Sometimes, an interview subject surprises you with something you didn’t see coming at all. “This film is one of the first films to incorporate a fully AI-generated sequence,” Florian Frerichs (The Last Supper), director and co-writer of Traumnovelle, a new adaptation of the Arthur Schnitzler novella that inspired Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, mentions during our Zoom chat.
Nikolai Kinski, the star of the film, about an upper middle-class couple that gets drawn into a secret world of erotic fantasy, which opens the 31st Oldenburg Film Festival on Wednesday, wasn’t fully prepared for the revelation either. “What do you mean?” he asks.
“I think it’s one of the first films that did it,” Frerichs explains, sharing that AI was used for a dream sequence in the movie when the protagonist Jakob, played by Kinski, finds out from his partner Amelia, portrayed by Laurine Price, about her dreams. “We have this animation thing going on there.”
Now Frerichs has everyone’s full attention. “This was something very unique and very new because in the book, this dream sequence is very surrealistic,” he highlights. “It would have been very hard to shoot. Actually, it was also never filmed in any of the other films” based on the novella.
“With the use and the help of AI and my two friends, Sven and Victor, who handled the whole operation, we actually gave this dream sequence a face,” Frerichs adds. “Whether you like it or not, it’s been done with the help of AI.”
So how was the experience working with AI, and what were the challenges? “It was a lot of work by our team that we put into this AI. It’s not just like we told the AI, ‘do this and that,’ and then It came out. It took, actually, six months of research and of trying,” the director explains. “It was a lot of trial and error, of prompting — and then also learning the craft of negative prompting, which is even more important: telling it what not to do instead of telling it what to do. So it was a very, very unique experience in post-production to give birth to this dream sequence, which otherwise we could not have filmed on such a shoestring budget.”
Kinski is now extra-excited to watch the final version of the movie. “I haven’t seen the last version [with the AI sequence] so I’m quite curious to see it,” he shares.
The actor calls the prospect of “AI and human interaction fascinating,” adding: “I think it’s just the beginning of a wild new era.”
Does AI scare or worry Frerichs? “Our machine dreamt up this dream sequence for our film with lots of work that we put into it,” he tells THR. “So, I don’t have the fear that any animators or so will lose their jobs. My experience with the AI was that this is a tool, and you need to put lots of creativity into it to get something out of it.” Concludes the filmmaker: “That’s why I can proudly say that we have an AI sequence in there which elevates the whole sequence and film.”
