Great motion picture is alchemy; i.e., sovereign to change its mind mid-flight.
Coppola nearly lost his mind when Brando arrived to play Kurtz unprepared and grossly overweight to be a soldier. Storaro and Coppola had to think on their feet — they staged him in a dark room with a lone warm spool of light. Why? So you wouldn't see his paunch. And because Brando hadn't memorized any dialogue — the script was dispensed with altogether. Coppola would sit beside Brando as the camera rolled and feed him words: judgement, pain, moral collapse. And Brando rambled, mumbling words half-mouthed as they found the scene together. And still, when you watch it now, the warm glint in his widened eyes and face half shadowed as he mutters "…snail crawling along the edge of straight razor", was a beautiful accident.
They'd shoot in the jungle for a year and a half — exceed the budget by 100% — and nearly kill Coppola in the process. Beware. Artists at play.
In the forty years that followed, margins stiffened and complexity compounded. No longer able to insure the risk of changing its mind, filmmaking became a compromise — production overhead against market signal. Brando died.
Artificial Intelligence cannot make motion pictures. It has no judgement or taste or audacity. No yearning that lilts unsteady from crumpled page to Cosmos. But it can perform the million recalculations that follow a change of heart. The new schedules and budgets and painstaking previz.
We are not building a machine that helps you make movies cheaper and faster and smoother — though it does that. We're making filmmakers alchemists again.