Who Gets to Make a Film?

 I challenge Guillermo del Toro, Christopher Nolan, and the growing hostility toward AI assisted filmmaking. There is a question I would like to put to Guillermo del Toro and Christopher Nolan, and to everyone in the established film industry who has decided that AI filmmaking is somehow the death of art: Where were you when we were trying to get in?

For seven years, I have been trying to get my original stories financed and made. I have written treatments and scripts, developed characters and built entire fictional worlds. I used my grocery money saved it and made 7 films I distributed them worldwide using my marketing skills.  I pitched my work to executive film producers and studios in seventeen countries in Europe and North America, including Universal Studios in Hollywood. I spent approximately $3,000 for pitching my work to producers to consider my film to finance AND YES! My films are commercially viable. I kept knocking on doors. They kept closing.

This is the reality for countless independent filmmakers. You can have a commercially viable original story, a screenplay and the determination to make a film, but none of that guarantees access to the traditional film industry. Without money, connections, representation or an established name, an original idea can remain exactly that: an idea sitting on a hard drive.

So what are filmmakers like us supposed to do? Accept that because Hollywood did not give us a budget, we are no longer allowed to make films?

Of course not. You use AI in your film marketing, don’t tell me no you don’t. I am an AI engineer, I see it. You Mr Del Toro, spread the word on instagram, Facebook, Linkedin etc. every minute. That you and your team are doing is using AI power social media bots. Mr. Nolan you do the same AI marketing  for your beloved Odyssey as well. All the camera equipment, studio equipment, post production and film scoring tools have AI in them. Who are you kidding? You also use AI In film marketing, social media marketing and advertising. All those posts on facebook i am seeing every minute are bot generated. They are not human! I  am one of those AI bots developers. So I know when I see it/them.

We want to make films. We want to tell stories. We want to create. And if the traditional system will not give us the means to do that, we will look for another way.

That is why the debate over AI filmmaking needs considerably more nuance than the increasingly common declaration that “AI is not art” or that AI-assisted filmmaking is inherently theft.

I am not talking about taking someone else’s screenplay, characters or intellectual property. I am talking about using my own original stories, my own IP, my own photographs, my own music and my own creative direction to make films.

That distinction matters.

If somebody takes another filmmaker’s copyrighted work ( read my book media law) without permission, that raises legitimate legal and ethical questions.  They have done it and doing it in traditional filmmaking too. But an independent filmmaker using AI as one of many tools to develop and produce an original project is a fundamentally different situation.

The technology does not automatically erase the human being behind the work.

When I work on an AI-assisted film, I am not simply pressing a button and receiving a finished movie. I am writing, directing, composing, editing, generating, rejecting, revising and rebuilding. I spend hours trying to correct continuity problems and visual inconsistencies. I generate shots that fail and start again. I work with imperfect tools and try to turn their output into something coherent and entertaining.

The technology is part of the production process.

The story is still mine.

The creative decisions are still mine.

And the responsibility for the finished work is still mine.

This is not an argument that every AI film is good. Most new technology produces plenty of bad work. Traditional filmmaking has never been immune to that either. There are terrible films made with enormous budgets and extraordinary films made with very little money.

The important question should therefore be: What has the filmmaker actually created?

Unfortunately, much of the current conversation skips that question entirely.

Instead, AI is increasingly treated as if the technology itself determines whether something can be art.

But filmmaking has never existed independently of technology.

Sound transformed cinema. Color transformed cinema. Digital cameras transformed cinema. Computer-generated imagery transformed cinema. Digital editing transformed cinema. Visual-effects technology transformed cinema.

AI is another technological shift.

And there is something else worth asking: why does the established industry appear so comfortable with some technologies and so hostile to this particular one?

Modern Hollywood filmmaking already depends on extraordinary amounts of technology. Cameras are increasingly computational. Visual effects depend on sophisticated software. Editing is digital. Color grading is digital. Sound production is digital. Marketing campaigns use increasingly sophisticated data and AI  tools.

AI is already finding its way into the broader filmmaking and marketing ecosystem.

So where exactly do we draw the line?

If AI can be used to help market a major studio production to create promotional material, analyze audiences, optimize advertising, or generate online content why is the independent filmmaker using AI to create the actual film suddenly treated as if a moral boundary has been crossed?

That seems inconsistent.

And the economics make the question even more important.

A filmmaker with a $200 million or $300 million production budget and a filmmaker working with a few thousand dollars are obviously not operating under the same conditions.

For the independent filmmaker, AI does not necessarily replace a $200 million production. It may simply make production possible at all.

That distinction matters.

For seven years, my stories could have remained scripts. I could have continued waiting for someone with money and connections to decide that they were worth financing.

Instead, technology has given me the possibility of making them myself.

That does not mean the resulting film automatically deserves an audience.

The audience still has the final say.

And this is where I think established filmmakers should be willing to compete on the same fundamental thing they have always claimed matters most: the quality of the film.

Hollywood has produced extraordinary original cinema. But it has also become heavily dependent on established intellectual property sequels, remakes, reboots, franchises and adaptations.

We have all watched the cycle.

A successful movie becomes a franchise. A franchise becomes another sequel. An older film is remade for a new generation. A familiar character returns. A familiar story is repackaged with a new cast and a bigger budget. There is nothing inherently wrong with any of that. Audiences clearly enjoy many of these films.

But it is strange to hear independent filmmakers criticized for using new technology while the mainstream industry repeatedly returns to stories and intellectual properties audiences already know.

Where is the outrage about creative repetition?

Why is the filmmaker with no money expected to prove the purity of their artistic process while the established industry can repeatedly monetize familiar intellectual property?

That is a conversation worth having.

And then there is the question of spectacle.

Christopher Nolan’s films are enormous cinematic events.Because he has been given the budget and freedom to make them. IMAX got a worlwide promotion too which increase their sales, no doubt about it. The IMAX photography, large-scale production and theatrical presentation are central to the experience he creates.

But spectacle and story are not the same thing.

A two and a half-hour film does not automatically become great because it is long, expensive or presented in IMAX. I don’t believe the chosen cast were right for the rolls but that is not my film. That was not Homer’s poetry either. That was Nolan’s Odyssey. 

Audiences are perfectly capable of deciding that a spectacular film is also too long, too slow or simply not engaging enough for them.

If some viewers found The Odyssey too long or became bored during it, that is their judgment as an audience. The size of the production does not make that reaction illegitimate.

And this is exactly why I believe AI-assisted filmmakers should be judged by the same principle.

Don’t judge the film by the tool.

Judge the film.

You can spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a production and still make something that doesn’t connect with an audience. Then you sit in one of your masions, using AI in post production, marketing etc, then say AI is bad so to speak? 

You can spend very little and make something people love.

The budget does not determine the emotional response.

The technology does not determine the quality.

The filmmaker does.

The audience does.

And there is another irony here.

The same major productions that insist on traditional filmmaking are already using sophisticated technology throughout their production, post-production and marketing processes. AI-assisted tools are increasingly becoming part of the wider entertainment ecosystem.

So perhaps the real question isn’t whether AI belongs in cinema.

It is who is allowed to use it.

If a major studio can use AI-assisted technology to promote a film online, analyze audiences and improve its marketing, why should an independent filmmaker be told that using AI as part of the creative production process makes their entire film illegitimate?

That doesn’t seem like a principled distinction.

It seems like a question about access.

And access is precisely what AI is changing.

For the first time, a filmmaker without Hollywood money or connections can experiment with worlds that would previously have required enormous financial resources.

That doesn’t mean everyone suddenly becomes a great filmmaker.

It means more people get the chance to try.

And some of those people will fail.

Some will make terrible films.

Some will make interesting films.

Some may eventually make extraordinary films.

That’s how every creative medium works.

The answer is not to prevent them from participating.

Let them compete.

If you have $300 million, make your $300 million film.

If you have IMAX cameras, use them.

If you have enormous sets, build them.

If you have the world’s best crews, work with them.

I’ll make my film with the resources I have. And then let the audience decide.

Because audiences are not stupid.

They don’t need Hollywood to tell them what is entertaining. They don’t need me to tell them either.

They watch, judge, share and recommend. Or they walk away.

That’s the marketplace of ideas.

And if AI independent films begin attracting large audiences, that is not evidence that cinema has died.

It may be evidence that audiences are interested in something new.

There is also a deeper cultural shift happening here.

For decades, filmmaking has been an industry where money and access determined, to a considerable extent, whose stories reached the screen.

AI doesn’t eliminate that system. But it potentially weakens the barrier.

And that is why I believe the hostility toward AI filmmaking deserves to be examined carefully.

Perhaps the fear is not simply about technology.

Perhaps it is about what happens when the people who were previously outside the gates can suddenly walk through them.

I don’t claim to know what is in Guillermo del Toro’s or Christopher Nolan’s minds.

But I do know what it feels like to spend seven years trying to get an original story made, spend thousands of dollars trying to get someone to listen, and repeatedly discover that having a story isn’t enough.

AI has not given me talent. It has not given me my imagination.It has given me another set of tools.

And I intend to use them.

You can believe that what I create isn’t art. You are entitled to that opinion.

But your opinion doesn’t settle the question.Neither does mine.

The audience gets the final word. After seven years of being told no, I am not going back to waiting.

I have stories to tell. I have films to make. And so do thousands of other filmmakers who were never given the opportunity to enter through the traditional door.

We are here.

We are creating.

And we are not going away.

The future of cinema does not have to belong exclusively to the people who can afford the biggest budgets.

It can also belong to the people who finally found a way to tell their storie