Artificial intelligence, including generative AI, is one of the underlying themes of the 77th Locarno Film Festival.
Thursday's session of Locarno Pro's industry program featured a discussion of the theme, which also features in several films in the lineup for Locarno 77, the international competition that will feature a main jury headed by Austrian filmmaker Jessica Hausner.
Portuguese director Edgar Pela's new film, Telepathic Letters, was created with AI imagery. Screening in the out-of-competition lineup at the Locarno Film Festival, the film explores the “invisible connection” between authors HP Lovecraft and Fernando Pessoa in a visually and sonically unmistakable way. Check out the trailer below.
In an email interview with THR ahead of the film's world premiere at an arthouse festival in Switzerland, Pela spoke about his interest in technology and the themes highlighted by Lovecraft and Pessoa.
How did you come up with the idea for this film, and when and why was now the perfect time to explore Lovecraft and Pessoa?
I was obsessed with the works of Pessoa and Lovecraft since I was a teenager, and I quickly realized there was a connection between their ideas about humanity, as if they were observers of the universe. After I graduated from film school, I adapted Lovecraft and Pessoa, but I only used their texts together briefly in one film, Magnetic Pathways. But when I was preparing The Nothingness Club, about Pessoa's epithet, I realized there were many more invisible connections between them. Now I have a pile of their books, and I have written (in the margins) “link Lovecraft” or “link Pessoa.”
And since we were already preparing a feature film on Lovecraft, The Spiral of Fear, we thought making a film about them might be a good way to bring Pessoa and Lovecraft readers together.
You've always worked with cutting edge technology, but is this your first film using AI? Why did you decide to use it here and what did you learn about using AI in filmmaking?
Well, I've always worked with cutting edge technology, but always on a low budget. Whenever something new comes along, I'm interested in it, because I see film technology almost as a set of toys. I see the camera as a toy in my hands. A friend once said to me about my films, I think with my hands.
Aldous Huxley wrote that books are toys for the mind, but I see cinema as a playground in which you can invent your own rules. As Pessoa said, the artist does not recreate the universe, but invents a new one.
Telepathic Letters started out as a documentary with some scenes with actors from The Nothingness Club, but it didn't feel like a challenge to me – it was just a continuation of the same process with a much smaller budget.
But starting on September 2, 2022, I started writing prompts to create images, and within a year, my life changed. I was sucked into a whirlpool of hundreds of thousands of images. I started making HPL (HP Lovecraft) + FP (Fernando Pessoa) mashups, and a cyber Pandora's box was opened. First, a still image was displayed with four variations of the prompt, and I immediately recognized the connection between these variations and the epithet of FP and the pseudonym of HPL.
Keith Esher Davis, who already performed the texts of HPL and FP, was the obvious choice to play both Lovecraft and Pessoa. I thought he would be the perfect voice for both. Unfortunately, he recently passed away, so we won't be able to see the film…
Besides Keith, Telepathic Letters features three other female voices: Victoria Guerra (Ophelia from The Nothingness Club), Iris Khayatte (Nyarlathotep from Lovecraftland) and Barbara Ruggedo (singer).
In the spring of 2023, I started using the 4-second video generator. It completely changed the film because up until then I had only used videos of HPL or FP talking. The first videos were very rough, but they are still my favorite images. This year I tried to make “lost footage”, but I couldn't make the incomplete images like the ones I started with. These beta images are found footage that didn't actually exist.
What would you say to filmmakers and others who are worried about being replaced by AI?
Manual labor… If a businessman finds a way to save money, i.e. to fire people, he will certainly take advantage of it. Everyone is replaceable. Machines are not new in many fields. They now dominate the entertainment industry. But before that, principled filmmakers were often replaced by human filmmakers without ethics, because they all wanted an algorithm for success. Humans who think like machines already exist, like the human androids that Philip K. Dick calls them.
But making a work of art is a different story. What we made was a low-budget fiction essay, made by exactly the same crew as our previous documentary.
Another issue is the question of style. For the Finnish artist Tomi Musturi, style is a tool of capitalism, so he uses different styles for different ideas. I believe that an artist should have an identity, a voice, but if you make a film with only one style, an AI will use that style. But that was happening before AI came along, and it's called plagiarism, or homage.
Your film is really fun and interesting. I can still hear the intense music in my head and see some of the images when I close my eyes. What do you want audiences to take away from this film?
On behalf of myself and Arthur Cyanate (which means “Cyanide” in Portuguese), I would like to say a big thank you. Some of Cyanate's music was there before the film was edited and was even used in my radio show “Kinorama”. The film starts with a prologue, but then I hope that the audience will enter a trance state, where Pessoa's and Lovecraft's works will merge and the music will be an important element. Ultimately, I hope that Lovecraft's 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 have been terrible. AI algorithms need to be tamed so they don't create mediocre images. I created hundreds of images a day, so I already had my own prompt playlist. Sometimes I would just write “man” and an image of Pessoa would appear.
This is one of the most difficult films I've done. I wake up and immediately start making images on my phone. It started as a toy, then a game, but after over a year of writing hundreds of thousands of prompts, I began to see myself as a marionette. I saw myself as a machine, as if that machine had all the fun of playing cinematic roulette with a human image data bank.
But of course, as with all my films, it's all in the edit, where I write the script.
What would you like to do for your next project, and will you be using AI imagery there as well?
Well, it's definitely not an AI film. It would be AG (Asphalt Guerrilla), a Portuguese 1970s-1980s film, a tragicomedy based on real events that happened after the Carnation Revolution of 1974. But while we were “doing” Telepathic Letters (it's really hard to choose words to describe the process that combined writing, filming and editing all the way through), we also made two music videos: Losers by Tigerman and Lost in Space by Sula Bassana.
Is there anything else you want to highlight?
One thing I learned from asking questions about Pessoa and Lovecraft while using GPT is that you need to know more about them than GPT does, or you'll make mistakes, because machines, like the rest of nature, abhor the void and will make up things they don't know. But that's the most interesting part of AI: machine hallucinations, six-fingered hands, chaotic morphs, the unexpected.
PS: Arthur Ciannet and Eduardo Ego (who wrote the script and prompts for the film, respectively) are part of my persona.
