Martin Scorsese has become one of the most high-profile Hollywood directors to publicly embrace artificial intelligence, announcing a partnership with AI company Black Forest Labs that will see him use the technology to create storyboards.
The 82-year-old Oscar winner will serve as an advisor to the research lab and has already begun testing its FLUX imaging technology during pre-production.
In a statement released Tuesday, Scorsese framed his interest in artificial intelligence not as a departure from his values as a filmmaker, but as a continuation of his longtime engagement with new tools.
“For 70 years I’ve been doing my own storyboards. There’s always been this problem of how you communicate what you see in your head to your cast and crew,” he said.
“There are things you have to see and feel. I’m interested in the intersection of technology and storytelling and seeing how it can push the boundaries of creativity to create deeper and richer experiences for audiences. Remember, cinema is a young medium, only about 125 years old, so we have to be open to how it can evolve.”
He drew a direct line between this move and his earlier technological experiments, the use of 3D in Hugo and ablation technology in The Irishman.
For Scorsese, the appeal of AI storyboarding is fundamentally practical.
“Now, with this tool, I can share what I visualize more clearly and effectively to my creative team, the production designer, art designer and cinematographer, so they can build on to enrich cinematic intelligence,” he said.
“During the pre-production process, time costs money, and this allowed us to move faster without sacrificing quality or craftsmanship.”
He also noted what the technology means to the people around him: “If you have a tool like this, you can figure it out much, much faster, and you can save production time and also less wear and tear on the crew.”
The announcement places Scorsese alongside James Cameron, who joined the board of AI firm Stability AI last September, as one of the more prominent voices in Hollywood willing to engage with the technology rather than resist it.
