Still from Shekhar Kapur’s next AI series ‘Warlord’.
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Shekhar Kapur, BAFTA-winning director of acclaimed films like Bandit Queen, Mr. India and Elizabeth, teased his new AI series Warlord at the International Film Festival of India (IFFI) on Saturday.
In a conversation with Berlinale festival director Tricia Tuttle about the future of AI in filmmaking, 79-year old Kapur, who is himself director of IFFI, talked about the AI series he’s been working on for ages.
“It took me ten years to write this script,” he told the audience, “and it took ten days to do on AI tools.”
The teaser for the series — which was first announced on Variety in July — showed clips of jellyfish-like spacecraft, a lone hooded figure facing a snowy mountainscape, and a wispy, white-clad ethereal woman vanishing into thin air. The teaser ended with the text “Can love exist across dimensions?”
Per Variety, Warlord follows the story of an interdimensional warrior who appears indestructible because his lover in another dimension pulls him to safety whenever he faces mortal danger.
Kapur said the best part is that he’s making the film open source so other filmmakers can use the visuals to build on their own AI work, only needing to pay one cent per use.
The first two episodes are ready for release, said Kapur, but the challenge is finding platforms and distributors that would be supportive of his decision to keep the series open source. “I think I already have people who are going to invest in the first two,” Kapur said, adding that while distribution platforms like Netflix and Amazon could work, AI could well have its own platform by then. “But are [the platforms] going to be willing to do what I want to do? Make it open source?”
AI as Democratic Technology
Berlinale festival director Tricia Tuttle and veteran filmmaker Shekhar Kapur in conversation at IFFI Goa.
hannah abraham
In a wide-ranging conversation spanning almost 90 minutes, Kapur and Tuttle discussed a plethora of questions pertaining to the increasing use of AI in filmmaking. “AI is the most democratic technology to hit us,” said Kapur, comparing its arrival to when the film medium began using sound and then went digital.
“When digital came in, everybody said, oh, that’s not how reality is, and I kept telling them, where was reality? Why did we spend hours lighting a shot or lighting her face or giving depth to a shot? We were creating a reality. And so I’m saying now we’ve got AI. I’m already seeing films. We’ve just come out of seeing lots of films. AI also, initially everybody’s going to say, oh my God, I’m going to use AI. It’s fine. I can use the technology, but it’ll very soon go into an art form, like digital did.
Kapur also emphasized the economic democratization that AI brings to filmmaking. “When there was a film that cost $300 million, will now cost $3 million. And if you do it in India, it’s probably cost half a million or even less,” he said, highlighting how the technology lowers barriers to entry for new filmmakers, a shift he views as essential for the industry’s future.