our illustrators,” the indie game developer lamented. “I can’t understand why so much of the older generation of artists are swayed by this crap when they already had it all figured out.”
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