Justine Bateman Wants to “Give a Book of Matches” to the Tech Companies So They Can Burn Down Hollywood

When it comes to Hollywood’s AI future, few have been more vocal —  or critical — than Justine Bateman.

Armed with a computer science degree from UCLA, the veteran actor-filmmaker has sounded an alarm about the dangers of replacing human work with machine fabrication. She became a lead voice, particularly during the strikes, when she advised SAG-AFTRA on the issue and was often a public face of the AI-skeptic movement on the WGA picket line.

Bateman is the founder of Credo 23, a two-year-old organization that believes Generative AI “will destroy the structure of the film business” and has set as its goal “making very human, very raw, very real films/series that respect the process of filmmaking.”

As Hollywood begins to cautiously dance with text-to-video tools like OpenAI‘s Sora and as the company makes Miyazaki-esque images available (to no small furor), Bateman is renewing her call. The Family Ties star and Violet director argues a movement is growing — that it needs to grow — to combat a drift to the synthetic. Organic material that is human both in creation and sensibility, she says, is the answer.

She calls this movement a drive toward “the new” — a push to restore a humanity to filmmaking that she says has been lost since the algorithms began dictating content choices last decade and that she believes will be further torched by the shift to AI. 

Her mission is a kind of human-driven populism we’re likely to see across a host of industries (she is close with Sean O’Brien, leader of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters); Bateman is simply one of the people leading it in Hollywood. Several high-profile creators have also joined her effort, including Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner and noted cinematographer and The Handmaid’s Tale director Reed Morano. 

To platform the movement, Bateman has founded the Credo 23 Film Festival — a “filmmaker-first, no-AI event” in which movies can contain nothing machine-generated (visual effects are OK, as they’re driven by humans). She says she will give all profits from the festival to the filmmakers to help support them and fund their next film. Credo 23 is taking place this weekend at Hollywood American Legion Post 43 just south of the Hollywood Bowl, showcasing about 30 shorts and features; they range from pieces like Ethan Krahn’s avant garde Meditation on a Room to Callie Carpinteri’s teen-drama Tribeca hit Dirty Towel, as well as two Bateman-helmed features, Look and Feel, the latter starring David Duchovny and Rae Dawn Chong. The Hollywood Reporter caught up with Bateman before the festival.

You’ve decided a film festival is a good way to get your message out. What do you hope it accomplishes?

The two goals of the festival are first, no AI, and second, all proceeds go to the filmmaker so they can make their next human film. What happened was this. I saw the studios were all in on AI and the streamers were all in on AI. But then the festivals went all in on AI and I thought, “Wait a minute. The film festivals are where we saw Pulp Fiction, and Sorry to Bother You and sex, lies and videotape and all this really original work. And now, how does that happen if festivals are all in on automated content?” So I thought, “I’ll start my own festival.”

Is there something broken about the festival model generally, do you think? Or are you just worried about a tech takeover?

I have a lot of gratitude for film festivals. There are so many people who spend an incredible amount of time and who work really hard to showcase great filmmakers. At the heart of all these film festivals, there’s a true objective to champion great art. But what have I seen happen — and perhaps it’s a result of money constraints, I really don’t know their business — is that they always had three categories of focus. Premieres of big films, cause-based films, and kickass innovative art like a Pulp Fiction or a sex, lies and videotape or a Cronenberg Crash. But the first two of these categories have gotten incredibly large while the third has gotten really small. Films that were different and really hit you in the right spot have been sacrificed for the sake of the other two categories. I’m not pointing fingers; I don’t know what goes on behind the scenes financially. But I want to do it differently.

There’s also a feeling among some filmmakers that there’s less benefit to going to a festival.

Well, people used to come to festivals to get distribution. But now it’s so hard to get a deal. So we said, “What if filmmakers got paid by a festival the way artists do at Coachella?” We don’t have a ton of money but I kept the overhead low so that between sponsors [Kodak, The Teamsters, AI-safety nonprofit Fathom and others) and ticket sales and everything else, we were able to cover all our costs with 20 percent of revenue. The other 80 percent is going back to filmmakers so they can make their next film. 

How does all this tie into your anti-AI stance?

So this is about how the business has changed long before AI — when the tech companies came in and carpetbagged Hollywood. They’ve never been in the entertainment business. They’re in the tech business, which is a different financial ecosystem. It used to be that every time one viewer watched a film one time, they paid $15, and the filmmaker got some of that. Then it became $15, so a whole household and anyone they share their password with can watch 5,000 or 10,000 films. It became about subscribers and a totally different setup. And that’s never going to benefit a filmmaker.

And you think this affected the quality too, the drive towards quantity. 

The North Star was always excellent work. Sure, you had movies and TV shows that weren’t great. But everybody wanted to be connected to a really good project. Now with the whole new model, what you get is a conveyor belt of content. Of course there are exceptions. But the North Star is not excellent work — it’s the conveyor belt.

How do you define that term?

Conveyor-belt content is the kind of film or TV series that can play in the background while you scroll mindlessly through Instagram. If you look away for 15 minutes and can’t know what’s going on when you look back — they don’t want that. I literally had a filmmaker friend who got a note from a streamer that said their film was “not second-screen enough.” The goal is to be cinematic Muzak. This is why a lot of people don’t want to go to movie theaters anymore. A good theatrical movie is designed to make you pay attention every minute. And people are not conditioned for that. So you take this conveyor belt and then you throw in the fear of being boycotted because you don’t have this type of box checked or that type of box checked, and oh man, the system it’s broken. It’s done.

Which leads you to AI.

AI can automate that content. It’s the next step. What I believe will happen is it will subsume the entertainment business because it helps the conveyor belt. They can now customize based on all the years of user history they have on you. For an upcharge, they can put your head on Luke Skywalker’s body for a showing of Star Wars tonight. Or they know you like, whatever, panda documentaries and Hong Kong fight movies, and so they can combine it and make you a movie. 

Reboots have been rampant for a while, but until now, studios have had to make the reboot by hand — they had to go out and shoot a whole new movie.

Exactly. And now it will be automated. And people say, “What about copyright?” But of course who’s talking copyright? This is like Kleenex, they make a movie and throw it out and make another tomorrow. That’s how a lot of tech companies see films now. It’s just something you put on your website. And wouldn’t that be better — wouldn’t that be cheaper — if it can be automated? That cheaper really is the key. They really would rather have no actors on a set because they’d rather have no sets. Sets are expensive.

Do you think people will go for this? Many experts say customization will be a novelty or, maybe at best, a niche. But you think it will subsume the business?

Yes, because we’re not talking about film audiences from the 1970s. We’re talking about people who’ve been conditioned on the conveyor belt of slop. They’ve also been awakened by social media and self-obsession. I think many people will be into it. Not cinephiles. But this will be new for a lot of people and they’ll go for it because it’s really just one click further than what they’re used to. People are used to looking at TikTok or an Instagram filter. So what’s an AI face?

What about the idea that AI is a tool — that it can help filmmakers who don’t otherwise have the budget to execute all the shots in their movie? Do you put any stock in that?

I don’t believe it. Because if that’s true, hundreds of films would have been impossible to get made before now. Humans always figured it out. That great shot at the beginning of Sunset Boulevard where you’re looking up from the bottom of the pool past the body to the photographers. That’s such an imaginative shot. They used a mirror to get it. If they had AI, they would have resorted to that, and we would have been robbed of one of the great shots in cinema. Constraints are what make great art.

But asking directors to voluntarily impose constraints feels like a big lift, doesn’t it?

Oh, I’m not asking anybody not to use it. I just feel they’re cheating themselves if they use it instead of finding out what they can actually do; I just would never use it because I’d be handicapping myself creatively. Using AI for a shot is a regurgitation of the past. It’s a vomit of everything that’s been ingested. And it’s theft. Come on. They say it’s a tool. What kind of tool needs to ingest 100 years of film and series or it can’t function? That’s not a tool.

And you don’t think there’s a way to live peaceably with it. Movies that include AI and human performers. An industry, too, that makes room for both.

Anyone who thinks that I think doesn’t understand greed and human nature. There’s a big bag of gold in the corner and you think these companies aren’t going to go and get it?

And just to be clear, you believe art is not possible here. That is, any AI image or video can’t be new, let alone visionary.

For me, artists are tubes through which the universe, God, magic, whatever you want to call it, comes through to us. Throughout history, new genres of stories or new music comes through that tube, and it changes society. But that doesn’t come through with AI; that’s not a tube connected to that source. And the people using it are not artists. Look at what Tom Cruise does. Who doesn’t love Tom Cruise? Look at every video of him, what he puts into Mission: Impossible. He does that for us.

Then you have Deepfake Tom Cruise.

Yes. No one drove a motorcycle off a cliff to make Deepfake Tom Cruise. There was no artist putting work into it, which is what matters to us, which we fell. And look, let’s be honest, these tech companies aren’t going after the artists — they’re going after the low-hanging fruit of all the people who wish they could be artists. It would be like if Boston Dynamics created an exo-skeleton that looked like Kobe Bryant and you could put it on and flop around the court and say, “Look at all the jump shots I’m making.” You wouldn’t be Kobe Bryant. And they’re not filmmakers.

What a bleak picture, if accurate.

See, but there’s a new film business emerging. I don’t fully know what it looks like yet but we’re going to get there. The films at our festival, that’s what they do, they’re raw and real and there was no AI. They’re not on the conveyor belt of slop. They’re not automated.

So you want to slow down AI adoption in Hollywood while also building this idea of the new.

Oh no, I don’t want to slow down anything at all. No one can slow it down. I want to give a book of matches — to the studios, the streamers, OpenAI, Runway, everybody — and just say, “Go ahead and burn it down faster.” Because the faster we get AI into the business, the faster we’ll get to a new genre, which we really haven’t had since the ‘90s. So hurry up. So we can get to the new.

But if it’s so bad, shouldn’t there be a push to fight it? That’s kind of what the strikes were about, no?

Both things can be true. I think Generative AI is one of the worst ideas society has ever had. But also, hurry up and get it over with so we can get to the other side. What I want to do in the meantime is build a tunnel. We’re going to figure it out so that when all the AI stuff ends, something new and magnificent will be waiting on the other side. There will be filmmakers — human artists — working on it so that something great will be waiting. The idea of trying to save the tree doesn’t make sense to me. The tree is already dead. The goal now is to plant a new tree.

Some optimism! So how do you see this playing out?

I think after a certain amount of time, people will start getting sick of these regurgitations. It might take a while. But they will. They’ll get sick of an AI telling them their medical procedure isn’t covered or they can’t go to this school or anything else where these automated things are making decisions about their lives. And they’ll get sick of automated content too. What they will want is something real and raw and human and not AI.

And that’s what the festival is, kind of a glimpse at what can be waiting?

Yes. We’re building the tunnel and this is what we are working on so we can bring it out into the light on the other side. We have films that are, at the very least, leaning in a human direction, that resist a cliché turn. But also films that point to something raw that a computer couldn’t generate. We’re trying to get to a future that isn’t automated. I think it’s exciting and a lot of people will join us.

There are two roads. One is going right into the mountain. Fortunately, there’s another road. That’s the road I think we should get on.