Jon Erwin Isn’t Hiding from AI: The ‘Young Washington’ Director on How AI Can Save Jobs and Bolster Collaboration
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- "Young Washington" contains about 100 shots augmented with generative AI, including costumes and cannon fire, per a Variety report that sparked online debate over the credits
- Jon Erwin's film opened to $20.8 million against a $20 million budget, beat "Supergirl," became his biggest opening weekend ever, and has already announced a sequel despite the AI controversy
- Erwin's new studio Innovative Dreams sits on the same Manhattan Beach lot as James Cameron, using AI to push toward real-time VFX rather than the months-long post-production cycle
- For the icy river sequence, actors were filmed inside a 50-foot trench and composited with separately shot real river footage because production could not safely place them in frigid water
- Erwin prefers the term "synthesizing," arguing AI should augment assets the production owns (wardrobe, locations, actors) rather than generate from scratch, and stacks AI tools on top of Unreal Engine and Nuke rather than relying on a single model like Sora
- On "The Old Stories: Moses," Erwin's crew used "gaussian splatting" volumetric scanning of real locations in Greece and Spain, then projected those 3-D renders onto volume stages behind the actors
- Erwin supports a joint studio-and-union mandate to retrain veteran film professionals on AI tools, arguing this is the best path to bring production jobs back to Los Angeles
Why it matters: Erwin's $20.8 million opening provides the first commercial evidence that an AI-forward film can perform at the box office without an audience backlash, giving studios a test case for AI-augmented production. His workflow—hundreds of crew employed on both "Young Washington" and "Moses," real on-location photography, and AI layered onto owned assets—directly contradicts the tech-sector rhetoric of replacement and offers a concrete template if unions and studios agree on retraining mandates.
Ask SkimNews
