Kassovitz: 'Nobody will care' if film actors are AI
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- Mathieu Kassovitz predicted at the second World AI Film Festival in Cannes that 'in two years from now nobody will care' whether film characters are AI or human, calling the technology 'the last artistic tool we need' and saying the first AI film stars are 'around the corner.'
- Kassovitz dismissed copyright concerns with 'Fuck copyright,' arguing that 'as AI steals everything, it doesn't steal anything' and that all filmmakers 'steal' from predecessors, citing borrowings from Scorsese, Kurosawa, and Eisenstein — while conceding he would still sue anyone who misused La Haine.
- Kassovitz announced he is setting up an AI film studio in Paris, comparing it to George Lucas founding Industrial Light and Magic in 1975; his AI-enabled adaptation of Edmond-François Calvo's 1940s comic The Beast is Dead will cost $25m, half the $50-60m quoted by traditional US and European studios.
- Cannes Film Festival president Iris Knobloch announced an AI ban for films in the main official competition, declaring 'AI imitates very well, but it will never feel deep emotions' — a stance that directly contradicts Kassovitz's embrace of the technology at a parallel festival.
- Val Kilmer, who died a year ago, appeared via AI-generated performance in a trailer for As Deep as the Grave, with permission from his estate — cited as a recent example of the technology's convincing capabilities.
- Tim Kraft, a leading German copyright lawyer speaking at the same festival, said there are almost 140 pending cases against AI companies over copyright, mostly in the US and Germany, and argued that Google and OpenAI 'operate on our knowledge and copyrighted material' and should pay for usage.
Why it matters: Kassovitz, whose 1995 La Haine won three Césars, hands the pro-AI Hollywood camp a cultural heavyweight at the precise moment the main Cannes festival banned AI from competition and 140 copyright cases pile up against AI firms. His $25m AI production cost — half the $50-60m quoted by traditional studios — makes the economic pitch as loudly as the artistic one, and the Lucas/ILM analogy frames it as infrastructure-building, not gimmickry.
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