James Cameron is an internationally renowned director, but his films often face budget overruns. Now he is an advocate for lowering the cost of making commercial blockbusters. In a recent interview, Cameron said that he joined the board of directors of Stability AI last year mainly because he wanted to know how to use AI to improve the efficiency of film production. Stability AI is the company behind the text-to-image model Stable Diffusion.
Cameron said: "In the past, I would start a company to solve the problem of (controlling funds), but now I realize that this is not the best approach. So I want to join the board of directors of a good, competitive, and performant company. My goal is not necessarily to make a lot of money, my goal is Understand the field and understand what the developers are thinking. What are their goals? What kind of development cycle do you need to invest in creating a new operational module that can fulfill a specific purpose? My goal is to try to integrate it into the visual effects process."
Nowadays, the cost of any commercial film can easily start from two to three hundred million US dollars, but the profit has not increased much, and Cameron has also noticed this seriousness. He said: "This is not just a hypothesis, if we want to continue to see the movies we love, such as "Dune" and "Dune 2", or movies with extremely high special effects and CG content, we have to find a way to halve the cost. I don't mean to lay off half the staff and special effects company employees, but double the speed at which the shots are completed, so that your rhythm and production cycle will be faster, and the artists can continue to do other cool things, right? This is my vision."