Stranger than Fiction
What is the future of storytelling in a post-truth world?
I travelled to Melbourne for a documentary film conference to understand the future of filmmaking and my place within it. Before I get to that, I really want to unpick the threads of a couple of films I watched while I was there; because I’m pretty sure they can show us more about the future of filmmaking than any essay can tell us.
While I watch a lot of movies, I don’t often go to the cinema these days. I live in rural Tasmania and have a dog with serious FOMO — he’s never happy when I leave him home watching Bluey while I’m out! So, on the rare opportunities I find myself in big cities while he’s on a mini-break being pampered by the dog sitter, the first thing I’ll do is see what’s on the big screen at a local indie theatre.
For a couple of weeks before the conference, I’d been soaking up all the interviews on YouTube that Matt Johnson, Jay McCarrol and Jared Raab had been doing to build the hype around Nirvana the Band the Show the Movie. Their Back to the Future time travel vibe and crazy stunts in the heart of Toronto, coupled with Johnson’s larger than life enthusiasm in both the film clips and the interviews had me hooked. I knew I had to see it, but as usual, I was thinking I’d have to wait a couple of months for it to become available to rent on YouTube.
So, I couldn’t believe my luck when I saw Madman had picked it up and was giving it a very limited release in indie cinemas here in Aus that coincided with my Melbourne trip. The conference schedule was jam packed, but I found a screening at Thornbury Picturehouse (an old favourite of mine) on the only evening I had free. I locked in my ticket a week ahead.
The other film I made sure to secure a ticket for was Deepfaking Sam Altman, directed by Adam Bhala Lough. As part of the conference, AIDC and ACMI1 screened some new documentaries, including this one. There’d not been as much hype, but the trailer was enough to peak my curiosity.
Basically, Bhala Lough sets out to interview Sam Altman but can’t get access — the notoriously private Open AI founder wouldn’t even pick up the phone. So, Bhala Lough set out to create an AI chatbot trained on what we know about Altman,2 with something akin to his likeness and voice, to interview that instead. It’s a journey that took him around the world and into a place deep inside himself he didn’t expect — or at least that’s what Bhala Lough led me to believe.
But now I’m not so sure…
And this leads me to the point of this essay…
