A year ago, I hopped on a call with Edward Saatchi, the C.E.O. of Fable Studio, to discuss his efforts to build the “Netflix of A.I.” Saatchi, the scion of legendary adman Maurice Saatchi, had just secured a fresh round of funding from Amazon, and was intent on creating an entirely new content platform—one where A.I., licensed I.P., and original I.P. could exist in endless, personalized iterations akin to a video game. For major Hollywood studios and rights-holders, however, Fable was the perfect illustration of the threat posed by A.I.

Saatchi’s contention at the time was that the tech would enable “non-Hollywood creators to be able to create their own story—and their own story world.” He described it as something that would supplement, rather than displace, the traditional film and TV industry. And for the past few months, he’s been working on enacting that vision, backing an indie film project from the popular A.I. artist/filmmaker Zack London, known by his online moniker Gossip Goblin. On YouTube, London describes his work as “crafting stories scripted from the human brain, curated through vision, and rendered by the machine.”

London had built a career as a designer and illustrator—but, he said, A.I. “spelled the end for any kind of burgeoning illustration career I thought I might have.” So he started using the technology to tell stories. A year ago, he launched his studio, got some investors on board, and started building out the Gossip Goblin universe. On Wednesday, London and Saatchi announced that Gods Don’t Give Gifts, the film they’ve been working on, will enjoy a limited theatrical release in October. Inspired by recent theatrical successes from other YouTube creators, like Curry Barker’s Obsession, they’re hoping to leverage London’s 1.4 million YouTube subscribers to fill a few hundred theaters. The crucial difference is that their movie will be the first “A.I.-built” movie to receive a theatrical release.

Last week, I spent an hour chatting with London and Saatchi, who’s one of the co-producers, about how Gods Don’t Give Gifts was made, and how they hope it’ll be received. It’s out on October 30, and I plan to see it in theaters myself. The duo released a clip of the film yesterday, which you can watch here. I’d be very curious to hear what you think. As always, the following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.

Ian Krietzberg: What do you mean when you say “built by A.I.”? How exactly was this film made?

Zack London: I’ve been a writer my whole life. So I was already writing stories, and the past few years I’ve been writing stories specifically to be adapted to A.I. I think they read as normal screenplays, but in the back of my head, it’s like—I’m not just a writer, I’m the whole production crew. I’m writing the script, but I’m also chasing down the voice actors to do this. We used artists for the SFX. We used four different musicians to score the whole film, and all the audio—from the music to the SFX to the voices—are real people. The writing is me, and a good friend of mine who’s a co-writer. What’s left is the visuals.

Obviously, there are companies that try to suggest everything can be automated with a Claude integration. To some extent, that’s true—it is getting more and more automated—but what differentiates us, and why we have such a huge mindshare relative to any other creator in the space, is how manual the process is for us. An A.I. naysayer would love to collapse it all into one. Like, You used A.I.—you cheated. But it’s incredibly hands-on.

How so?

London: So, we always start with a huge kind of visual exploration phase, exploring everything from lighting environments and interiors to objects and characters. It’s basically generating hundreds if not many thousands of assets and photo-bashing them together to arrive at what we want. I would say there’s a tremendous amount of manual intervention—five people spending a month iterating on tiny elements, like interrogation-room lighting, and then bashing it together to arrive at what that environment looks like. We want anything that shows up onscreen to be intentional and not just a weird, messy artifact of what A.I. happened to come up with when we said “handcuffs” or whatever.

Everyone’s trying to chase a solution of, Now you can automate editing. Now you can automate X, Y, and Z. But the outcome is pretty terrible when you automate all that away. I feel like we found a really good balance where the most impactful things—the script, the voices, and the sound—are human. And the editing has to be human.

A still from Gods Don’t Give Gifts, directed by Zack London. Photo: Courtesy of Gossip Goblin

Edward Saatchi: We’re asking an audience to give us two hours of their time in the theater. Lights down, no phones, no distractions. It has to be perfect, and so Zack has to be making those decisions. Seeing the acting—seeing a proper performance that is sustained and has an emotional journey—that’s something that, when you and I talked last, Ian, I felt was just not close. It has to work as a performance, and I think it does now.

We think of this as an experiment. We think of this as an underdog, a fun thing that’s about showing the possibilities. It’s opening up a door such that eventually—I think by next summer—the majority of major films that you see will contain A.I. That’s different from a fully A.I. film, and still pretty radical and subversive.

Are you going to advertise this as an A.I. film?

Saatchi: No, it’s a movie. Frankly, I hadn’t actually thought of that question. People who go to see it will be Gossip Goblin fans. That’s our audience. And then you know, if it expands from there, then that’s great. But there is an audience that likes this already.

London: Anything relating to A.I. sucks all the air out of the room, and understandably so. It’s what people want to hear about, so they can get angry or excited or self-righteous about defeating Hollywood or whatever. But either way, the discourse is always A.I.

I don’t think we’re gunning for some giant windfall of cash from this. This is an experiment of planting a flag in the ground—a nice milestone to get to. But I think the real metric of success is, Can people talk about this without mentioning A.I.? Are people going to talk about it, like, This is a cool movie? I’m not shying away from it being A.I., and maybe that’s a selling point because it’s controversial, so people will go see it because it’s taboo. Who knows? But ultimately, I would like its legacy to not be about A.I.

This was an insane film, and it could’ve never been made without A.I., because this narrative was too expensive and too risky and too weird to do otherwise. It would’ve never gotten greenlit for how much it would’ve cost to make.

Saatchi: The trailer is not going to be like, For the first time, an A.I. film! It’s going to show you the story.

London: Whatever the exact opposite of Tilly Norwood [the A.I. actress] is—where the narrative is the message is the medium is the fan base. There is no Tilly Norwood. It doesn’t exist. There is no fan base. It is controversy packaged up into a poorly generated Nano Banana character and sold to the press. Maybe we are trying to make a few statements here, but the statement isn’t to be shoving A.I. in your face and saying, Look what it can do. I don’t want it to end up being just a showcase of the technology.

I know you don’t expect this to make a ton of money, but do you have a baseline ticket sales expectation?

Saatchi: It’s a mad experiment, and the numbers are going to be totally visible. It’s not at all the reason why we’re doing it. If you’re a fan of Gossip Goblin, bring your friends. That’s what it should be about.

London: Candidly, because there’s no point beating around the bush—given the cost of production, relative to what we recoup when we make these shorts and release them on YouTube, we’re not making money. We’re a money pit. If you want to do it right and do it well, and use actual talent as opposed to try to optimize for speed and efficiency at the expense of anything else—we’ve already been losing money, and that’s partially why I had to raise [funding].

By now, do you see A.I. as an inevitable filmmaking tool?

London: Every single streamer and studio is heavily invested in A.I. Whether they’re transparent about it is another story, but it is coming in some way, shape, or form. This is happening. I see Gossip Goblin as at the forefront of validating this, as opposed to pontificating on what it could be. We’re actually making the stuff, and we have audiences. We’re not teasing proof of concepts or speaking on panels. We’re releasing it, and we’re getting millions and millions of views on narrative stuff, not memes or clickbait or softcore porn. The movie feels like an extension of that. We’re not being mavericks for the sake of it. We’re validating, Is this possible? There’s a lot of symbolism to it as much as there is any kind of monetary win.