Ben Affleck said Wednesday that he used artificial intelligence “for lots of things” in his Netflix thriller Animals, but he declined to say where. He also dismissed a Hollywood claim that the streamer forces filmmakers to simplify their stories.
Speaking with a reporter at Bloomberg’s Screentime conference in Los Angeles, Affleck compared naming the specific uses to a magician revealing a trick before the show. He called Animals, which he directs and stars in, a good model for ethical use because it is a human-driven film with few flashy effects. The film opens on Netflix and in select theaters October 9, with Kerry Washington, Gillian Anderson and Steven Yeun in the cast.
The tools came from InterPositive, the startup Affleck founded and Netflix bought in March for $587 million. He described building a model for cinematic shots by training an open-source system on thousands of hours of footage. His financial stake in the technology has not escaped notice. Affleck rejected a theory that Netflix bought the company as a public relations shield against scrutiny of its wider AI use.
Affleck argued that anxiety fades once filmmakers gain control of the tools, and he called AI another form of computing in a long line of production technology. He doubts that anyone can type a prompt and produce a film audiences want to see. A fully AI-generated feature, he said, would run into limits of cost, complexity, physics and energy.
Netflix has pushed hard in this direction. Co-CEO Ted Sarandos said last quarter that generative AI has touched roughly 300 titles this year, mostly in post-production, and claimed it can cut time and costs.
Affleck also took on a viral claim from his friend and collaborator Matt Damon. On Joe Rogan’s podcast in January, Damon said Netflix urged them to repeat the plot of The Rip “three or four times” for distracted viewers. Netflix executives called the idea offensive. Affleck said the studio gave him no notes on Animals and described his own experience as “utterly contrary” to that account. He added that he would have refused such a request.
