“Fuck AI.” So speaketh Rian Johnson, who’s currently on the press tour for his new Netflix mystery film Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery. Echoing comments from his friend—and fellow Netflix collaborator—Guillermo Del Toro, Johnson did not mince words on the topic of artificial intelligence’s encroachment into Hollywood. “It’s something that’s making everything worse in every single way—I don’t get it.”
Johnson—leaning into a new THR profile’s portrait of him as a guy who understands filmmaking’s economic underpinnings, without making himself beholden to them—then clarified: “I mean, I get it in a ‘This makes sense to save money by not paying artists’ way.’ But then, what the fuck are we doing? Is this where we want to be?”
As the profile itself notes, this blunt opposition to AI puts Johnson at odds with at least a few of his frequent collaborators—notably Natasha Lyonne, who he worked with on two seasons of Peacock’s Poker Face before the show got canceled a week ago (along with news that Johnson was hoping to resurrect it somewhere else with a new star—although Lyonne would stay on as a producer). Given that one of the other thrusts of the THR piece is that Johnson is a genuinely nice guy, he didn’t say anything about Lyonne’s embrace of AI production techniques, but it’s clear he’s not on the same page as the (now former) Charlie Cale.
Elsewhere in the interview, Johnson reveals that he’s ready to get back into theaters, after a two-film run living in a Netflix world where limited theatrical runs are doled out, basically, as a treat to keep directors happy. (Even here, Johnson is notably diplomatic, saying, “The temptation is to frame it as ‘us against Netflix’ or something. It’s not that at all. It sounds a little bit like corporate speak, but it’s also just the reality: You’re in the boat with the person you got on the boat with. You’ve got to kind of start rowing.”)
Wake Up Dead Man gets a brief theatrical run starting on November 26; the film lands on Netflix on December 12.
