While the majority of Hollywood is fearful of the impact artificial intelligence could have on the industry — most recently in the form of AI actress Tilly Norwood — “Mad Max” director George Miller likens it to how the Renaissance movement affected painting.
Speaking to The Guardian ahead of leading a jury at the Omni AI Film Festival in Australia, Miller said the debate around AI “echoes earlier moments in art history,” particularly during the Renaissance era, when the introduction of oil painting “gave artists the freedom to revise and enhance their work over time.”
“That shift sparked controversy – some argued that true artists should be able to commit to the canvas without corrections, others embraced the new flexibility,” Miller told The Guardian. “A similar debate unfolded in the mid-19th century with the arrival of photography. Art has to evolve. And while photography became its own form, painting continued. Both changed, but both endured. Art changed.”
He’s also behind AI because it’s “way more egalitarian.” “It will make screen storytelling available to anyone who has a calling to it,” he says. “I know kids not yet in their teens using AI. They don’t have to raise money. They’re making films – or at least putting footage together.”
Artificial intelligence, Miller said, represents “the most dynamically evolving tool in making moving image.” “As a filmmaker, I’ve always been driven by the tools. AI is here to stay and change things,” he argued, noting that, “the balance between human creativity and machine capability, that’s what the debate and the anxiety is about.”
But Miller said ultimately, AI isn’t a threat because it can’t replace the “human essence.” Reflecting on a previous conversation he had with filmmakers about the 2015 British documentary “Listen to Me Marlon” which recreated Marlon Brando in 3D with a software, Miller said he doesn’t believe AI can replace or revive actors in a truthful manner because of the specificity of a human performance.
He quoted a young director who had told him then about “Listen to Me Marlon” that in the future, you may “have a character who looks like Marlon Brando, but you’ll have nothing close to Marlon Brando. You won’t have the engagement, that performances arise out of the collaborative effort between other actors and directors and writers and so on. You will not have the essence of Brando.”
Miller’s latest film “Furiosa: a Mad Max Saga” world premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2024 and grossed $174.3 million at the worldwide box office.
