Donovan Marsh on AI and the future of filmmaking

Award-winning South African film director Donovan Marsh has pivoted to artificial intelligence filmmaking and believes generative AI tools could fundamentally reshape how movies are made – and who gets to make them. Marsh, whose 30-year career includes directing the Hollywood submarine thriller Hunter Killer starring Gerard Butler and Gary Oldman, the Spud films and iNumber Number, is the latest guest on the TechCentral Show. The economics, he tells TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod, are extraordinary: a single complex scene in a traditional production requires crews, equipment, locations and days of scheduling, while AI tools collapse much of that overhead into work that can be done at a desk. But Marsh is clear that the creative work has not disappeared. He still directs shot by shot, much as he would on a conventional set, and uses a patchwork of different AI tools – no single product yet does everything. He has found that simpler prompts produce better results, saying over-prescription tends to degrade output quality. Marsh acknowledges the disruption this implies for camera operators, lighting crews, set designers and extras. But he argues that AI filmmaking could prove liberating for smaller filmmaking markets like South Africa, where the budgets to make ambitious local movies have dwindled. He has co-founded Dragon Studios AI with Ronnie Apteker and Stephen Cholerton, and is developing what he believes will be among the first AI-generated feature films. The tools are not quite there yet for a full 90-minute production, he says, but the gap is closing fast. Marsh also weighs in on where the so-called “uncanny valley” still trips up generative video, the future of the acting profession and what AI filmmaking could look like by 2029.