Paul Schrader has expressed support for using ChatGPT to come up with movie ideas. In a recent Facebook post, the “Taxi Driver” writer and “First Reformed” director said he asked the AI platform to create plots for films by famous directors, including himself, and was impressed with the results.
“I am stunned,” Schrader wrote. “I just asked chatgpt for ‘Paul Schrader movie idea’. Then Paul Thomas Anderson. Then Quentin Tarantino. Then Harmony Korine. Then Ingmar Bergman. Then Rossellini. Lang. Scorsese. Murnau. Capra. Ford. Spielberg (sic). Lynch.” Every idea that chatgpt came up with (in a few seconds) was good, original and fleshed out. Why should writers sit for months searching for a good idea when AI can provide it in seconds?
The post sparked a lot of backlash from Schrader’s followers, with responses including: “Paul is everything okay?”, “I think Paul has been hacked” and “Jesus Paul… stop promoting this nonsense, from… “Please.”
AI has been a recurring topic on Schrader’s Facebook page lately, with the 78-year-old director posting the day before that he had sent ChatGPT a script he wrote “several years ago and requested improvements.” He then said that “in five seconds I responded with feedback as good or better than I’ve ever received” from a “film executive.” In a previous post, he also noted that he “realized that AI is smarter than me.”
“He has better ideas, and he has more efficient ways of executing them,” he wrote. “It’s an existential moment, similar to what Kasparov felt in 1997 when he realized that Deep Blue was going to beat him at chess.”
Schrader’s latest film Oh, Canada, starring Richard Gere and Jacob Elordi, follows a dying director as he sits down for a final interview and reflects on his life and career. At the Cannes Film Festival, where “Oh, Canada” premiered, Schrader said his next film would be a noir about “sexual obsession” called “Non Compos Mentis.”
“It’s about the stupid things men do for love,” he said.