AI in Film: A Deep Dive with Brady Corbet and Sebastian Strasser

SCENE: On the rooftop of a post-production company in Berlin, summer rain patters against a massive umbrella sheltering three figures huddled around a small table. Brady Corbet: has just emerged from fourteen intensive days of finishing his latest film in the building below us, and the exhaustion in his eyes merges with the satisfaction of work completed. Sebastian Strasser: returned fresh from business meetings with film people in Florence, and brings a European perspective to this impromptu gathering, still carrying the energy of deals discussed and projects conceived under the Tuscan sun. Their partnership was fostered through mutual connections at MAGNA STUDIOS UK and has sparked a dialogue about the future of film-making in an era of technological upheaval, which has grown into an ongoing collaboration at LIPSTICK, the first all-in-one studio with top directors, award-winning VFX and some of the world’s best AI artists. And while the city spreads out beneath us – rain-slicked and gleaming – these two filmmakers from seemingly different worlds find common ground in their pursuit of cinematic truth. They share a fundamental belief that has guided their careers: the conviction: that cinema should do more than just entertain – it should immerse, provoke, and linger in the viewer’s consciousness long after the credits roll.

SLEEK You’ve both spoken about wanting to immerse viewers rather than simply entertain them. What does immersion mean to you in an age of constant distraction?

Brady Corbet My relationship with cinema is closer to my relationship with music. Great films are films that I can put on the way I put on a record. I’m measuring something’s success not by its narrative – because for me, when something has a beginning, middle, and end, when it’s over, it’s over forever. I’m really interested in something that’s living with me for weeks, hopefully years, maybe even decades. If I think about the greatest cinematic experiences I’ve ever had – David Lynch, F.W. Murnau – they made films that haunt your dreams.

Sebastian Strasser It’s the difference between art and entertainment. Entertainment is catered and curated to be sold. But when you create art, you care obsessively about your vision and don’t think so much about the audience. When Brady made The Brutalist, he was satisfying himself and his close circle of creators first. You’re happy if you reach people, but it’s not the primary purpose.

BC I find it strange when filmmakers talk about “the audience.” What does that really mean? You can’t know a public. You only have your own sensibility. Maybe I’m making films for my wife, for my daughter when she grows up, but I’m definitely not doing it for some abstract public – it’s simply unknowable.

SLEEK Your films often defy traditional story-telling, feeling more like psychological spaces. How do new tools like artificial intelligence factor into creating these experiences?

BC Because all the films I’ve made are historical, I’m fascinated by this new access to the past that AI provides. We’re pooling collective consciousness – all these archives that can give us a potentially better, more innovative understanding of history. I’m particularly interested in how these machines hallucinate. The current models are all about photorealism, but some unsuccessful models from a few years ago are more interesting because they’re doing something we wouldn’t dream to do ourselves. Just as photography gave birth to Impressionism and Abstraction, I’m interested in a new era of Surrealist fine art, photography, and cinema that these tools can help us access.

SS AI makes people naked – it exposes where we don’t excel or aren’t special. I find it hypocritical when everyone suddenly becomes concerned about AI ethics while wearing $500 sneakers made by child labor and drinking milk from tortured cows. Humans used to carry stones around the desert and build pyramids. Now we build podcasts about how we feel, about building podcasts. Welcome to the golden age of “Selbstverwirklichungsfanatismus” self-actualisation as religion. Obviously, when something powerful like AI comes along – faster, better, cheaper – most people don’t see opportunity. They see a threat to their gently curated mediocrity.

SLEEK How do you define authorship today? What makes a film truly yours?

BC To make a film yours, you have to be absolutely uncompromising about certain pillars of the project. You’ll walk away if those pillars aren’t erected and maintained. For example the length of The Brutalist – and also for my next project – time is a crucial ingredient. These are melodramas, and if you compress them into two hours to satisfy a studio, the experience becomes implausible.

SS The question of authorship extends to AI as well. AI doesn’t replace artists. It just exposes who never really was one. And what I like most: the more educated you are, the more you know, the better your culture of taste is – the better your results in collaborating with AI are. One of our claims on the Lipstick website is: “Humans create. Machines generate!” AI is exhilarating for those who have something to say. The limiting factor is no longer budget – it’s only taste, culture, vision. Which means the only thing left that will matter is: what are you actually trying to say? It’s like 1789 again – but instead of guillotines, we have ChatGPT. The soft-palmed aristocracy is afraid, sitting there saying “but we have taste!” Cool. So did Marie Antoinette! I am not sure when people will get it but AI is not VR, 3D or just another feature, it’s the storming of the Bastille! If you have culture, taste and vision, you’ll use AI to create something new. If you don’t, you’ll just keep copying – like before.

SLEEK Many of your films play with time, symbolism, and ambiguity. Can AI expand these experiences, or does it risk simplifying them?

BC AI represents one of the most exciting new opportunities to explore ambiguities. What viewers or critics might describe as ambiguities, I would call the uncanny – things we can’t articulate. This exists in cinema, painting, music. For me, form is content. It’s exploring something you cannot put into words. If you could tell a film, why make a film?

SS I have complete trust in filmmakers like Brady who have a soul for art. Our experiences, reading, education, wounds, scars and pain we have as humans, guide how we will create and direct. The machine will just generate. Whatever tool he chooses is fine – it’s very democratic. Budget will matter less, gatekeepers will matter less. AI will not break creativity, it will enhance it.

BC As production costs decrease, appetite for risk increases. Independent financiers and studios will be able to make two films per quarter instead of one. This will cut costs significantly.

SLEEK Where does AI fall short, particularly regarding emotions, authenticity, or human presence?

SS It’s never going to have emotions. I find it funny when people ask if AI can truly feel – your smartphone doesn’t feel anything, your shopping app doesn’t feel anything. AI doesn’t have opinions, attitudes, curation, or emotions – all the things that are deeply human. But it has archived knowledge that humans mostly don’t have, and you can play with that.

BC The rule for visual effects applies here: if extensions are 15-20% of the image, it works well. Once it becomes 90%, it looks fake. You still need actors – that’s never going to be replaced. We’re going to start creating filmmaker-specific models – a Sebastian model, a Brady model – reflecting our taste and sensibility. When it comes to set extensions and visual effects, it will be much more in tune with the personal nature of everything else in the film.

SLEEK What excites you about this technological shift?

BC I care about using the best tool available. I often work with cameras engineered 75 years ago because they’re actually the best tools. Whether something is from 1955 or 2055, I don’t care about its provenance – I only care about the result. I like that we’re going to have a stark contrast between something artisanal and something factory-made. Why do people still collect ceramics when you can buy mass-produced bowls? Because imperfections are precisely what stirs something in us.

SS On set, you experience control and revision through interaction with educated department heads, the DP, production designer, actors. You improvise, find new angles – this quality of creativity cannot be replaced by one person at a computer. AI is a wonderful extension for things you cannot do elsewhere, especially given budget limitations.

SLEEK If you could build the cinema of the future from scratch, what would it look like?

BC It would look like United Artists – going back a hundred years to a model that really worked. [US American production company, founded 1919 by Charly Chaplin]

SS A playground where creators call the shots. Not vendors and share holders.

SLEEK What can AI never replace?

SS The wounds and scars that result from human experience. There’s this filmmaker I appreciate, John Cassavetes, who said all he cared about was where love is and where it isn’t – where it stops and starts hurting. He’d seen people hurting each other all their lives. Those wounds and scars and trauma create a chemistry of pain, feeling, lust, and hope that’s uniquely human.

BC I don’t think AI is capable of replacing great artists. There will come a starker contrast, and listen – Bach, Beethoven, Mozart are objectively great. There’s a golden ratio fundamental to aesthetics. Greatness is a self-evident truth. Even if 80% of content is AI-generated in 25 years, the 20% that isn’t will be more impactful than ever. My daughter could identify the difference between Hayao Miyazaki and Pixar from age four or five – she knew immediately they weren’t the same thing.

SLEEK What gives you hope about the future?

BC Fifteen years ago, I couldn’t have seen this coming. The fact that there is something new gives me hope because I was under the impression that there was nothing new to explore. There’s actually a new frontier for us to discover. I wasn’t expecting anything genuinely new in my lifetime. Of course, it will bring frightening developments, but it’s new. I’m both optimistic and nervous about that.

SS McLuhan predicted that electronic media would create a “global village” – where we’re all connected, but also overwhelmed, disoriented, and emotionally fragmented. The internet turbocharged that. AI will do it again – faster, deeper, weirder. But you know… artists don’t survive in spite of the mess, but because of it.

SCENE: By the time our conversation winds down and Corbet receives messages about a screening starting across town, it has become clear that these two directors represent something essential about the future of cinema: the understanding that technology, however advanced, remains merely a tool in service of human vision. In an age of infinite content and shortened attention spans, their commitment to immersion – to creating experiences that dig deep into our consciousness and remain there – feels both revolutionary and timeless. The rain continues outside, while inside this Berlin post-production company, both – Corbet and Strasser – have outlined cinema’s next chapter: one where artificial intelligence serves human artistry, where the contrast between mass-produced content and handcrafted vision becomes more prevalent, and where the fundamental questions of what makes us human become more urgent than ever.