Two weeks before Disclosure Day opens in cinemas, Emily Blunt has revealed how one of the film’s most unsettling moments was made — and why she refused to let a machine do it for her.
Appearing on Hot Ones, Blunt described a pivotal scene in Steven Spielberg’s new sci-fi thriller in which her character, Kansas City meteorologist Margaret Fairchild, begins emitting inhuman clicking and breathing sounds during a live weather broadcast. The sequence, she explained, is a four-minute single take building toward the moment Margaret starts speaking in what sounds like a non-human language.
Presented with the option of using AI to generate the sounds, Blunt declined. “You could go the AI route, which I’m a bit terrified of. I thought I could make some real, really strange sounds,” she said. She came in and improvised a range of clicking, humming, consonant and breathing sounds while engineers placed one microphone by her mouth and another at her throat, capturing the voice at two different points. The sound designer then took that raw material and shaped it into the film’s alien language.
Spielberg, who conceived the story before handing scripting duties to longtime collaborator David Koepp, has staked out a similar position. He has said he draws the line at using AI as “the final word on anything creative,” arguing that no algorithm can substitute for the human soul.
Blunt’s stance lands at a charged moment: Amazon MGM Studios announced this week a new GenAI Creators’ Fund designed to greenlight and produce AI-generated entertainment content, the latest sign of studios moving aggressively in a direction many performers resist.
Disclosure Day marks Spielberg’s first film since The Fabelmans in 2022 and early reactions from preview screenings have been strongly positive. The film also stars Josh O’Connor as a man determined to reveal the truth about extraterrestrial life, alongside Colin Firth, Colman Domingo, Eve Hewson and Wyatt Russell. It opens June 12.
