that’s fair.
When you think about building stories from multiple audiences, not just audiences of color, but also queer audiences, audiences with disabilities, female audiences, I mean we’re seeing a lot of evidence at the box office lately that suggests how difficult it is to build a story. A hit that didn’t go down well with BIPOC and female audiences. Unfortunately, we don’t have a lot of data on queer and disabled audiences from a box office perspective, but everything I read tells me that as these audiences become more vocal, it’s impossible to have success without them.
When we say we’re trying to broaden commercial appeal, we’re really trying to give you a lot of different entry points to different audiences from a more realistic standpoint. So when they see that character in the movie trailer, they feel as if real thought has been put into it rather than what seems like a superficial or tokenistic representation that doesn’t really achieve what you’re looking for.
What would you say to someone calling Story Spark another AI tool studio imposes on an already fractured industry?
There is no AI involved in Story Spark at all. The only thing that works is your brain.
Original artificial intelligence.
right. Actual intelligence. One of the things I’ve learned from my time in technology is learning how to build scalable solutions that people can use. You are not uploading the script. You take a script that you know well and you ask yourself a bunch of questions about it or you ask your creative collaborators a bunch of questions about it. As for the idea of studios forcing things on a fractured market, I think that’s one of the lessons I learned from it Strikes It is that consumers are very special and part of the role that studios play in good partnership with storytellers is to create places of positive construction, debate and dialogue. If a studio head approves everything and doesn’t have any notes, the movie probably won’t be the best movie ever. Same thing with storytellers, you don’t have to take every note, but you can’t take any notes.
Because if you don’t, what will happen?
In my opinion, there’s nothing worse than showing up on opening weekend and suddenly there are narratives attached to your film that were never developed. We want to take that off the table and start front-loading those conversations.
Story Spark is not AI, but AI is coming to Hollywood regardless. OpenAI is courting several big studios with Sora, a text-based video generator. Many filmmakers have strong reservations about the use of artificial intelligence and its consequences. Do you think these reservations are justified?
What always happens as new technologies come online is that there’s a direct sort of, God, VCRs mean no one will ever go to the movies again. And then we realized, no, we actually still like to go out and do these things. Streaming means the albums will never be listened to again. And it’s as if, no, actually, we still enjoy listening to the artist’s work from beginning to end. That’s how I listened Cowboy Carter And for Renaissance. Although the fear is reasonable, I think it will create really smart boundaries.
How is that?
We as humans, but also as creators, have always been able to navigate and leverage them to our advantage, no matter how different these technologies are. I don’t see any evidence that AI will be significantly different from that in the long term. For people in the studio and on the creative side — and everywhere in between — my invitation would be to think about how AI is a tool in the toolkit, but it never replaces the person holding the tool. Because we have knives, does that mean we’re useless now? No, I can shred these things faster instead of having to tear apart a chicken. I’m still a chef.