VENICE — Maggie Gyllenhaal, president of the jury at the Venice International Film Festival, said she abandoned an attempt to use artificial intelligence to transform Dakota Johnson into Marilyn Monroe for her new short film, Flesh Impact, because the technology failed to capture the humanity of a live performance.
Speaking at The Future of Creativity event on the Lido, Gyllenhaal told the audience that the people who commissioned the project had asked her to use AI. She agreed out of curiosity, she said, and the technology was trained exclusively on licensed images of Monroe — not on OpenAI, she stressed.
“The idea was that we trained it on her; we then put her face on Dakota’s face,” Gyllenhaal said. “We worked hard at it, and in the end, I threw it away because what was coming through Dakota playing Marilyn Monroe was so much more moving, human, alive.”
Flesh Impact, which will premiere at the festival, imagines a scenario in which Monroe did not die at age 36, instead living to 100. The film juxtaposes a 100-year-old Monroe with a version in her 30s, played by Johnson.
Gyllenhaal said the AI version “fundamentally did not work” and that “all the reasons we decided to make this project to begin with were killed off in the AI version.”
The filmmaker also highlighted safety concerns surrounding AI, referencing pioneering computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton, who she said is “ringing bells of alarm” about the technology. She recalled Hinton’s suggestion that AI should be programmed with a maternal instinct, comparing it to “a less intelligent creature kind of controlling a more intelligent creature than a baby and its mother.”
Gyllenhaal expressed concern that talent on both sides of the camera could lose out if AI becomes commonplace in filmmaking and reduces costs for studios. She noted that a $40 million film could be made for $4 million with AI, and eventually for $40,000 — asking who would then invest $10 million in a traditional production.
Her remarks come amid broader industry debate about AI’s role in entertainment. At the same event, Meredith Whittaker, head of the messaging app Signal, warned against AI being controlled by a few billionaires and urged the audience to “don’t buy the hype.” George Clooney also sounded a pessimistic note, predicting that many crew members and visual effects supervisors, not just actors, could be replaced.