Guillermo del Toro has issued a stark warning about the future of cinema, describing artificial intelligence as a form of “natural stupidity” and warning that the film industry is approaching a crisis point.
The Oscar-winning director made the remarks on Monday night while receiving the BFI Fellowship, the British Film Institute’s highest honour, at a dinner event in Hollywood.
Addressing a room full of industry figures including Leonardo DiCaprio, Jon Favreau, Michael Mann and Netflix executives, Del Toro delivered an impassioned defense of film as a fundamentally human art form.
“We are on the verge of image illiteracy. We are on the verge of cinema illiteracy,” he told the audience.
The creative impulse, he argued, is as old as the pictures painted on cave walls and cannot be copied by machines.
“We are told that images can be generated by artificial means. The existence of an image is not just to be there. It is to connect us, to make us feel beauty,” he said.
“The pact between man and image is sacred.”
His connection with the BFI stretches back to his teenage years in Guadalajara, Mexico, when he would write to the organization requesting 16mm prints of films by directors such as Carol Reed to show to his cinema club.
Receiving the fellowship, he said, touched him deeply.
Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos, who introduced del Toro, recalled their first meeting when del Toro was developing an animated adaptation of Troll hunters to the platform.
“I walked into the meeting thinking, ‘Why is this master filmmaker directing what I thought was a cartoon for us?'” Sarandos said.
“And then I saw Guillermo create a universe before my eyes.”
Del Toro framed his current chapter as one of giving back, teaching, advocating and preserving. “We’re not gatekeepers. We’re gatekeepers so more people can come in and out of the cinema church,” he said.
“I have been saved by pictures so many times in my life.” Regarding the duration of great films, he was equally expressive: “These films are never from the past. When someone sees them for the first time, they are present.”
