Paul Schrader’s AI Noir Drops Antoine Fuqua and Every Name Actor

That package never reached the screen. Earlier this week, while discussing his next three films, Schrader said, “Antoine is no longer involved.” He also said the project had become something different and was being reconfigured as an AI project.

So the change is not a small staffing adjustment. A producer-director partnership is out, a Netflix sale sits in the project’s history, and the proposed cast has been replaced by generated figures. The original title might not survive either. Schrader’s account leaves that open.

Photos: Ariela Ortiz-Barrantes · CC BY-SA 4.0 · source; Pietro Luca Cassarino · CC BY-SA 4.0 · source

“Those jobs are gone, babe” is Schrader’s bluntest sales pitch

Schrader has made no secret of his interest in artificial intelligence. The Playlist notes that he posts AI-generated images, experiments with the technology and earlier this year said he was “stunned” by movie ideas produced through ChatGPT.

Now he has moved from tinkering to prediction. “Those jobs are gone, babe,” Schrader told The Hollywood Reporter. “You can scream ‘Stop AI’ all you want, but you can’t stop it.”

There is the jolt: an 80-year-old screenwriter-director, famous for writing Taxi Driver and for making severe movies about damaged men, announcing that the workers who embody those damaged men have no future. It is a line with the efficiency of a studio memo and the warmth of a shove.

The Playlist frames Three Guns At Dawn as a test of how far generative AI can enter a traditional feature. That is fair, but Schrader’s own statement is more revealing than the phrase “test case.” He is not waiting for the industry to settle the argument. He is betting the argument has already been settled by the machines.

Photos: Montclair Film · CC BY 2.0 · source 1, source 2

The film’s original story may survive, but almost everything else is loose

The basic premise appears intact: three criminal brothers and a South Central noir framework. Beyond that, the reporting gives us no locked title, no announced schedule, no production company and no confirmed distribution arrangement for the reconfigured version.

Schrader is planning three films after The Basics Of Philosophy. He intends to shoot the erotic thriller Non Compos Mentis first, then the ayahuasca project The Doors Of Perception, before moving to the AI film. The second movie will contain about 15 minutes of AI-assisted trip sequences, according to Schrader’s earlier comments reported by The Playlist. That is a different proposition from a feature populated entirely by generated people.

The distinction may become the whole story. The Doors Of Perception uses AI for a defined stretch of altered-state imagery. Three Guns At Dawn, as Schrader describes it now, removes the actor from the center of the frame. Whether that produces a new kind of noir or a very expensive absence is unknown. The film has not been made, and no one can report what it looks like.

For now, the concrete fact is simpler and stranger: Schrader’s three brothers may return as software, while the human names attached to them disappear before cameras roll.