Sometimes, an interview subject surprises you with something you never expected. “This film is one of the first to incorporate a sequence completely generated by artificial intelligence,” Florian Frerichs (The Last Supper), director and co-writer of Traumnovela new adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler's story that inspired Stanley Kubrick Eyes tightly closedmentioned during our Zoom chat.
Nikolai Kinski, the star of the film about an upper-middle-class couple drawn into a secret world of erotic fantasy, which opens the 31st Oldenburg Film Festival on Wednesday, wasn’t quite prepared for the revelation. “What do you mean?” he asks.
“I think it’s one of the first films that did that,” Frerichs explains, sharing that AI was used for a dream sequence in the film when protagonist Jakob, played by Kinski, learns from his partner Amelia, played by Laurine Price, about his dreams. “We have this animation thing going on there.”
Now Frerichs has everyone's full attention. “It was something very unique and very new because in the book this dream sequence is very surreal,” he emphasizes. “It would have been very difficult to shoot. In fact, it has never been shot in any of the other films” based on the novel.
“With the use and help of AI and my two friends, Sven and Victor, who ran the whole thing, we actually gave a face to this dream sequence,” Frerichs adds. “Like it or not, it was done with the help of AI.”
So, what was the experience of working with AI like and what were the challenges? “It was a lot of work on the part of our team that we put into this AI. It’s not like we just said to the AI, ‘do this and that,’ and then it came out. It was actually six months of research and trial and error,” the director explains. “It was a lot of trial and error, of prodding, and then also learning the art of negative prodding, which is even more important: telling it what not to do instead of telling it what to do. So it was a very, very unique experience in post-production to bring this dream sequence to life, which we otherwise wouldn’t have been able to film on such a limited budget.”
Kinski is now particularly excited to see the final version of the film. “I haven't seen the final version [with the AI sequence] so I'm very curious to see it,” he says.
The actor calls the prospect of “artificial intelligence and human interaction fascinating,” adding, “I think it's just the beginning of a wild new era.”
Does artificial intelligence scare or worry Frerichs? “Our machine dreamed up this dream sequence for our film with a lot of work that we put into it,” he says. DAY. “So, I'm not afraid of some animator or something losing their job. My experience with AI has been that it's a tool and you have to put a lot of creativity into it to get something out of it.” The director concludes: “That's why I can proudly say that we have an AI sequence in there that elevates the entire sequence and the movie.”