Award-winning French director Mathieu Kassovitz is embracing AI and predicts that “in two years from now nobody will care” if actors are real or AI.
Kassovitz arrived on the scene as a respected international filmmaker 30 years ago with his 1995 masterpiece La Haine, a critical and financial hit that won him the Best Director prize at that year’s Cannes Film Festival.
Today, he says he’s working on what the far-left Guardian describes as “an almost entirely AI-enabled film based on a 1940s wartime comic book by Edmond-François Calvo[.]”
“Right now, everybody’s scared,” he told the World AI Film Festival, held in Cannes. “But in a few years from now, you will have really, really good AI superstars. You will have AI actors with millions of followers. They will exist in your phone [and] when they have a promo for the movie, you can talk to them directly.”
Meanwhile, elsewhere in Cannes, the famous Luddites at the Cannes Film Festival have banned AI.
Kassovitz also shrugged off concerns about AI using copyrighted works, which is Hollywood’s biggest fear. Of his own classic, Kassovitz said, “La Haine was made from other films. They stole also. I stole shots from Scorsese that he stole from Kurosawa that he stole from Eisenstein. Unless you … created something from the ground up, we’re all thieves.”
He added, “So, as AI steals everything, it doesn’t steal anything.”
Kassovitz might sound like he’s out there with these opinions. That’s only because Hollywood is so scared of AI they treat anyone who looks at it realistically as though they just said the N-word.
Of course, people will eventually embrace AI actors. In a way, we already do. Who doesn’t love Woody and Buzz Lightyear? People are crazy for Disney characters, for the Simpsons, Bug Bunny, SpongeBob, Pikachu, and Eric Cartman. And you know what? It will take just as much artistry for someone to create and design a human AI character as it does a cartoon or CGI character.
If watching Bambi’s mother die can make us cry, if Dumbo can break our hearts, it’s whistling past the graveyard to believe a human actor created by AI cannot earn our goodwill.
Mathieu Kassovitz, seen here during the 8th Canneseries International Festival at Palais des Festivals on April 26, 2025 in Cannes, France, predicts “in two years from now nobody will care” if actors are real or AI. (Photo by Marc Piasecki/Getty Images)
Last night, I watched the movie BlackBerry (2023). It’s not a great movie, but it tells a story Hollywood could learn something from. BlackBerry was a company that, for over a decade, was dynamic, flexible, ahead of the curve, and risk-taking. The results were undeniable. The creators invented what we now call the SmartPhone. They captured a majority of the market share. Their company went from being in the red to being worth billions.
Then they got a look at the iPhone, and instead of remaining dynamic, flexible, and willing to take risks, they curled up into a ball of denial and found themselves wiped off the map forever.
All this denial, backed by all these lame-ass scare tactics about AI becoming sentient, cannot stop the future. Hollywood can shout down sweet little Reese Witherspoon all it wants. AI is coming, and I can’t wait to see what it delivers. The destruction of Hollywood as we know it, a Hollywood that openly grooms children, vilifies Christians, and trashes America, is a-okay with me.
