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Your new movie
My Boyfriend is a
Superhero!? - in a few words, what's it about?
My Boyfriend is a
Superhero!? is a romantic superhero comedy built
around secretary Abigail Winters and billionaire Mark Waters. It is
glossy, playful, and character-led. It exists as two complete feature
editions with two different Abigails, so the audience can choose which
protagonist performance to follow. It is the first fully AI
CG-animated feature film in cinema history, introducing cinema's first
explicit choose-your-protagonist feature concept, and is the first
feature to employ agentic AI editing as part of its editorial
workflow. With
My Boyfriend is a Superhero!? being a superhero movie, is that a
genre especially dear to you, and some of your genre favourites?
It is built off my running desire to have films operate psychically,
meaning you can close your eyes and still enjoy the film. It's
tethered only to your imagination. Its influences are: The Incredibles
(the tonal balance), Tim Burton's Batman and the
Batman Animated Series (the
gothic office-world absurdity) and
Iron Man (the hard technology).
For the romance and elegance, Hitchcock's To Catch a Thief was a major
reference point, along with '80s city-girl rom-com energy. As loveable
as Abigail is in the final film, she began as a harder-edged city girl
at the start, placing her in this whole Sean Young, Melanie Griffith, Michelle Pfeiffer camp.
After the heavy artistic drama of
A Very Long
Carriage Ride,, I wanted
this one to be light and enjoyable to direct, away from taverns and
carriages; this one lives in this whole corporate city aesthetic which
was refreshing to operate within. The film began as a billionaire
romance novel, and Abigail evolved from sharper "edgy city girl" to
something more lovable and buoyant.
(Other) sources of inspiration when writing
My Boyfriend
is a Superhero!??
I write with LLMs like a writers' room and like actor improv: I
prompt, audition options, rewrite and lock what works. Multiple models
act as sparring partners and judges, but the final authorship is mine;
selection, structure, taste and revision. If someone says "AI wrote
it," I translate that as: the script came through a
machine-collaboration process. But it wasn't pulled verbatim, every
scene is directed, shaped, and locked by me. As with your last few movies, My
Boyfriend is a Superhero!?'s visuals and soundtrack were entirely
AI-cenerated - so as a director, how much creative control do you have
over the material, over the look and feel of your movie? The misconception is that AI reduces creative control. In practice, I
have more control than I ever had in traditional production, because
iteration is fast, and I can drive performance, framing, rhythm, and
tone directly through repeated passes.
The difference is that the department heads are machine collaborators:
they propose options instantly, and I direct by selecting, revising,
and locking decisions in the cut. It's still filmmaking, just with a
different kind of crew. That is the total cost saving between AI and tradfilm is 10,000x. That
is so vast, it might as well be the difference between 0 and 1. It is
post-scarcity being realized. I do not think there is a resolution to
sound logical when describing the reality of AI. You have to surrender
that you are realizing the incomprehensible.
Having worked with AI for quite a few years now, how has the
technology developed when it comes to filmmaking? And did you still
experience significant changes for you as a filmmaker between your last
one, A Very Long
Carriage Ride, andMy Boyfriend
is a Superhero!??
The tools improved fast, especially in character consistency, motion,
and scene continuity, and I'm getting those gains without the
production budgets traditional animation requires.
Six months earlier,
A Very Long
Carriage Ride tested the idea that a
feature can exist as two valid editions released simultaneously. With
My Boyfriend
is a Superhero!? I pushed that logic further into performance and
authorship: it's a fully AI 3D-animated feature built to play as mainstream entertainment.
I call it AI cinema's Toy Story in a practical sense: a
first-of-its-kind moment where a new production model proves it can
carry a full feature. It's still an ultra-low budget, one-person film,
so you'll find a few artifacts, but I treat some of that as part of an
editorial philosophy I call the True Line Cut, where decisions get
locked and carried forward rather than endlessly polished.
In terms of budget,My Boyfriend
is a Superhero!? is at $1,000 versus Toy Story's $30
million, that is not 10,000x, that is 30,000x, even before marketing. But one thing on
Toy Story I do hold My Boyfriend
is a Superhero!? with, it's right there
in its entertainment. How it accomplishes this is primarily through
its shorthand in casting. This central relationship between Abigail
Winters and Mark Waters is pitch-perfect. The comic relief with Reejus
(played by Rogers, the first machine movie star). It's the actors who
carry this film. How great is Abigail's performance? Her voice is my
luckiest find in casting, she carries this entire blockbuster on her
shoulders.
My Boyfriend
is a Superhero!? has a "choose your protagonist" option to it -
care to explain? The "choose your protagonist" idea came late in pre-production and
became the film's most radical feature. The movie exists as two
complete editions, built around two different instantiations of
Abigail, and the audience can choose which version to watch. TTechnically, it wasn't a simple filter. I replaced the lead
shot-by-shot across the entire film, one section at a time. Like with
A Very Long
Carriage Ride,, I also have extensive screen recordings of
the process, so it's auditable as a real production method.
What surprised me is that it isn't a soulless swap. The two Abigails
produce two distinct performances and two distinct tonal experiences,
audiences can compare, argue, and rewatch. In the second version,
Abigail carries a strong African accent, which I chose deliberately to
put a kind of voice and presence in a mainstream film that I have
never seen centered. The main shoot began on September 1st and
premiered November 23rd. The second Abigail premiered on December 6th.
The $64-question of course, where can
My Boyfriend
is a Superhero!? be seen? It is currently in streaming and rolling out everywhere. Both versions
are currently available on Escape.AI, the first video platform
exclusively for AI filmmakers, which is nice to be a part of in such a
hostile climate. Anything you can
tell us about audience and critical reception of
My Boyfriend
is a Superhero!?? The film is still early in its release cycle and finding its audience
through streaming and curated platforms. Reception around AI cinema is
polarized in the 2020s, but my approach is to build work that survives
the moment with complete editions, full documentation, and stable
archival materials so the films can be revisited and judged on their
own terms. My Boyfriend
is a Superhero!? is the most technically advanced AI feature
film yet made, so I am eager for people to see it.
Any future projects
you'd like to share? I've now released five AI features:
Window Seat,
DreadClub,
A Very Long
Carriage Ride,
My Boyfriend
is a Superhero!? and The New Machine
Cinema documentary. Next is Strings, my push toward a strictly photoreal AI feature, with
performances that hold up. I'm taking my time because the goal is to
make the best possible film. Your/your movie's website,
social media, whatever else?
HoorooJackson.com and Instagram. Anything else you're
dying to mention and I have merely forgotten to ask?
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The True Line Cut brings forth that in post-scarcity, the best
resource we have is scarcity. Therefore films must be made adhering to
scarcity principles even in post-scarcity. The solution is in jazz.
Whatever you place down becomes fixed in the final work; The True Line
Cut is where film is made in one single pass without revision.
My Boyfriend
is a Superhero!? has a separate true line cut of the feature. The concept
furthers in the New Machine Cinema documentary, whose visuals were all
placed down in one single pass; when they glitch out or when the
visuals overwhelm the technology, I attempt to recontextualize it on
screen, so the journey of every single shot remains etched in living
motion. Thanks for the interview! |
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