Roger Avary Plans AI Film of Milton's Paradise Lost
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- Roger Avary — co-writer of Pulp Fiction and director of Killing Zoe and The Rules of Attraction — is planning a film adaptation of Milton's 17th-century epic poem Paradise Lost using AI.
- The piece frames the announcement as arriving at a 'politically injudicious time,' citing concerns about AI's impact on livelihoods and authorship alongside artistic doubts about AI's capacity to deliver anything beyond 'AI slop.'
- The article notes that Joe Russo, director of the Avengers films, predicted three years ago that audiences would soon be watching entirely AI-created movies — a forecast the piece says has not yet been realized.
- Avary's project will test whether AI can deliver the 'cosmic spectacle' of a poem the author considers 'too great, too bizarre and too outrageously excessive' to be handed to a system that finds 'the most likely outcome to any given question.'
- The article draws a parallel to other 'unfilmable' works that eventually succeeded on screen — Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings and Denis Villeneuve's 2021 Dune — questioning whether AI can play the role Jackson and Villeneuve did for their respective source texts.
- The author argues current AI filmmaking has still relied on human curators to select usable shots and assemble coherent edits, implying that Paradise Lost may require the same hands-on intervention — or risk producing 'the most cliched and over polished visual deja vu.'
Why it matters: The article crystallizes the AI-vs-human-art debate by pitting a director with genuine literary ambition against a source text the piece considers too great to be handled by pattern-prediction software. The piece's central irony — that Satan himself would celebrate creation being outsourced and human authorship 'quietly being dissolved' — frames the project as a referendum on whether AI-generated cinema can produce work with a 'soul,' with Paradise Lost as the stress test.
