Few directors know more about how to turn a profit in Hollywood than James Cameron. The director has made three of the four highest-grossing movies in history, and even he is worried that blockbuster films cost too much to make.
In a recent interview with the Boz to the Future podcast, Cameron suggested that the best way forward for blockbusters was to make them for less money. Cameron said that we need to cut the costs of VFX in half, and added that he was exploring ways for AI to help that process without anyone losing their job.
“In the old days, I would have founded a company to figure it out. I’ve learned maybe that’s not the best way to do it. So I thought, all right, I’ll join the board of a good, competitive company that’s got a good track record,” Cameron said of joining the board of Stability AI. “My goal was not necessarily make a s–t pile of money. The goal was to understand the space, to understand what’s on the minds of the developers. What are they targeting? What’s their development cycle? How much resources you have to throw at it to create a new model that does a purpose-built thing, and my goal was to try to integrate it into a VFX workflow.”
“And it’s not just hypothetical,” he continued. “If we want to continue to see the kinds of movies that I’ve always loved and that I like to make and that I will go to see — Dune, Dune: Part Two, or one of my films or big effects-heavy, CG-heavy films — we’ve got to figure out how to cut the cost of that in half. Now that’s not about laying off half the staff and at the effects company. That’s about doubling their speed to completion on a given shot, so your cadence is faster and your throughput cycle is faster, and artists get to move on and do other cool things and then other cool things, right? That’s my sort of vision for that.”
