Artificial intelligence, including generative AI, is one of the fundamental themes of the 77th edition of the Locarno Film Festival.

The topic was discussed in the Thursday sessions of the Locarno Pro industry programme, and several films in the Locarno77 programme, whose international competition will be the focus of the main jury chaired by Austrian auteur Jessica Hausner, also deal with this topic.

The new film by Portuguese filmmaker Edgar Pêra Telepathic letters (Telepathic Cards) was even created using AI imagery. The film will screen out of competition at Locarno and explores “invisible connections” between authors HP Lovecraft and Fernando Pessoa in a way that is sure to stand out both visually and aurally. Watch the trailer below.

Before the film’s world premiere at the Swiss arthouse festival Pêra in an email interview with THRtalked about his fascination with technology and the themes that brought Lovecraft and Pessoa into the spotlight.

How did you come up with the idea for this film and when and why was now the right time for you to engage with Lovecraft and Pessoa?

I have been obsessed with Pessoa’s and Lovecraft’s works since I was a teenager, and I quickly realized that there were connections between their thoughts on humanity – as if they were both cosmic spectators. Since graduating from film school, I have made adaptations of Lovecraft and Pessoa, but I have only used their writing together, briefly, in one film, Magnetic signal pathwaysBut in preparation The Club of Nothingabout Pessoa’s heteronyms, I found many more invisible connections between them. Now I have loads of her books, (in which I) have written “Link Lovecraft” or “Link Pessoa” in the margins.

And since we were already preparing The spiral of feara Lovecraft feature film, I thought that producing a film about it would be a good way to bring Pessoa and Lovecraft readers together.

You have always used cutting-edge technology. Is this your first film using AI? Why did you decide to use it here and what have you learned about using AI in filmmaking?

Well, I have always used cutting edge technology, but always in low budget mode. Every time there is something new, I am interested in it, because I see film technology mainly as a toy. I see cameras as toys in my hands, and once a friend of mine said about my films that I think with my hands.

Aldous Huxley wrote that books are toys of the mind, and I see films as a playground where I can invent my own rules. As Pessoa said, artists don’t reproduce the universe, they invent new ones.

Telepathic letters began as a documentary with some scenes from the actors of The Club of Nothingbut I didn’t see it as a challenge – it was just a continuation of the same process, but on a much smaller budget.

But after September 2, 2022, I started writing prompts to create images, and within a year my life changed: I was sucked into a vortex of hundreds of thousands of images. I started creating mashups of HPL (HP Lovecraft) + FP (Fernando Pessoa) and the cyber Pandora’s box opened. It was only when the still images appeared (with) four variations of the prompt that I immediately realized that there was a connection between these variations and the heteronyms of FP and the pseudonyms of HPL.

Keith Esher Davis, who had already performed texts by HPL and FP, was the obvious choice for Lovecraft and Pessoa. I thought he would be perfect for both voices. Unfortunately, he recently passed away so he won’t be able to see the film…

Besides Keith, we have three female voices in Telepathic letters —Victoria Guerra (Ophelia in The Club of Nothing), Iris Cayatte (Nyarlathotep in Lovecraftland) and Bárbara Lagido (singer).

In the spring of 2023, we started using a four-second film generator and the film changed completely, because until then we only used moving images from talking HPL or FP. The first moving images were very rough, and they are still the images I like the most. We tried to create “lost footage” this year, but we didn’t manage to create the same imperfect images as in the beginning. These beta images are really found footage that never existed.

What can you say to filmmakers and others who fear that AI could replace them?

Manual labor… Whenever a businessman sees an opportunity to save money by firing people, he will take it, that’s for sure. Anyone can be replaced. Machines are nothing new in many fields. In the entertainment business, they are now. But before that, a filmmaker who stayed true to his principles was often replaced by human filmmakers who had no ethics because they were all already looking for the algorithm of success. There are already people who think like machines, what Philip K. Dick would call human androids.

But when it comes to art, it’s different. What we did was a low-budget essay with exactly the same number of people working on the film as on the documentary before it.

Another thing is the question of style. For the Finnish artist Tommi Musturi, style is a capitalist tool, so for a different idea he uses a different style. I believe that an artist should have an identity, a voice, but if you make films with only one style, the AI ​​will use your style. But that was already happening before AI, what is called plagiarism. Or an homage.

Your film is such a fun and interesting journey. I can still hear the music blaring in my head and still see some of the images when I close my eyes. What would you like the audience to take away from it?

Thank you on my behalf and on behalf of Artur Cyaneto (which means “cyanide” in Portuguese). Some of Cyaneto’s music was there before the film was edited, and some parts of it (were used) in my radio program Kinorama. The film begins with an introduction, but after that I hope that viewers will enter a trance state where the works of Pessoa and Lovecraft merge, and the music is a crucial element. In the end, I hope that Lovecraft readers will want to read Pessoa, and vice versa…

What was the biggest challenge in making this film?

Most of the AI ​​images and movies I’ve seen so far are terrible. You have to tame the AI ​​algorithm so it doesn’t start producing very mediocre images. I was making hundreds of images a day, so I already had my own playlist of prompts. There were times when I would just write “a man” and the image of Pessoa would appear.

This was one of the hardest films I’ve ever made. I woke up and immediately started creating images with my phone. It started as a toy, then a game, but after over a year of writing hundreds of thousands of prompts, I started to think of myself as a puppet. I saw myself as a machine, as if the machine was having all the fun playing a cinematic roulette of human image banks.

But of course, as with all my films, everything is in the editing. That’s where I write.

What is your next project and will you use AI imagery again?

Well, it certainly won’t be an AI film, it will be AG — Asphalt Guerrillaa film from the 1970s and 1980s in Portugal, a tragicomedy based on true events after the Carnation Revolution of 1974. But while we were “making” Telepathic letters (it is very difficult to find a word for a process that combines writing, shooting and editing until the end), we made two music videos: loser by Tigerman and Lost in space by Sula Bassana.

Is there anything else you would like to highlight?

One of the things I learned from asking questions about Pessoa and Lovecraft while using GPT is that you have to know more about them than you know about GPT. If you don’t, you’re going to make mistakes, because machines, like the rest of nature, abhor the void, and if they don’t know something, they invent it. But that’s the most interesting part of AI – the machine’s hallucinations, the six-fingered hands, the Kaotyk morphs, the unexpected…

PS: Artur Cyaneto and Eduardo Ego (who are responsible for the libretto and the prompts for the film respectively) are some of my roles.