Paul Schrader Breaks Down ChatGPT’s ‘Not Bad’ Paul Schrader Script Idea

In his keynote address at AI on the Lot, the "Taxi Driver" writer shared a story about prompting the AI tool and getting back a concept called "The Collection Agent."

It’s called “The Collection Agent.” A solitary man with a frustrated, ritualized life is racked with guilt, and the former Catholic anti-porn crusader in the ’70s is now working as a debt collector for a company that buys medical debt from dying hospitals. He stays in cheap, anonymous hotels, wears identical gray shirts, streams church services without sound, and records copious audio diary notes in an old cassette player. Each night, he pressures people into paying debts they can’t afford. Years earlier, though, he helped cover up the suicide of a teenage girl at his church and now, 20 years later, he becomes obsessed with an amateur cam girl who he learns is the teenager’s daughter.

It sounds like a Paul Schrader movie. But the “writer” of this script is “Alex Indigo,” which is the pseudonym director and writer Paul Schrader gave to ChatGPT. He prompted OpenAI’s generative chat bot app by asking what it thinks of his own work and to help create him an idea for “a Paul Schrader movie.”

“Not bad,” Schrader thought.

Schrader, working from a handful of legal pad paper, shared these notes he got via ChatGPT as part of his keynote address during Day 2 of AI on the Lot, an AI convention being held Thursday, May 28 in Culver City at the Amazon MGM Studios lot. Schrader even went further, asking it to conceive of the opening and ending scenes for the film, to give him some alternate title ideas, and to even come up with the protagonist’s name. From a list of 10 options, Schrader said he liked “Elias Vane,” which sounds a little like the Biblical “Elijah” and reflects the character’s tortured vanity. He also wanted a title that had “more hard Schrader energy.” When he got an outline for the opening scene, he said it struck him as very familiar, not just something that resembled his tropes, but also was writing in his own tongue.

“This is second-rate Schrader,” he said of the app’s output, “but it’s going to be first-rate Schrader soon enough. And it’s already first rate ‘NCIS.'”

This will not be Schrader’s next movie, but he teased that he is working on a movie based on an older script he had lying around, and he’s likely to lean on AI in some fashion to get it made. He said he usually sits on an idea for four to six months before he can know if it’s something worth making, but “Alex Indigo” came up with the idea in a matter of minutes.

Of all the directors who would be likely to embrace generative AI as a creative tool, the writer of “Taxi Driver” and the director of “First Reformed” would likely not be on anyone’s Bingo card. But Schrader surprised some of his cadre of other writers when he recently revealed that he would be the keynote speaker at AI on the Lot. He opened his speech saying he got a “tsunami” of responses on his Facebook page, much of it backlash “as if I shot the family dog.”

He explained that the fear artists seem to have about this new advancement of technology is that, quoting an Israeli writer, it’s the first technology humans have created that doesn’t necessarily do what we tell it to do. And the tech is moving so fast, they feel like they’re barely “a step ahead of the monster.”

Schrader wonders why there hasn’t been more of an embrace of the technology. He hears what he feels is pretty generic synth scores in true crime documentaries on streaming and wonders why anyone themselves would actually bother composing something so basic when AI can do it so much more easily? He said he watched “Wicked” on the plane over here and wondered why they’re paying countless extras a day rate, clothe them, feed them, and hear them complain when it still doesn’t look great and we can just “make them” instead?

“AI does not create,” he explained, but it does combine, and he added that while you can make the argument that’s what artists do anyway, you still need someone to come up with an actual idea first.

But he wondered more about the practicality of AI and asked “what do we have film schools for” if the idea is to only show them old movies when kids really want to know how they’ll find a job. Schrader says he sees AI not being used as “jacked up special effects on steroids” that can make elaborate monsters and vistas but that it will be a way for Hollywood to revitalize old IP. He came up with an idea for a new episode of “I Love Lucy,” one in which Ethel is accidentally given a laxative by a doctor and needs to use Lucy’s bathroom, all while Lucy is serving appetizers to Desi’s guests.

“Will AI think in the way I just did? I suspect it will,” Schrader said.

But he also made a bold prediction that very soon, audiences will buy into wholly AI protagonists. He referenced remarks from Amazon MGM’s COO Albert Cheng during Day 1 of the AI on the Lot conference, in which he was adamant that the studio would be sticking to a hybrid AI model, a marriage of human performers and AI creations, that it’s important for authorship and copyright but that audiences wouldn’t want something fully synthetic.

That’s where Schrader disagrees. He thinks there’s a future where AI creates the next Clint Eastwood, all without actually typing in the name “Clint Eastwood” in a prompt.

“I think he is afraid. I think it is going to happen. I think we are going to have non-hybrid protagonists in the arts,” Schrader said. “I might even be alive long enough to see it.”