Edgar Pêra, the filmmaker behind the AI-generated Telepathic letters which will be shown at Locarno77, talks about how his fascination with technology led him to AI.

Portuguese filmmaker Edgar Pêra has made numerous feature films, his most recent Telepathic letters, will be shown out of competition at Locarno, a major film festival in Switzerland. The film tells the story of famous cosmic horror writer HP Lovecraft and acclaimed poet and writer Fernando Pessoa, and chronicles the “invisible connections” between them. Perhaps it is just as well that this film is not eligible for a prize at Locarno77, because the technology behind it – so-called “artificial intelligence” that can generate images, text, video, music and more, but is not actually “intelligent” – is deeply controversial. While many films at Locarno this year tackle the topics of artificial intelligence and its implications, Telepathic letters is unique in that it is actually created with generative AI.

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In an email interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Pêra spoke about his obsessions with technology, Lovecraft and Pessoa. “I have been obsessed with Pessoa’s and Lovecraft’s works since I was a teenager,” he said, “and I soon realized that there were connections between their thoughts on humanity – as if they were both cosmic spectators. I have been making film adaptations of Lovecraft and Pessoa since I graduated from film school, but I have only used their texts together, and 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 tons of her books (in which I) have written in the margins ‘Link Lovecraft’ or ‘Link Pessoa’.”

When talking about his interest in technology, he compares it to a toy and says: “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 cinema technology primarily as a toy. I consider cameras as toys in my hands, and a friend of mine once said of my films that I think with my hands. Aldous Huxley wrote that books are toys of consciousness, and I consider films as a playground where I can invent my own rules. As Pessoa said Artists do not reproduce the universe, they invent new.”

Pêra said working on his previous film, The Club of Nothingdidn’t feel challenging enough. It felt like the same process he had already done, just on a smaller budget. “But after September 2, 2022,” he said, “I started writing prompts to create images and within a year my life changed: I was drawn 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.”

After finding his voice actors, he set to work creating images for the film. “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 of speaking HPL or FP. The first moving images were very rough, and they are still the images I like best. We tried to create ‘lost footage’ this year, but we didn’t succeed in creating the same imperfect images as in the beginning. These beta images are really found footage that never existed.”

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Fear of artificial intelligence is widespread in the art world. However, despite the bleak future he paints, Pêra has hope.

“If a businessman sees an opportunity to save money by firing people, he will take it, that’s for sure,” the filmmaker said. “Anyone can be replaced. Machines are nothing new in many fields. This is now the case in the entertainment industry. But before, 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 machineswhat Philip K. Dick would call human androids. But when it comes to art, that’s something else. 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.”

He shares words of wisdom for artists in the AI ​​age.”I believe that an artist should have an identity, a voicebut if you make films with only one style, the AI ​​will use your style. But that happened before AI, that’s called plagiarism. Or an homage.”

Source: The Hollywood Reporter