In January, Matt Damon caused a stir when he appeared with Ben Affleck on Joe Rogan’s podcast and said Netflix urged the duo to restate the plot of the film “three or four times” and for the sake of distracted audience.
The comment struck a chord because viewers have long suspected such a directive (just watch the final season of “Stranger Things), but Affleck, appearing at the Bloomberg Screentime conference on Wednesday night, set the record straight.
“I’ve never met anybody who’s had a note that idiotic and brazen,” Affleck said, arguing that he and Damon had tried to debunk that rumor on the podcast, only to have their words misconstrued as evidence of the practice. “There’s absolutely no truth to that.”
Netflix in March denied such a practice existed. “There’s no such principle,” Netflix film chairman Dan Lin said during a Netflix slate presentation to reporters. “If you watch our movies or TV shows, we don’t repeat our plot. So I don’t know where that comment came from … We actually all laughed when we watched that bit at the Oscars.”
Affleck noted that for his upcoming Netflix film “Animals,” which comes out Oct. 9, executives from the streamer service didn’t offer him any notes. But even had a request like that had been made, Affleck said he wouldn’t make the change.
Embracing AI
One thing Affleck did use in the making of “Animals” was AI tools — specifically ones created from his startup, InterPositive, which Netflix acquired for nearly $600 million. While at Bloomberg Screentime, Affleck broke down the process of building his own model specifically designed to help with cinematic shots, taking an open-source model and training it with thousands of hours of footage.
Affleck declined to specify which scenes utilized AI, saying he wanted to “foster the illusion of reality,” and providing glimpses into where the technology was employed was akin to a magician revealing his tricks before the performance. But he said “Animals” was a good example of the universal application of those AI tools because this was a more human-driven film with few splashy effects.
Affleck dismissed a conspiracy theory that Netflix bought InterPositive as a public relations shield protecting it from scrutiny over its broader use of AI. The thinking is that by allying with a respected filmmaker like Affleck and championing the use of ethical AI, it would distract Hollywood from its more aggressive use of the technology.
“What I can tell you is that in my experience, like in my ongoing capacity, one of the things about a company like Netflix is that they’re not really in a position to just sort of go ahead and do despicable things and alienate artists because they understand that they need to be in business with people, and so actually I feel that they’ve even been as I’ve been part of all these conversations like super judicious — whatever you want to do it’s totally up to you,” he said.
Affleck also cast doubt that someone will make a fully AI-generated film, citing the complexity and expense of the effort.
“I think actually it may end up being bounded by the constraints of physics and energy before you reach a place where it could actually do that,” Affleck said. “I feel this is one of the least likely domains to be disintermediated by AI.”
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