Director Piotr Winiewicz brought a provocative experiment to this year’s KVIFF: he trained an artificial intelligence model on the films of Werner Herzog, then used the resulting output as the basis for a screenplay, which he turned into a feature film. The result is About a Hero, which screened at the festival, followed by a lively audience discussion.
“The entire process would take a week to explain. In total, we spent about six years working on the film. First, we had to find funding, and most importantly, we had to develop our own technology, which took four years to build and understand. Only after that came the more conventional stage: actual filmmaking,” Winiewicz described the pre-production stage. The project sparked passionate debate around whether artificial intelligence could ever surpass human creativity.
“We’re suffering from technophobia. At the start, I should have been far more sceptical of people. Of course, we should also question AI. But the real danger lies with those in powerful companies who exploit it. And as for creativity – cinema has been around for over 120 years. A lot of terrible films have been made in that time, and AI wasn’t involved in any of them,” concludes the director, who uses the film to explore the relationship between humans and technology.
The AI-generated framework produced multiple possible storylines, which the filmmakers then refined and shaped into a workable format. Importantly, the AI did not write dialogue. All scenes were shot by humans, and Winiewicz took a subversive approach to production design, crafting a deliberately artificial aesthetic to provoke questions around authenticity.
And did Werner Herzog himself see the film? “Werner always told me not to make the film, while simultaneously giving me advice on how I should make it. At one point, he threatened to sue if I released it without his permission. But once it was done, we had a long conversation. In the end, he gave us the green light. Though I did have to promise him that next time I’d make a normal movie,” Winiewicz joked to the audience at the Drahomíra Cinema.
