What’s the opposite of Absolute Cinema? According to the New York Times, Martin Scorsese has accepted a role as an advisor for a generative AI firm and, even more devastatingly, has apparently started to use the technology during the storyboarding process for his next film.
The company in question is Black Forest Labs, the maker of text-to-image and video models, including Flux, which has been used for image and video generation by companies including Adobe, VSCO, and xAI. And if you’re wondering how Marty ended up involved with them, well, you can probably blame his agents—though you don’t have to give the director a total pardon.
Per the Times, Scorsese’s talent manager, Rick Yorn, is the co-founder of BroadLight Capital, one of the firms that has invested in Black Forest Films. Michael Ovitz, the founder of Creative Artists Agency and a former neighbor of Scorsese, is also an investor and probably had Marty’s ear on the whole project. Notably, Scorsese didn’t speak directly with the Times about his adviser role.
But if you’ve been listening to Marty over the last few years, it’s clear he’s not as averse to AI as some other creatives.
In 2023, as AI was becoming more commercially available, Scorsese said that he hoped it would have a positive impact on the art form. “My hopes are such that with the new technology and the new generations and younger people seeing the world in a different way, that cinema will evolve itself into a new form,” he said during an appearance on Sky News’ Backstage podcast.
In 2024, while speaking at the Berlin Film Festival, the director said filmmakers shouldn’t “let the technology scare us,” and advised, “Don’t become a slave to the technology; let us control the technology and put it in the right direction.” During an interview at the Taormina Film Festival in 2025, he told the audience, “Whatever new tool comes along, learn to use it,” while warning, “The thing is that it’s gotta be human, the heart’s gotta be there.”
All that said, Scorsese’s use of the technology itself is limited. In a statement to the Times (that, let’s be real, probably did not come from him directly), he said that he’s been using it for storyboarding—something that he has famously done by hand since he was a kid. “There’s always been this problem of how do you communicate what you see in your head to your cast and crew,” he said. “Now with this tool I can share what I’m visualizing more clearly and efficiently to my creative team — the production designer, art designer and cinematographer.”
Scorsese isn’t advocating for AI to replace the human element in the final product (importantly, he’s repeatedly argued for the importance of preserving that), but it inevitably will. Storyboarding is a job. Scorsese might do it himself, but not every director does, and some of those directors are going to embrace this technology in favor of a more collaborative and human creative process. And films will be worse off for it.
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