Filmmaker Charlie Kaufman has a lot to say about the state of the world — and why he thinks Hollywood is at least partly to blame.
In a new interview with The Guardian , the 2004 brainchild of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and this year’s short How to Shoot a Ghost said the film industry has “everything to do with [why] the world is in a terrible, terrible situation right now.”
Within the said industry, Kaufman sees it as a personal responsibility to “not put garbage in the world,” which for him means doing his own thing and not allowing himself to be tempted to use AI in filmmaking.
The selling point of mass technology is its ability to quickly give people exactly what they want. But Kaufman argues that, at least in Hollywood, this predisposition has been there long before AI exploded onto the scene: “If you start trying to figure out what people want, you’re doing what AI is doing. That’s why Hollywood remakes the same five movies every 10 years, and that’s why they have a formula for what a movie is.”
More critically, Kaufman said that the “greed and dependency” in the industry stems from “corrupt people who do so much damage.” His comments feel especially powerful after Thursday’s report that Paramount would try to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery — a merger that in itself seemed, well, disastrous to put it nicely.
Kaufman claimed that Hollywood executives are “truly lost and have nothing, so they are desperately trying to make themselves better by mastering, lording it over people, by being powerful and wealthy.”
Notably, Kaufman doesn’t exactly promote his own criticism: he described himself as another damaged individual, but suggested that his coping mechanisms are healthier than others in the industry. “[I read] a poem, see a painting, or listen to music that speaks to me and breaks me for a moment, and where I feel the experience is honestly and subtly portrayed,” he said.
He added that AI is doomed to fail in art because it cannot create a sense of aliveness, which Kaufman said is more important now than ever: “If we don’t allow ourselves to connect with other people who have the experiences that we have, then I think we are lost.”
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