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The Center at West Park held its second annual Fall Benefit on Thursday, November 14 in Manhattan’s Upper West Side. The evening raises funds for the nonprofit community arts center, and Matt Damon and Mark Ruffalo were on the host committee. Guests were treated to a special performance of Kenneth Lonergan’s “Lobby Hero,” starring Casey Affleck, Jamie Hector, Aubrey Plaza, and Josh Radnor.
Blumhouse partnered with Facebook-owner Meta last month to get three filmmakers to test out the tech giant’s new AI tool Meta Movie Gen, including Casey Affleck, and IndieWire used this opportunity at CWP’s Fall Benefit to ask him about it. “I think they’re cool,” Affleck said.
“It’s an opportunity for people who wouldn’t ordinarily get their hands on the resources to do certain things that you can do with movies to create worlds that are far away or super imaginative, that would be very expensive,” he told IndieWire. “I think as soon as these tools become available to everybody, you’re going to see all these people that didn’t have access to the five studio heads and all of their big budgets, be able to make incredibly imaginative, world building movies, features, and shorts. It was a lot of fun.”
The Meta technology is meant to use simple text prompts to produce videos and sounds, edit existing video or photos, and do so at 1080p HD video and audio quality. But per a blog post, the tech won’t be integrated into public products on Facebook until next year, and they first wanted filmmakers to test it and provide feedback as part of a pilot program.
As for the future of artificial intelligence and filmmaking, Affleck is optimistic, but cautious. “I think that we just have to be really conscious of how we start to incorporate it.”
“The film business evolved over many decades and over that time, there were certain guardrails put in place, the unions, [to make] sure that the different people, different departments doing different things, were taken care of and protected and we’ll have to do the same thing here,” Affleck said. “It’s exciting to me as a tool just for an artist. It’s really exciting. Other than that, I don’t know where it’s going to take us, but I think we’re gonna figure it out and everyone’s going to discover that they can do new things with it and they’ll be less afraid of it.”
Affleck’s “Oppenheimer” director Christopher Nolan is set to go into production for his new film next year, starring Tom Holland, Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway, Zendaya, and Lupita Nyong’o. We asked Affleck if there’s any chance of a reunion with Nolan quite yet, “Don’t jinx me. [laughs] I don’t know anything about it. They keep a lid on that stuff.”
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