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Shakun Batra Interview: 'Artificial Intelligence Doesn't Have Childhood Trauma'
Shakun Batra predicts a feature-length, drama-fronted Hindi film created entirely in AI—one worthy of theatrical exhibition—to be just around the corner, but also admits that ChatGPT is a lousy writer
In January this year, filmmaker Shakun Batra was shooting a commercial under his production company, Jouska Films. Founded in 2018, Jouska has created popular, well-received ad campaigns for brands like Google, Oppo, Spotify, UberEats and others. For this particular assignment, Batra had set up a big, flashy shot on a real set—“with chroma, lighting, everything.” Then an idea struck him. Returning to his computer, he built the same shot in AI, as brick for brick as possible. When he presented it to the client… you can guess what happened. “They actually picked the AI shot," Batra enthuses. "It got me thinking, wow, these tools are really catching up."
Like many filmmakers and visual artists around the world, Batra had, by then, toyed around with tools like Midjourney, which generates images and artworks from textual prompts. But he wasn’t fully convinced. Generative AI, about a year ago, was fluent in image, not motion. But the ground was shifting rapidly. Applications like Sora and Runway had rolled out commercially, offering high-fidelity video generation models. Batra was particularly taken with the work of LA-based filmmaker and innovator Paul Trillo, as well as Davide Bianca’s ‘Holidays Are Coming’ Coca-Cola commercial, which recreated an older 1994 ad, replacing human actors and brightly-lit trucks with AI-generated ones.
“Even then I didn't think it would get so far ahead. Dialogue and lip sync was still not viable. But once Google released Veo 3, that really pushed the needle.”
Veo 3 is the latest iteration of Google's proprietary video generation model, capable of creating eight-second clips with synchronised audio and special effects. Stitch them together and you have, notionally, a film. To demonstrate its capabilities, Batra has recently collaborated with Google India for a five-part video series, short cinematic vignettes ranging from action to comedy to sci-fi, all created within AI. The first video in the series, titled The Getaway Car, is a Hollywood-style chase sequence. It’s a fun, spiffy, professional piece of work, something between a tech demo and a big-budget micro-short. Except there was no budget—just a freed-up Batra running wild with his prompts.
“I started with a chimp in a car, then added an actor,” he says. “I kept going back, editing, regenerating. I slammed the car into a truck once, I took it to a vegetable market and trashed it. It was like rage, but rage through AI.” He set the film in Montreal, Canada. Why not Mumbai? His answer touches a raw nerve in the global AI debate—that of cultural homogenisation and Western bias.
“I can shoot this car chase in Colaba, but my side theory is that a lot of the data sets that these things are trained on is Western data. And they sometimes don't do justice to Indian imagery. So I was like, you know what, let's just go to what it's trained for.” This imbalance—evident in online videos of yellowed-out, flat-skinned Indian cities—may fizzle out as data sets diversify, he wagers.
”After North America, China and India are the two other places where viewership is at the scale that we have. So it's a matter of time before companies train their models more and more on specific local contexts.” He points to advances in AI voice training as a reference point. “If you prompted a line of dialogue in Hindi in January, and if you prompt it today, you would already see a huge, huge jump in fidelity and authenticity. So it's moving at a much faster pace than you and I can imagine.”
Batra, at first glance, is an unlikely candidate for AI advocacy out of India. His three feature films—Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu, Kapoor & Sons and Gehraiyaan—are intimate, emotionally tangled dramas, albeit featuring mainstream stars and staging. Emotional resonance is his calling card, not technical wizardry. So what storytelling frontiers does AI filmmaking open up for a guy like him?
“I grew up on movies like Ajooba, Haatim Tai, Mr. India. They blew my mind because they did something with technology that made me feel more. They give me this childlike sense of wonder.” AI videos, much like the earliest batch of silent films, currently ride on spectacle and shock value—“a lion sitting next to you, kissing you, that sort of stuff”. As with any new tech, this novelty will soon be rendered generic, Batra feels, clearing the way for more personal, idiosyncratic expression.
"We made a fun announcement video with a chimpanzee, a gorilla and an orangutan singing a Ghazal. But that is not something we envision long-term. Eventually, we want to come back to our roots." He predicts a feature-length, drama-fronted Hindi film created entirely in AI—one worthy of theatrical exhibition—is just around the corner. "I think it's less than two years away. A couple of people are already attempting it."
This is a tricky terrain, though. It's one thing to put an AI actor inside a high-speed vehicle, quite another to tease out a realistic, moving performance from a heap of code. The animation and gaming industries have been privy to this pitfall, using motion-capture technology to record real performances and feed them onto digital characters. AI tools like DeepMotion are wading in the same stream, using 2D videos to pull human movements and expressions, bypassing the fancy gear and markers used in traditional mo-cap.
"I'm rooted in working with real actors and that always stays," says Batra, who's directed everyone from Deepika Padukone to Rishi Kapoor via Imran Khan. He also can't get behind writing with AI—one of the flashpoints of the Writers Guild of America (WGA) strikes in Hollywood in 2023.
"Like I say, AI doesn't have childhood trauma. If you ask ChatGPT to write a scene, it will write a scene, but it won't be great unless you put your own personality into it. Writing, for me, has always been a way of discovering myself. If I lose that, I lose myself."
Back in July, filmmaker Aanand L Rai publicly decried an AI-altered climax of his 2013 film Raanjhanaa, flipping its tragic ending into a happy one for a Tamil re-release. To the AI cynic, it portends all kinds of fearful scenarios: what if there is a regime—let’s say in the distant future—that wants to alter contrarian and controversial scenes from past movies?
"Yeah, the regime in the future is an important question," Batra smirks. He can envision a world where applications like Showrunner become commonplace, allowing the general public to make their own films, “change scenes and endings that they don’t like.”
“What happened with Raanjhanaa is not a problem of AI as a tool but of consent,” the filmmaker says. In an earlier interview with The Hollywood Reporter India, Rai called for a clause in film contracts mandating the consent of writers and filmmakers in AI chicanery. This came on the heels of the Union Government setting up a panel to review policy issues on AI and copyright.
“Ethical guardrails in contracts are going to get important,” Batra concurs. “We need frameworks for what you can or cannot do with someone's creation. It’s a conversation we all need to collectively have.”