Bruno Dumont with the Silver Bear jury prize for The Empire at the 2024 Berlinale. Photo by Martin Kraft, cropped (CC BY-SA)
One of Europe’s most uncompromising auteurs has made a movie with no actors and no crew. French director Bruno Dumont told Screen International that his next feature, The End, was made entirely with generative AI, from his home in Paris.
Key Takeaways
- The End is an English-language sci-fi thriller about an ambitious Los Angeles cop investigating a crime as the city is hit by earthquakes and falling asteroids.
- Dumont began work in August and has wrapped. He generated the images, performances and sound himself, Screen reported.
- He is producing it independently, with no sales agent yet, and is aiming for a festival premiere and theatrical release in 2027.
- He is also developing a separate live-action French feature with human actors and a crew through Bathysphere Films.
The Full Story
Dumont said he wrote The End more than 25 years ago, after 1999’s Humanity, but its disaster sequences made it too expensive to shoot. He made the California-set Twentynine Palms (2003) instead. Generative AI, he told Screen, finally made it possible, at a cost “on an entirely different scale.”
He didn’t feed the whole script into a program. He worked scene by scene from his own shot breakdowns, asking his virtual actors for “greater emotional intensity or anger” and adjusting sets, vehicles, costumes and hairstyles. He also used faces from Flemish paintings as references for his characters. “I’m like a director working with a crew, except that my crew is a machine,” he said. “I give it instructions constantly.”
His reasoning is about money. “It is becoming harder and harder to finance films in France,” Dumont said. “Today I have complete freedom. I can do what I want.”
Why It Matters
This isn’t a tech startup demo. Dumont won the Cannes Grand Prix for Humanity in 1999 and Flanders in 2006, and his sci-fi satire The Empire won the Silver Bear jury prize at the 2024 Berlinale. His latest, Red Rocks, premiered in Cannes Directors’ Fortnight this year. World of Reel predicted that whether Cannes, Berlin or Venice programs The End will be a heated debate in 2027.
