Darren Aronofsky‘s backing of an AI-driven series has reasonably sent shockwaves across the movie community. His AI Studio, Primordial Soup, along with Times, unveiled the trailer for the series On This Day… 1776, and the reception, as one would assume, hasn’t been thrilling for rightful reasons.
However, this isn’t the Mother director’s first controversial creative venture, as his views on how a movie should be viewed didn’t sit well with Quentin Tarantino (via IndieWire).
The most depressing thing I’ve ever heard in my life.
Considering major filmmakers have been championing to preserve the big screen magic for years, especially in the age of streaming, his comments about accounting for the phone-viewing experience rubbed many the wrong way. Given that Tarantino has been a staunch advocate for the theatrical experience, it’s not hard to see why the auteur wasn’t thrilled by Aronofsky’s remarks.
Darren Aronofsky’s AI Gamble isn’t His First Artistic Compromise
In the wake of the streaming boom, major filmmakers, including Tarantino, Kevin Smith, and Aronofsky, weighed in on the debate surrounding the subject in Tom Roston’s I Lost it at The Video Store: A Filmmakers’ Oral History of a Vanished Era. Although a handheld device isn’t the ideal way to experience a movie, which was made with the big screen experience in mind, certain directors, like Smith, weren’t opposed to the idea of enjoying the story on their phones.
Credit: Image by Harry Murphy / Web Summit via Sportsfile / Licensed under CCA 2.0 / Wikimedia Commons.
Credit: Image by Georges Biard / licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 / via Wikimedia Commons
Aronofsky, on the flip side, confessed to accounting the phone experience in mind for his movies, including Noah, as he argued most people were going to consume his works on an iPhone.
Most people are going to watch my films on an iPhone. We talk about that. When we did a sound mix, we did an iPad or iPhone mix for Noah, so that hopefully it would be in stereo. Look. There’s a real audience there, and you have to be conscious of that. You can’t control it.
It’s easy to see why Tarantino, who has been vouching for the traditional movie-going experience for decades, wasn’t a fan of this shift. Although this trend of prioritizing the phone viewing experience has diluted many streaming outputs in recent years, several filmmakers, including Nolan, Coogler, and other major auteurs, have been adamant about crafting movies first and foremost for the big screen.
What Darren Aronofsky’s AI Backing Means for His Directorial Future
In hindsight, Aronofsky’s stance on the phone-viewing experience seems tame compared to his pivot toward generative AI for the series On This Day… 1776, centered around America’s first day of independence.
A still from On This Day… 1776 | Credit: Times/YT
While Primordial Soup claimed it’s a combination of “traditional filmmaking tools and emerging AI capabilities”, following the industry and cinephiles’ unease with AI, this risks alienating fans and his peers in the foreseeable future. With Aronofsky eying to helm an erotic thriller along with the Gone Girl novelist Gillian Flynn for his next project, it remains to be seen how that movie tracks after his backing of this AI-driven series.
On the bright side, given how bad and uncanny On This Day… 1776 is despite being one of the most expensive and high-level examples of AI filmmaking, it’s safe to say human-driven art isn’t going anywhere in the years to come.
Share your thoughts on Aronofsky’s AI show below!
The first two episodes of On This Day… 1776 are available to stream on Time’s YouTube channel.
This post belongs to FandomWire and first appeared on FandomWire
