can claude save cannes?
artificial intelligence and the future of cinema
When I land in Cannes, for the first time in my life, a checked bag is lost. The staff at Nice Côte d’Azur Airport are useless, as is the customer service agent I connect with at British Airways. They don't know where my bag is. They don't know if I checked a bag. They say call back in 72 hours. At first, I panic and think my tuxedo is gone. But in a stroke of luck, my suitcase was 2kg over the weight limit when I departed from London and I moved my garment bag to my carry-on. If there’s one place in the world to show up with only socks, underwear, and a tuxedo, it’s Cannes.
I came to the world’s most prestigious film festivsal to attend the premier of Ira Sachs' new film, The Man I Love, produced by my dear friend, Mike Spreter, along with his longtime colleagues David Siegel and Scott McGehee. I had been telling friends at the preview of the Venice Biennale that a film I was in was in competition. It’s my favorite kind of lie to tell: technically true, but in the most strained sense possible. (I attended an ADR session in Bronson Canyon this winter, lending the sonic barrier of my body and the sound of my breathing as ambient noise for the film’s closing song, an a cappella cover of Ronee Blakley's "Lightning Over Water" by by Maisy Stella.)
This was the year of AI anxiety at Cannes. At a press conference, jury member Demi Moore struck a conciliatory, but perhaps pessimistic tone:
AI is here…to fight it is to fight something that…we will lose. So to find ways in which we can work with it I think is a more valuable path to take.
Steven Soderbergh was more fully optimistic:
We haven’t seen yet someone with a certain amount of creative credibility go full-metal AI on something, and see how people react. I think it’s necessary. How do you know where the line is until somebody crosses it? I don’t think what I’m doing crosses it. Some people may disagree. I don’t know where my line is yet. I’m waiting to see.
Despite the positive if cautious take, the film work is still unsure about AI and how it will affect already precarious industry employment. Perhaps this is why Grayden Carter’s party at the fabulous hotel-slash-merch-purveyor, Hotel du Cap Eden-Roc—and sponsored by Anthropic’s chatbot, Claude—seemed under-attended. Matchbooks, playing cards, and cocktail napkins striped clay orange and cream were strewn across the beachfront terrace, rendering Anthropic’s brand colors in the style of beach umbrellas, cabanas, and life preservers.
While a friend posed in front of one of the latter, I joked, "Claude saved Cannes!"
Predictably, I spied a venture-capitalist-turned-producer I knew from San Francisco. But the smattering of celebrities and directors seemed thin: Darren Aronofsky, Sophie Thatcher, Daisy Edgar-Jones, Natasha Lyonne, and Sharon Stone, resplendent in a grey silk ballgown, dramatically finished over-sized bow were in attendance, alongside co-stars from The Man I Love, Luther Ford and Tom Stoddard. This left event photographers reaching. As the celebrity attendees dwindled, my new Saint Laurent sunglasses were seemingly one of the last things left to pap.
The overall impression was lackluster though: plastic tumblers moulded to look like cut crystal; finger pizzas and mini-burgers; a French bar mitzvah DJ. The Riviera's ubiquitous yachts looming offshore under a Cheshire-Cat-smile moon. As we're leaving someone comments, "This place is so empty. It really feels like the end of the world."
But then again, maybe we just got there too late.
The next day, I set about dealing with my suitcase. British Airways was blasé about the whole thing.
"It happens all the time at Heathrow."
"But I didn’t fly from Heathrow. I flew from London City Airport."
"All London airports."
They didn't have a record of the bag. Then they did have a record of the bag. They needed information added online, but their webpage didn’t work. When I got disconnected from a live agent, their AI chatbot system flagged my call and stopped allowing me to speak to a human customer service representative.
The future is a chipper chatbot hanging up on you over and over again.
Luckily, the bag was at the terminal all along. The airport and airline were just too incompetent to know it. My wardrobe of Uniqlo slacks and Oxford shirts would die another day, and I would have a bow tie and appropriate shoes for the premier later that evening.
I've gone to the Venice Biennale, Paris Fashion Week, and watched Hollywood's awards season wash over Los Angeles year after year. Cannes is a different animal. And by far the chicest of the lot. The sunny Mediterranean has a glamour all its own and the addition of celebrity supercharges it. But it's really the enforcement of French etiquette that transforms the event. Black tie is mandatory. You don't argue with the ushers. And you are expected to attend the screenings you have tickets for, otherwise you will be punished.
Dress to be the person you want to be, they say. A dress code can have that same transformative effect on others.
At Cannes, you are expected to respect cinema. And so people do. For nearly two weeks every year, the artistic and aesthetic concerns of filmmakers and discerning audiences are elevated over the commercial constraints that dominate conversations around moviemaking.
That's not to say business isn't being done, as well. Producers are selling films. La Croisette, the palm-lined promenade along Cannes' waterfront, fills with prostitutes and pushy executive producers. Late night, Mike White's hit HBO show, White Lotus can be spotted filming their fourth season. Karens come to Cannes, too.
A friend with a nascent AI production company is there, too. We spend the last day staked out the scene-y café La Californie. I wave hello to people whose names I don't remember from the party the night before. We order too much champagne on someone's company card and discuss this year's excellent merch: a corduroy cap embossed with the festival's famous palm frond logo.
Like Soderbergh and Moore, I'm not a doomer about AI and creativity. It will be a great tool, but I doubt it will replace cinema entirely. And the degree to which it does intrude will inevitably be seen as somewhat low status, especially if the incentives for adoption are purely financial—like the blue-tinged and overly cool color grading that has now become synonymous with Netflix's in-house productions.
I think of it contrast to The Man I Love. Stilted AI characters will not be able to replicate the performances. The beautiful cinematography and carefully crafted mise-en-scène (trademark Ira Sachs) can't even be achieved shooting on digital. The Kodak's iconic golden logo appears at the end of the credits and reminds us the best movies are still shot on film.
But most important of all, after spending two days with the team that produced the film, who generously invited me along, and witnessing the camaraderie produced by working together on multi-year creative projects, I wonder if that is the real thing AI cannot reproduce.
After a long standing ovation, director Ira Sachs asked everyone involved if they would raise their hands and across the crowded theatre arms flew up. Films are made together and watched together. That's of course what's most special about Cannes.
