Danny Boyle has confirmed the use of AI in new movie Ink about the launch of The Sun newspaper.
Speaking to Vanity Fair, Boyle said he had used around 30 seconds of generative AI in the making of his new movie, which opened the Venice Film Festival this week before going on to play Telluride.
“There’s about 30 seconds of it in our movie where we animate a couple of old photographs,” the Oscar winner said in a video interview from the Colorado festival. “Oh, and there’s some mice,” he added. “It’s very good for animals, and we had some mice that run around The Sun newsroom.”
Some viewers of the movie took to social media this week to ponder whether AI had been used to reanimate old images of the Kray brothers and former UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Per Boyle’s video from Telluride, the answer to that would seem to be yes.
Vanity Fair earlier asked Boyle what he thinks about the use of AI in film, to which he responded: “It doesn’t really matter what I think about AI. It matters what 20-year-olds think about it. Is the honest truth. My opinion of it is that it’s a very useful tool in many ways, provided you use it respectfully and provided you pay actors if you’re going to replace them with some kind of AI embodiment.”
Earlier this week, speaking at the Venice press conference for Ink, Boyle had voiced concerns about the impact of AI on certain sectors, including journalism.
“The danger with the tech giants and their AI is that they will be able to replace journalism. They’ll be able to have an AI journalist who’s much more efficient, cheaper, etcetera, ecetera, and will that AI journalist speak truth to the power that created it?”
Ink, starring Jack O’Connell, Guy Pearce and Claire Foy, charts the rise of the UK’s notorious tabloid newspaper The Sun in the 1970s under the editorship of Larry Lamb, after he was poached from the Daily Mirror in 1969 by then budding media mogul Rupert Murdoch.
The Studiocanal and Netflix film, which launches in December in cinemas and on Netflix in January, received largely positive notices out of Venice and currently counts an 85% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
