The answer is clear: AI quite simply let me make a film again.
My path is hybrid. I worked in advertising and e-commerce, always through the lens of data science and AI. But I have also directed films, and I know the film industry from the inside. It is very hard to keep complete freedom there — to do things slowly, lightly — without devoting your entire professional life to it.
Cinema is not a medium suited to that balance; it allows it poorly, where other forms allow it well, like literature. Many writers have held other jobs: magistrates, diplomats, doctors, night watchmen… You don't always choose your medium: you express yourself out of passion and necessity.
AI also reopens the craft to those who had been shut out of it: Roger Avary, the Oscar-winning co-writer of Pulp Fiction, can no longer get his films financed by Hollywood and is returning to cinema through it. We are heading toward an explosion in film production — without destroying cinema. On the contrary: against the mass of films to come, ambitious directors will emerge strengthened, their skill all the rarer; AI will mostly take its share of the more functional products, with little artistic substance. France produces about two hundred films a year and publishes 40,000 novels, more than 30,000 of them self-published: we will see an imbalance of the same order, more measured, since an AI feature still costs thousands of euros.
Had AI not been there, I might not have been able to make a film again — not for a long time. The economic and logistical constraints are too strong. To keep a director's complete freedom, you generally have to produce your own films, which eats up most of your time. The tumult of shoots, hauling heavy gear in trucks, dealing with middlemen: all of it demands enormous time and energy that never reach the creation. Some, though, love that tumult, that chaos — and it is there, in the thick of the disorder, that they give their very best.
With AI, the channels open. That doesn't mean the weight is gone — a feature film is extremely demanding either way. But AI lets you take your time; and as long as you're comfortable with agentic coding, the barriers lift and the path to creation grows far simpler.
To have these means today is, for me and for many others — blocked by the reality principle in realizing their cinematic creativity — a dream.
A deeply human bond
The miracle of AI is not only technical. It is also — perhaps above all — human.