Brad Pitt Says AI Could Help Save Mid-Budget Movies: “Gonna Be a Very Interesting Experiment”

Hollywood’s AI debate usually heads straight toward the nightmare scenarios: digital actors, synthetic performances, and studios finding new ways to cut humans out of the filmmaking process.

Brad Pitt, however, thinks there’s another side of the technology worth considering, especially if it can help filmmakers make movies that studios have increasingly struggled to justify financially.

In a new Esquire cover story, the Oscar-winning actor talked about artificial intelligence and where he thinks it could actually be useful. For Pitt, one of the most interesting possibilities is using AI as a filmmaking tool to lower the cost of expensive visual effects and potentially make mid-budget movies more financially viable.

“There’s a lot of pushback against AI, but AI is going to be the very thing that, if used as a tool, is going to help these mid-budget films, $40 to $90 million-budgeted films, get made.”

That’s an interesting argument at a time when the theatrical movie business has increasingly leaned toward massive franchise productions on one end and relatively inexpensive projects on the other. The $40 million to $90 million range Pitt mentions is where plenty of adult dramas, thrillers, action movies, and filmmaker-driven projects once lived comfortably.

If AI tools can reduce certain visual effects costs without replacing the artists and performers responsible for making the movie, Pitt sees an opportunity. Of course, that distinction is also where things get considerably more complicated.

When asked whether AI could eventually reproduce one of his performances, Pitt didn’t dismiss the possibility. Instead, he questioned whether an AI-generated Brad Pitt performance would actually contain the choices that make a performance his in the first place.

“Well, it depends on who’s creating it, you know? Who’s behind it, who’s telling the story. Who’s saying, ‘I want to see this emotion from him,’ and then being able to mine through whatever AI provides and going, ‘More in this direction,’ and tailoring it in that way. So they could, but the final product might not be my choices and what I found and discovered in the thing.”

That gets right into one of the stranger questions surrounding AI in movies. A system might eventually be capable of recreating an actor’s face, voice, movement, and even recognizable mannerisms, but performance isn’t simply a collection of those ingredients.

Actors make choices while working through scenes, responding to other performers, directors, locations, and whatever happens during a take.

Pitt said AI in filmmaking is “gonna be a very interesting experiment,” and the conversation also moved into another increasingly important issue for actors: digital body scans.

Full-body scanning has become commonplace on major productions, particularly for stunt sequences, large-scale battles, digital doubles, and de-aging effects. The technology itself isn’t new, but the rise of AI has made questions about ownership, licensing, and future use of those scans much more serious.

Pitt has apparently been thinking about that problem for decades: “They’re telling us all to … scan ourselves. I’ve been scanned for the last 20 years, and I’ve always put in my contract: I own them and I destroy them. I should have kept them! All this time I’ve always had them destroyed, because I’m paranoid Ozark boy.”

Considering where digital technology is headed, owning your digital likeness seems like a pretty smart contract clause.

Pitt has also been checking out what generative AI can accomplish outside of movies. He recently listened to an AI-created song and came away impressed by parts of it, although he could still hear something missing from the equation.

He said he “heard an AI song the other day that was pretty damn good,” but noted that “it had a repetitive nature to it. It’s not going to be the same as hearing her voice — a woman’s voice, a person’s voice.”

His comments paint a more complicated picture than simply being for or against artificial intelligence. Pitt appears interested in AI when it functions as another tool available to filmmakers, particularly if it can help solve production problems or make certain movies affordable again.

He’s considerably more cautious when the technology starts moving into territory traditionally occupied by human performers and artists.

While Hollywood figures out exactly how much AI it wants in its future, Pitt has plenty of old-fashioned movie star work coming his way.

He’ll next appear in Heart of the Beast, which follows a Special Forces soldier who survives a plane crash alongside his dog and has to fight his way through the aftermath.

After that comes a particularly intriguing project, The Adventures of Cliff Booth, which brings Pitt back as Cliff Booth, the character who earned him an Academy Award for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

Quentin Tarantino wrote the screenplay, but this won’t be the filmmaker’s long-discussed tenth and final movie. Instead, David Fincher is directing, reuniting him with Pitt after their previous collaborations, including Fight Club.

The Adventures of Cliff Booth isn’t exactly a traditional sequel to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Its structure is reportedly closer to “the kind of episodic television Tarantino has said he grew up watching, with characters you could follow from adventure to adventure, but each episode also stood on its own.”

The unusual Tarantino-Fincher handoff happened after Tarantino decided he didn’t want to direct the script as his final film. Pitt then asked whether he could take it to Fincher.

“Quentin gave me his blessing,” Pitt said. “Finch and I were on a plane and I gave him the script, and by the time we landed he said, ‘I’m doing it.’”

As for Pitt’s comments about AI, the idea of using the technology to make more mid-budget movies possible is certainly more appealing than using it to manufacture synthetic movie stars. Hollywood could use more $40 million to $90 million films that aren’t required to launch a cinematic universe or earn a billion dollars to justify their existence.

The bigger question is whether AI actually becomes a tool that gives filmmakers more freedom and stretches production budgets, or whether studios eventually use it primarily as another way to reduce labor costs. That distinction will probably determine just how interesting Pitt’s “experiment” ultimately becomes.