By Frank Pavich
Images generated by Midjourney, with Johnny Darrell
Frank Pavich is the director of “Jodorowsky’s Dune,” a documentary about the Chilean filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky’s attempt to film a version of “Dune” in the mid-1970s.
I was recently shown some frames from a film that I had never heard of: Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 1976 version of “Tron.” The sets were incredible. The actors, unfamiliar to me, looked fantastic in their roles. The costumes and lighting worked together perfectly. The images glowed with an extravagant and psychedelic sensibility that felt distinctly Jodorowskian.
However, Mr. Jodorowsky, the visionary Chilean filmmaker, never tried to make “Tron.” I’m not even sure he knows what “Tron” is. And Disney’s original “Tron” was released in 1982. So what 1970s film were these gorgeous stills from? Who were these neon-suited actors? And how did I — the director of the documentary “Jodorowsky’s Dune,” having spent two and a half years interviewing and working with Alejandro to tell the story of his famously unfinished film — not know about this?
The truth is that these weren’t stills from a long-lost movie. They weren’t photos at all. These evocative, well-composed and tonally immaculate images were generated in seconds with the magic of artificial intelligence.
During the filming of my documentary, Alejandro told me about the Greek-Armenian philosopher and mystic George Gurdjieff. He taught that we are born without a soul and that our task in life is to help our soul to grow and develop: Souls aren’t born; they’re earned. Every single day, Alejandro creates. He writes, he draws, he paints. He works on his soul through art. Next month he’ll turn 94, and he’s preparing to direct a new film. He’s a man in perpetual creative motion.
I first met Alejandro in 2010, when I approached him about filming a documentary on his mid-1970s attempt to make a feature film version of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi novel “Dune.” My interest wasn’t in the story of the young noble Paul Atreides, the desert planet Arrakis or the mind-altering spice called melange. I wanted to find out why the mysterious and guru-like director chose to follow up his 1970 acid western “El Topo” (the very first midnight movie) and 1973 scandalous and hallucinogenic “The Holy Mountain” with an attempt to make the most colossal science-fiction film of all time.
After adapting the novel into a screenplay, he worked for two years with a team of artists — his “spiritual warriors”: the British illustrator Chris Foss, who helped him design his striped spaceships; the Swiss artist H.R. Giger, whose dark style would help him create the home planet of the film’s villains; the American special effects innovator Dan O’Bannon; and, of course, Jean Giraud, France’s greatest comics artist, who would help Alejandro design the costumes, as well as draw the more than 3,000 storyboard sketches needed to visualize this epic tale.
The cast would have included Mick Jagger, Orson Welles, Salvador Dalí and Alejandro’s 12-year-old son, Brontis, in the lead role. The soundtrack would have been composed and recorded by Pink Floyd.
He wanted “Dune” to be more than a movie. It was to be a prophet! It was to change the world! And it was not to be. You’ve never seen the film because it was never completed.
The project ended once Alejandro presented his massive compendium of artwork to the Hollywood studios. They turned it down out of fear or shortsightedness or simply because they could not comprehend what he was trying to do. Or maybe it was because he refused to submit to the practical limits of the two-hour film, threatening that his “Dune” would be as long as 20 hours.
He was never given the chance to shoot even a single frame of “Dune.” There’s no unused footage that we can look at and dismiss because of campy acting or poor special effects. It will forever be the greatest film never made, because it exists solely in our imaginations.
Just because you cannot watch Alejandro’s “Dune” doesn’t mean it didn’t change the world. This unfilmed film’s influence on our culture is nothing short of astounding. Specific ideas and images from the “Dune” art bible have escaped into the world. They can be experienced in movies such as “Blade Runner,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” “Prometheus,” “The Terminator” and even the original “Star Wars.” His “Dune” does not exist, yet it’s all around us.
It took Alejandro and his team two years of pure analog struggle to create his “Dune” — pencil on paper, paint on canvas, inventing the practical effects required to deliver his onscreen spectacle.
It’s different with A.I. No struggle was involved in creating these images of “Jodorowsky’s Tron.” It didn’t require any special skills or extensive direction from Johnny Darrell, the Canadian director who made these pictures with an A.I. program called Midjourney. A simple prompt is all it took. A few words — in this case, slight variations on “production still from 1976 of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Tron” — followed by under a minute of waiting, and a computer deep in the racks of a data center somewhere, sifting through the numbers encoded into its memory banks associated with the words “Tron” and “Jodorowsky.”
I’m still trying to wrap my mind around it all. There seems to be a correlation between how Alejandro’s work was absorbed and referred to by subsequent filmmakers and how his work was ingested and metabolized by computer programming. But these two things are not the same. I want to say that influence is not the same thing as algorithm. But looking at these images, how can I be sure?
It’s hard to find many shortcomings in the software. It can’t render text. And like many painters and sculptors throughout history, it has trouble getting hands right. I’m nitpicking here. The model contains multitudes. It has scanned the collected works of thousands upon thousands of photographers, painters and cinematographers. It has a deep library of styles and a facility with all kinds of image-making techniques at its digital fingertips. The technology is jaw-dropping. And it concerns me greatly.
To what extent do these rapidly generated images contain creativity? And from what source is that creativity emerging? Has Alejandro been robbed? Is the training of this A.I. model the greatest art heist in history? How much of art-making is theft, anyway?
On the one hand, the software gives you a kind of turbocharged pastiche. But there’s still some fresh splendor in that imitation. It’s succeeding at one of filmmaking’s main jobs: transporting you to another time, to another world. If A.I.s were eligible for the Academy Awards, I’d vote for “Jodorowsky’s Tron” for best A.I. costume design just for dreaming up such outrageous retro sci-fi hats and helmets.
If, as Mr. Gurdjieff taught, creation leads to the development of one’s soul, whose soul is being developed here?
Nothing in this software seems controllable in the pixel-precise way artists use digital tools like Photoshop. When Mr. Darrell generated these images, he didn’t choose the colors, the framing or what the characters would be doing. He also didn’t determine some of the other choices that the A.I. program assimilated from 1970s science fiction: the seemingly all-white cast and the vintage gender roles. Whatever he might have had in his mind’s eye was not what he was going to get. He needed to state his prompt cleanly and clearly. But the creativity bubbled out of the machine.
In exploring more of Mr. Darrell’s A.I. experimentation, I saw some still images that he made for an occult motorcycle flick called “The Snakes Are the Devil.” They were incredible. So full of mystery and depth. I wanted to watch this movie.
I promptly went to IMDb to search it out. But no such luck. Hmmmmm. I went back to his images, one of which was a lobby card. I noted the lead actor’s name, Jay Clennan, and returned to IMDb. No such actor exists.
I couldn’t find anything because there was no film. There was no actor. There was no anything. These images were another A.I. creation. And I had known that right from the start. Yet still, I hoped that somehow it was real. I’m still annoyed at Mr. Darrell for making me want what I cannot have.
That’s how powerful it is to allow A.I. to generate pictures of films or other art objects you wish could exist. It’s like watching a magic show. Going in, you know it will all be illusions and sleight of hand. But during the show, your suspension of disbelief kicks in. Your heart wants to believe it’s real, and it gets your brain to go along for the ride. Life is more fun that way.
What will it mean when directors, concept artists and film students can see with their imaginations, painting with all the digitally archived visual material of human civilization? When our culture starts to be influenced by scenes, sets and images from old films that never existed or that haven’t yet even been imagined?
I have a feeling we’re all about to find out.
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