Having passed through the Sundance and Deauville festivals, “The Pod Generation” is released in theaters this Wednesday, October 25. Meeting with its director Sophie Barthes, to discuss its central subjects, including artificial intelligence.
A strange fate than that of The Pod Generation, a science fiction film in which a society allows couples to carry their future child in an egg-shaped capsule, aided by artificial intelligence and algorithms.
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Its first public screening takes place in January 2023, at the Sundance Film Festival, when ChatGPT is launched. It then went through the stages of Deauville in September and its director Sophie Barthes showed her support for the screenwriters (of which she was one), then on strike in the same way as the actors. Against artificial intelligence in particular.
And the actors are still mobilized as his third feature film arrives in our theaters this Wednesday, October 25. Is it a coincidence, or did the director and screenwriter feel the spirit of the times when writing this film?
While in Paris a few days before the release of The Pod Generation, Sophie Barthes spoke at length on the subject. And the way in which the news has more than once caught up with his film, to the point that we can, less and less, place it in the category “science fiction”.
There is no longer even a healthy relationship with the truth, it is not a quest in itself
Artificial wombs are about to become a reality. Artificial intelligence is already one and its upheavals are being felt more and more, not only in the world of cinema where actors are still fighting against it in the streets.
Thirteen years after the release of Souls in Stock, her first feature film in which it was about shedding one’s soul, the French filmmaker to whom we also owe the adaptation of Madame Bovary with Mia Wasikowska and Ezra Miller, confirms that dehumanization is also a central subject of his work.
And speaks about the dangers that await cinema, and culture in general, in the face of algorithms and the use of artificial intelligence. “We will go through a phase of profound debilitation of cinematographic content”she tells us, for example, about the phenomenon of excessive franchising.
So many subjects on which she returns to our microphone while explaining that this story carried by Emilia Clarke and Chiwetel Ejiofor could not have taken place anywhere other than in the United States, since it is a criticism and ‘a satire of American society. Which also evokes capitalism and male-female relationships across the Atlantic.
Comments collected by Maximilien Pierrette in Paris on October 19, 2023 – Editing: Chanelle Morvan