Ben Affleck on AI and Hollywood Economics

You were identified as the CEO of Artist Equity. You have a movie coming out that I want to talk about it, but I want to start with Inter positive, just because I think a lot of people were maybe not confused, but thrown when they found out that you had not only starred in a company, but that Netflix is buying it for a bunch of money. Um, it's the reaction I get. Any time I seem to do anything that's remotely resembles achievement is a vaguely baffled look. Does this guy. You've got to be kidding me, right? Um, well, you at one of the reasons among many I wanted to talk to you is because even prior to that, you had said a lot of very intelligent things about and seemed like someone who had been spending time doing the work, trying to figure it out. So when and how did you decide to start a company and what was the goal? Well, I've had a sort of interest in technology and trying to build a number of failed attempts to build companies as a sort of a tandem life going back to the early 90s, predating most of the people's Lifespan here. When I tried to build a non-linear editing company with PCs to because avatars are too expensive. That didn't work because the drives were too slow and they dropped frames. And then a few years later, as the you know. But I was always somebody who built computers and like to play with them and like to program them mostly for games and stuff like that. Um, but I was always interested in it. And then this filmmaking segue from analog to digital, and they started working with the moving image. We started to be mostly, you know, an array of numbers called the tensor. Um, that became part of the visual effects workflow. Machine language was part of that, like I learned Python. And so I have had an ongoing relationship with that technology. I started a company called Life Planet with John Bailey and Matt Damon in 2000, uh, where we did Project Greenlight and we did a bunch of shows that were new media and old media, and the whole thing was like, how can you make money advertising online? There's not enough people, you know? Um, And we were very proud of as. You know, we have 40 million people watching a television show. You shouldn't be. But the truth was, it was an interesting idea. And, um, we did some interesting stuff, and I got some exposure to what it meant to raise money and start a business. And so when I was, I started a small visual effects company, and some of the people that I was working with there said, you should see what Google's doing with transformer. And there's this. Then there's this company, OpenAI, and they have this text image thing. And as I was telling you before, my life has I've learned to take advantage of the opportunities in my life as afforded, which is essentially probably inappropriately. I find often I'm able to just pick up the phone and say, hi, I'm Ben Affleck. Can I just come in and see what you're doing? People were like, sure. Um, still baffles me, but nonetheless went in, looked at what they were doing at first, kind of had a heart attack because I was like, holy. I called my name and I was like, dude, we have to do like as many movies in the next few years. And his were finished. Went back, looked at and then started saying, well. Hold on a second. Like, why isn't this working in the way that I think it should work? And it was a very strange thing to realize that I was dealing with researchers and scientists who were so incredibly smart in this one way. I had so little information about video and how it's created, or how it's defined and how it's captured and how it needs to be organized. And so, having learned the lessons of the previous failed entrepreneurship and having raised money for our singularity, I gambled on this notion that, um, you know, in order to do this in an ethical way and in a way that could take this technology and actually make it work hand in glove with artists in this community, that where there are very fixed, longstanding relationships or around likeness and so forth. Um, we had to create our own data set. So I raised the money. I shot for about eight months with a lot of cameras and a lot of equipment and created a data set that would serve as late stage training for open models to do discrete tasks, sort of where the training code and the inference code were related to one another and geared toward actual specific tasks that would generate value, as opposed to like, oh, this is novel. That's kind of cool. Look what it can do. But to sort of say it needs to hit these criteria. Um, and I didn't tell anybody about it like that. And when sorry, when you were talking about because you were using, I think, some language that maybe not everyone in the audience is going to know. So can you dumb it down when you're talking? Because my understanding and correct me if I'm wrong is you. Have you developed tools where you shot something? You would then train the model on what you had shot, and you could then use that to manipulate or adapt things that you had already made. Right. Is that exactly? The only additional element to understand is that, like other models, uh, in order to be a video model that's successful, you just need a huge volume of video. Initially, it learns things like what is read, you know, and then it learns more and more specific information to get to the cinematic information. It's the sort of last stage in in order to obtain that information, I was concerned that most of the models being used had trained on my peers, people I knows work, and I was uncomfortable with that, and I thought, that's not really a viable business. So I sort of created that last layer, which was an understanding of cinema and cinematic components that did not need to be. And so how did you create the last layer without doing all of the, you know, the copying of what came before it? Because open models, uh, just like open, uh, language models, open video models are, um, available to be trained on. And so you just unfreeze the weights and you say, okay, this stopped that step 8631. Now here's step 8632. So you could take existing open models that didn't work very well and that weren't cinematic, but that had just aggregated in a bunch of social media footage or random video online and teach them to meet cinematic standards in very specific ways. Then, as you pointed out, we built the workflow, which is to say this is designed to train from a filmmaker while they're making their movie. So rather than, you know, you have to expose what you're doing to everybody to learn from, they retain the proprietary nature. In other words, they benefit from the learning that they're creating. They train their own discrete model using the same technique we did. Just on top of that additional layer we had created. And it works quite well for the discrete movie that you're doing. Um, and so it's meant to be not replace people, not eliminate there's I don't believe that there will ever be just sort of type it in and make a movie that people want to see. But the whole effort behind it was to do something ethical, to do something that did not displace people, but that allowed people in this economy and this world to benefit from this technology, as opposed to sort of obscuring it. And then watching, you know, it sort of come over the gates. And eventually they're sophomores at Stanford making 12 minute movies that run on YouTube, and that's eat into our business. Um, did you use it on your on your new movie, which is out in a couple of weeks? I did, um, I used it for lots of things in that movie. Um, I'm a little bit hesitant to point out what they are or even talk about it because, like, in my business, um, we're trying to foster the illusion of reality, right? It's sort of like if you went to a magic show and the magician walked out and said, just before I start, I want you to know there's another bunny under here. This guy's a plant. You know, it's sort of ruins, right? So, uh, but yes, we did use it. And in fact, I thought it was a good example because it's a very human movie. Uh, there's it's not, you know, in space or it doesn't have visual effects, but it allowed us to move in some cases more quickly or without us, really mostly in post-production, to do things that would have otherwise. Not, we wouldn't have been able to do. There was, uh, kind of a cynical take on Netflix buying your company. You're kidding me, which is online. And people were cynical. They were, um, that they bought it to basically provide cover for all the despicable things that they were going to do with AI, because if they're aligned with a reputable filmmaker, then nobody's going to question anything. Well, that's a very cynical view indeed. Um, what I can tell you is that in my experience, in my ongoing capacity, you know, one of the things about a company like Netflix is that they're not really in a position to, um, just sort of go ahead and do despicable things and alienate, you know, artists because they understand that they need to be in business with people. Um, and so actually, I feel that they've even been as I've been part of all these conversations, like super judicious about, like, whatever you want to do, it's it's totally up to, you know, and I'm sitting down with directors going to look, man, you can just you can change the background here. You can do this, you can do that. And what I find is that filmmakers and people, once they sit with it and have a sense of control and a sense of understanding what's happening, and it moves from this nebulous, abstract, terrifying alien, you know, it's going to kill us all like we're paperclips, and it's going to wipe out half of what, college, all this propaganda. And they actually see what it is. It's like another form of computing that does tools and is a technological advancement. That's really in keeping with the long standing series of technological improvements we've made in the film and television business. It's like a switch. They go, oh, great, wonderful. And it's being used on films now where they've the same number of people. In fact, more people technically are being employed. And I think it's they are they have been absolutely, in my view, true to their word, if we want to make what we're doing better, we're not trying to, you know, just smash costs or do heinous things. What? Um, if you are not as concerned about the impact of the technology as you were when you first started seeing things? What parts of the industry do you think will be most impacted, whether positively or negatively? Mhm. From I am, yes. And I think that what that the it's complicated and expensive and difficult to for generative eye to do this beginning to end actual filmmaking that we do to the extent that I think actually it may end up being bounded by the constraints of physics and energy, uh, before you reach a place where it could actually do that. Um, I feel this is one of the least likely domains to be the sensor mediated by I. When I worry about, I, I worry about like my kids in school, I worry about 30% rise in, uh, you know, the number of a is given out at colleges of the last three years. I worry about learned helplessness. I worry about responsible use. Um, I don't worry about Skynet. And I don't think that it's going to take over this business in any, any meaningful way. I think it's going to be additive, but I think someone has to actually step in and do it in a way where it is that you can't just bury your head in the sand and, you know, you, you know, it needs to be incorporated. And it's like a lot of technologies that require sort of getting comfortable and getting familiar with. And then immediately it's knowable. You see all the ways in which it doesn't work, all the failures, um, the sort of dumb nature of it in a lot of ways. And, and it becomes a knowable thing. Um, so your new movie is animals. Um, it's a lot of fun. Thank you. Um, it's a kidnapping movie. Uh, I'm a thriller, but it it's not fun. Um, you, uh, you seem to be fairly selective about what you direct. If you're not one of the directors making something new every year. So why did you pick the two? Make this one as your next movie? Um, I am, and that really has to do with the fact that when you act in a movie, it might be four weeks, six weeks, ten weeks, something like that, directing movies a year and a half of your life. And also you have to be the most interested, the most involved and the most passionate. If you're not, it's really doomed. And so I kind of have to choose things that I think are going to sustain my interest in this case was really I was passionate about that interesting story. I wanted to tell a story that, yes, it uses the sort of plot mechanism of what happens when something in your life that you care about so much is threatened. Um, but what I was interested in is sort of the nature of morality as becoming increasingly performative, you know, whether it be on social media or in pop politics. The most obvious example of that, um, and the ways in which that performative morality sometimes doesn't comport with the way you see people actually behave. And more interestingly, what happens when that professor morality collides with something that you need urgently, and the way in which moral compromise, um, is sort of accomplished most effectively when it's personal and about having something to lose. Um, so it's it is a sort of morality tale, but really at the heart of it, honestly, it's about marriage. It's about a couple that's married. It's about what does it mean to have a real marriage? How intimate you have to be. How vulnerable do you have to be? You know, their child is kidnapped and the person comes in and the first thing she says is, okay, you too, husband and wife need to tell each other all the secrets that you've ever kept from each other. And spoiler one half does not tell all the secrets. Yes. So shockingly, some people aren't always totally forthcoming. Yeah, and really, I mean, to give a little bit away what I thought was a really interesting proposition was to take it to the place of the couple who isn't really able to be completely, nakedly honest with one another until they kind of have nothing to lose. They almost like the marriage is over. And at that point, you know, they actually can say because because we're tuned to not we don't want to tell somebody that we want to love us. The things about us that we think are unattractive or that they might find that attractive. Um, and so there's this sort of tension of, again, with the advertised self versus the real self. And that those themes I found really, really compelling. And I thought they make a good opportunity for an ensemble. Uh, and I had great partners in, you know, Kerry Washington Stephen Engle the instance amazing in the movie. Um, it was uh, it's I'm really proud of the movie. And it comes out December 9th on Netflix. And if everyone in here watching, if that's what it would be, .00 1% of subscribers, but still, um, the kidnapping part of the movie reminded me a lot of Curtis. I was high and low. Was that I assume you were aware of that or it was. Well, I became aware of that. I will confess that I had not seen, even though I seen three or so movies, but not that one. What actually concerned me was that like, um, when we were about to make it two weeks from making it and, and I heard, you know, Spike's doing a kidnapping movie. Yeah. And it was like Spike Lee's own money. Yeah. For Apple. And out of the 10,000 with Denzel Washington. These are guys who I look up to and I thought, like, oh, I like how similar. And they said, well, and it's I don't want to read it, I don't. And they told me the plot sort of. And I was immediately like called Matt, who was going to be an issue. And I was like, dude, I don't think we can have a movie. I mean, I I've been in the like, I was in the one of two asteroid movies. One is an end. Well, for the other asteroid movie, and we might be the other asteroid movie here, and, um, so. And I didn't even want the appearance of like, well, hold on, is this have some relationship with that. So we called it off promptly. Um, and what happened was that it's sort of, uh, the stuff that I was interested in, the stuff that I sort of just talked about thematically is really wholly unrelated to that movie. And I got more. And so I rewrote it to go all the way down that direction, including sort of serendipitously, a storyline about, uh, as part about like, again, that the advertised truth versus the real truth, like, this is sort of West L.A. family that's got this housekeeper and she's like a family, and it's this all this sort of shared collective ly kind of. And and then she wants her boyfriend, who's undocumented, that she wants them to hire him anyway. This then creates a plot twist that involves an undocumented immigrant in L.A. I had written this before the election, and it was the scenes where we were shooting, and I was like, okay, we're going to shoot this Home Depot tomorrow. And we go down there and they I would say, you have to leave. We just did a raid here like three times. We got moved. So it was one of these things where it was kind of like the movie was parallel. And then there was the rather unusual mayoral primary here in Los Angeles, and I started feeling like either this is terrible for us or it all as well, but, um, yeah, we ended up mark Kimball was the Spencer Pratt of. I don't know quite enough about Spencer Pratt's campaign, but, uh, I'll tell you one thing. I went and shot. I felt like we need to do campaign footage, and we were going to take the whole crew into the whole thing, and I was like, this is crazy. Let me just go to the grove and take some hats and merch and go. Stephen playing my campaign manager with some cameras. And let's just tell people I'm running for mayor. Let's see what they do. And I swear to God, not one person didn't. But they were like, great. Yeah, sure. What do you care about it? Like, well, I'll tell you what. And they launch into their speech and they, you know, and it was as if, of course, you're running for mayor. And I was like, the world is being crazy. Um, I'm I want to ask. There's a lot of attention. When you and Matt went on Joe Rogan's podcast earlier this year, and Matt made those comments about sort of the Netflix movie, they want you to regurgitate the plot three times and isn't this horrible and blah blah, blah, blah. I'm just curious, has Netflix asked you to do that? Like, what is the reality of. This is a very interesting, um, case study and a phenomenon that I've found recurrent in my life. And it sort of relates to the truth in the story. Matt Damon and I went on Joe Rogan to promote our Netflix movie. In the context of having that discussion with Joe Rogan, what we were saying was, there's this perception, right? Like, this is how this will be, and it's great. This is perception that like people in their living room and you have to do this and they tell you that you have to do, you know, tell the audience the plot. And I said, right. But even if you look at baby reindeer or adolescents where they have these long shots falling down, that's clearly not true. We went on there to debunk this notion and explain to people why, in fact, our experience was utterly contrary to that. And yet somebody went ahead and did a pull quote, and it got picked up once and it was Matt Damon says Netflix, you know, makes you tell the plot in the first five minutes. If you just stop and think about it. I think in this movie I'm directing. Even if that were true, do you think I would go on Joe Rogan and be like, they made me put all this obvious? Like, it doesn't even make sense. Never mind the fact that if you look back on it. In fact, then we called a journalist and said, hey, would you mind running a story saying that was not our intention? I talked to a man I talked to whom he thought they were going to run it. I said, what happened? That story there was, oh, he didn't really feel like there was a story there. I was like, okay. And then it keeps on coming up. This is how things get. And so here you are, an ethical, established person in this field and you have no way of describing names. Well, in fairness, I actually listened to the podcast episode because I did not want to rely on just two clips that before this I did listen to the first. You must have had some suspicion that this was the case. I struggled to see how. Well, one, I don't think that Netflix is telling a director of your stature this is how you should make your movie. That is sort of that is absolutely true. They would never do that. I don't know that I've never met anyone who's had a note that idiotic and brazen it. I've heard of a lot of idiotic studio notes. Idiotic studio notes. Long predate Netflix. This is a business with a long history of executives telling you to do the exact wrong thing. That's going to ruin your movie. And later, standing there, shaking your hand at the premiere when it's ahead and you did exactly what they wanted you not to do. So we have this I mean, there's a great story about Steven Spielberg on a movie. I can't remember what it was. He was producing it, and they got these notes from the studio, and the note was something that was so outrageously bad. And Steven said, like, I'll handle this. And, uh, he he wrote back to the guy, like, that was a great one. You had us all breaking up. Keep him coming. We thought like. But but that being said, there's absolutely no truth to that. And of course, like, I wouldn't do it. And in fact, they didn't give me any notes. So much so that I they were like, listen, we bet on you. We believe in you. You want to make this movie? Go ahead. It's like I almost want a little more buy in. I'm like, but if it doesn't work, we're in this together, right? So now it's going to be your fault. Um, but. Okay. Like, I can take that. And the absolute honest truth is, like, that has been the best and most amazing part as well. Like we believe in you. Go do your thing. You know, nobody I can promise you till David Fincher is like this movie that's coming out today. You know, so it doesn't really bear scrutiny. It's not really true. It got picked up. I have corrected it a number of times, but it's sort of like the planes that land that somehow the press doesn't have quite the same voracious interest in stories that are like, hey, that other story is not exactly true as they do in like, you know, the plane crashing or whatever. Um, with Artists Equity, I am I'm curious because you've made Up and of a point of pushing for residuals. And it's part of, I'd say, a broader sense in Hollywood that there would like to be a return to some kind of performance based compensation, that streaming war this a little bit, and it just became we are paid like everything is a modest success. So in your kind of ideal version, let's say artists equity is really successful. Other companies pay well and actually like what? How does the industry change? What does it look like that's different? Well, I can tell you because like we we were able to implement that model on the report. The reason why it's not actually wasn't used on this movie is because a story I told you before, this movie was actually set up prior to the rip, before I was able to, um, you know, get this accomplished. And where it came from was my frustration in participating unofficially and the discussions around the work stoppage and finding there was a lot of willingness, and particularly on the part of Netflix around transparency, around performance based incentives And the not. And it was frustrating, uh, because that was a hard thing to resolve. But I thought, okay, this appetite is still there. We have this project. And what I'd like to do is essentially say to make it a little bit more affordable to make movies, but it does need to be we have a sort of vestigial structure that we've inherited from the 30s and 40s. That sort of assumes a lot of the same constructs that don't even really exist now. But I want people to be able to make a living. In fact, I'd like them to be able to be aligned. I would like the shareholders for a company and the actors and the director and everyone on the crew to have exactly the same goals, because I think that's the optimal approach. However, as it works now, that's not really the case. We have very different goals. So these guys want to go to lunch because they don't, you know, they're where they want their overtime. So they may be taking a little bit longer. They don't care about the value of making this close up work really well. The director sometimes cares about the you know, how big this trailer is or how be an explosion. It is because they have their own ego and they're not. They've already been paid. They're not connected in any meaningful way to the shareholders who invested hundreds of million dollars in their movie. My idea is let's put us all on the same page, which is to make a great movie. And if the movie is great, let's believe it. That will be successful. And let's believe that if history and it's successful, then we'll all get paid, because we also have a history of sort of. There's an old joke in Hollywood about what did the producer say to his kid on Christmas morning? We'll get you on the next one. It's like, you know, that that history has taught people to not believe that and take the cash up front, which is why you have very different way of building business in Silicon Valley than you do here. So what we instituted, instituted was a model that said, we'll take a little bit less, but at the point where you sort of break even what you're underwriting to in terms of viewers, we'll recoup. And in the event that there is success beyond that, uh, there should be additional compensation. And it's a model that I think if it were implemented across all of streaming, they probably save 30% on their content spend, which that's $2.4 billion, I think of $1 million. Right. That's, uh, I think. Right. Anyways, um, a who's who's content spend. We know that Netflix or Netflix is in here. No no no they're like 2021. But that mean that's not movies right. Oh no. Yeah. Sorry. Yes. That's just total right. So I'm just thinking small, you know, and um, and so if you were to uh, and so my hope is not only to establish this model and it was successful so that we were able to actually have people get paid, which is important to actually, you know, find out that's real and it's not, you know, we'll get you next year. The hope now be and this is what I'm in the process of trying to do is institute this as on an ongoing basis so that people are both united. We all get that we can do something really good. We're going to pitch in a little bit together, and we care about this shared vision and in success It's going to rain money on everyone's head. And if it doesn't, it's not because I did this movie and they paid me $12 million, right? I didn't give it back. You know what I mean? But it didn't really seem fair to me at that time since they got wiped out. You know, it doesn't that that's just a misalignment that like to me is not particularly wise or sustainable, particularly when it's harder to make theatrical movies is more of a risk, and you can take a more of a risk if you manage downward the capital that's at risk. And so the other model that we're doing, because we're announcing this, our equity independent, um, film fund for theatrical is we treat the actors and directors what they call above the line, uh, and the and the writers and the producers as pure investors. Right. You are. And not with arcane. Take nothing upfront. You you take nothing upfront. But whatever the scale yield, you know, you know, mandatory minimums are but you are actually treated and paid, you know, dollar for dollar. Right next to the financiers and the investors. And by the way, it was not that difficult to raise a fund on that was rooted in those principles, because people really understand that it seems fair. It also means that your talent, who you count on for a lot of earned media when you want to promote your movie, at the time when the revenue was actually going to come in, was in the box office, and then obviously subsequent, you know, pivot as VOD and hotel event like most of the time, we've already been paid as soon as the movie wraps. So if you don't like the movie or you don't really want to show up, it's like, I'm not available. I'm doing another movie. I can't tell you the number of times I've gone through this is a very highly paid people. But if the best predictor of somebody's behavior is probably their incentive, and when it's your money alongside with somebody else's, you're, I believe we should be fair and you should be entitled to it, and you should get very rich in upside and success, but people should be aligned. And that way, I think your talent promotes your movie. Maybe they go the extra mile, maybe they're posting it on all their social channels or doing extra shows. Um, so by instituting some of these changes. Look, I'm not going to change the whole world, but I would like to say, look, you can establish this model. It can be done a different way, in the same way than are positive is to say, look, you can integrate I into a workflow with human beings and human artists doing exactly what you've done and do it more efficiently and do it better. Right. That there is that model. It doesn't have to be this binary, you know, zero out the human beings you know or not model, which just seems to me to be a crazy thing to go around and pitch people because like how how many products do you want to use where the pitches. We're going to annihilate you by this really stir enthusiasm. Um. The Red Sox lost. So it killed my final question for you. So I'll ask. Thanks. Um, who is one actor you most want to direct and one director for whom you most want to act? Oh boy. There are so many directors that I really admire and love to work for Cuaron and me and Yari to, um, you know, Scorsese, uh, Chris Nolan. Um, that list is actually embarrassingly long because it just reveals how many of them haven't hired me so far. Um, and actors that I want to direct. I mean, again, that list again. But, I mean, there's there's a Washington, for example, maybe in a, not in a kidnapping movie, but, uh, you know, the Meryl Streep, uh, I mean, the great joy. We were talking a little bit before of my life, and the real fortune is I've. I had the opportunity to meet and be around and be exposed to interesting, incredible people who've made me better and smarter and who it's just sort of a privilege to spend time with. And, uh, there's no shortage of that, folks. You know, in my business or in here or, you know, it's not just limited to this business, but, um, yeah, there's there's a long list.