Paul Schrader maybe spending a little too much time at the computer. Although the septuagenarian filmmaker rolled out his latest project, “Oh, Canada,” just last year, Schrader is already hard at work creating new ideas, not only for himself, but also for other legendary filmmakers. Revisiting his beloved Facebook page, Schrader shared a post which he had experimented with ChatGPT and was shocked to see how developed it had become.
“I’M EXCITED,” Schrader said. “I just asked chatgpt about an idea for Paul Schrader film.’ Then Paul Thomas Anderson. Then Quentin Tarantino. Then Harmony Korine. Then Ingmar Bergman. Then Rossellini. Long. Scorsese. Murnau. Capra. Ford. Spielberg. Lynch. Every idea ChatGPT came up with (in seconds) was good. And original. And grown out. Why should writers sit around for months looking for a good idea when AI can provide one in seconds?”
It is not the first time that Schrader has expressed his interest in the developing technology. In the middle of the 2023 WGA strike, the “Raging Bull” printer posted his view on Facebookshares that no matter how hard you fight it, the AI will not be taken down.
“The Guild doesn’t fear AI as much as it fears not getting paid. Dig into that logic. It’s clear that AI is going to be a force in film entertainment,” Schrader wrote, later adding: “If a WGA member uses AI, should he/she be paid as a writer. If a producer uses AI to create a script, they must find a WGA member to pay.”
Schrader also spoke with IndieWire’s Anne Thompson around the same time about the benefits of AI as a tool that can cut down on the more tedious parts of screenwriting. At the time, he wasn’t sure that AI would be a problem that would be solved by the strikes, and although writers and actors won protection in the end, he’s not wrong that AI is still a threat.
“AI is not going to be solved, it’s going to be very much a part of our future,” Schrader said. “And the truth is, many of the TV scripts and movies you now see are already written by AI. If someone were to ask me, say, ‘do an episode of ‘CSI,’ I would watch a dozen CSIs to catch the template – the set of characters, all the dialogue, all the pilot positions, everything you need to make a template, I could knock it off easily enough. But that’s the same thing AI will do. They’ll probably make a better episode of ‘CSI’ because it’s faster, cheaper and doesn’t waste their time with any pretensions.”
