Gareth Edwards Thinks AI Is Bigger Than CGI — And He's Not Pretending to Know Where It Goes

Gareth Edwards has directed a Star Wars film, a Godzilla reboot, and last year's *Jurassic World Rebirth*. He is not, in other words, someone Hollywood tends to hand franchise keys to and then ignore. So when he shows up at an industry AI panel and says generative tools might end up more significant than CGI, people in the room probably listen a little differently than they would otherwise.

Edwards spoke Thursday at Amazon's "AI on the Lot" event in Culver City, appearing on a world-building panel that put him among the higher-profile creative voices at the gathering. He told the audience he's been experimenting with diffusion models for the past nine months and that he wants to eventually make a hybrid generative AI film — though he hasn't started one yet, partly because he's not sure the tools he'd use today will even be the relevant ones by the time production wrapped.

"It feels like this stuff's changing every three months," he said. "It's like we have to revisit the plan six months from now because it might be a totally different series of tools. And the things that weren't possible three months ago or six months ago, some of them are now possible."

His comparison point for all of this was CGI in the 1990s — that moment when digital effects went from novelty to infrastructure almost faster than the industry could process it. Edwards thinks AI is on a similar trajectory, possibly a steeper one. "It's going to be better than CGI," he said. "I'm excited, I hope you are."

What's interesting about his framing is that it's neither utopian nor defensive. He's not promising AI will democratize filmmaking or make every aspiring director's vision achievable. He was actually pretty clear that the technology doesn't compensate for a lack of taste or craft on its own. What it does, in his view, is accelerate the discovery process — helping a filmmaker figure out what a movie should be before committing to making it.

"It's only good for iteration and discovering what the movie should be," he said, "and then once you know what it is, go in and start making it your movie."

His description of working with AI tools was characteristically blunt: "It has no taste whatsoever. It is a fucking genius at helping you. I view it like having a second-unit director who is a billionaire on acid. Like, it'll do anything you ask, not a problem. Sometimes it'll go batshit crazy. And you'll give it notes, and it'll be like, 'I don't do notes. I'll just do something totally different.' But it's worth it."

Earlier the same day, Paul Schrader — director of *First Reformed* and *American Gigolo* — also appeared at the Amazon event. Schrader described trying to generate a story idea using ChatGPT and acknowledged the output wasn't quite there yet. "I could send it out," he said. "I know what response I would get: This is second-rate Schrader… but it's going to be first-rate Schrader soon enough." Schrader and Edwards were not on the same panel; Schrader spoke earlier in the day.

Edwards acknowledged that his openness about AI is relatively uncommon among directors who've been trusted with major IP. He also didn't oversell his own certainty about where any of this is heading. "We don't know where it's going to go," he said. "I think anybody saying they know exactly what's going to happen over the next five years is just a liar."

That's probably the most useful thing he said all day. The conversation around AI in Hollywood tends to collapse into either panic or hype, and Edwards is doing neither. He's nine months into experimenting with tools he can't fully predict, making a case for curiosity without pretending he has the map.

[Original Source](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/gareth-edwards-excited-ai-filmmaking-1236608376/)