Simon Willison’s Weblog

For [Natasha] Lyonne, the draw of AI isn’t speed or scale — it’s independence. “I’m not trying to run a tech company,” she told me. “It’s more that I’m a filmmaker who doesn’t want the tech people deciding the future of the medium.” She imagines a future in which indie filmmakers can use AI tools to reclaim authorship from studios and avoid the compromises that come with chasing funding in a broken system.

“We need some sort of Dogme 95 for the AI era,” Lyonne said, referring to the stripped-down 1990s filmmaking movement started by Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg, which sought to liberate cinema from an overreliance on technology. “If we could just wrangle this artist-first idea before it becomes industry standard to not do it that way, that’s something I would be interested in working on. Almost like we are not going to go quietly into the night.”

— Lila Shapiro, Everyone Is Already Using AI (And Hiding It), New York Magazine

# 7th June 2025, 8:05 pm / ai-ethics, film, ai, generative-ai

[On Paddington 3] If this movie is anywhere near as good as the second one, we are going to need to have an extremely serious conversation about this being one of the greatest film trilogies ever made.

— Brian Grubb

# 11th July 2024, 9:11 pm / brian-grubb, film

The big thing I always get asked to find are dank dilapidated alleys, and New York City has, like, 5 alleys that look like that. Maybe four. You can’t film in three of them. So what it comes down to is there’s one alley left in New York, Cortlandt Alley, that everybody films in because it’s the last place. I try to stress to these directors in a polite way that New York is not a city of alleys. Boston is a city of alleys. Philadelphia has alleys. I don’t know anyone who uses the ‘old alleyway shortcut’ to go home. It doesn’t exist here. But that’s the movie you see.

— Nick Carr

# 21st May 2018, 12:04 am / new-york, film