Bruno Dumont says he made his next film entirely with AI

Bruno Dumont, the French director who has won the Cannes Grand Prix twice, says he made his next feature entirely with generative AI, without actors or a traditional crew.

The English-language sci-fi thriller, The End, was reported by ScreenDaily in an exclusive on November 6. Dumont began work in August and has since wrapped production, generating the film's images, performances and sound himself from his home in Paris. No outlet names the AI tools he used.

The End follows an ambitious Los Angeles police officer investigating a crime as the city is engulfed by earthquakes and falling asteroids. It moves between contemporary Los Angeles and the Joshua Tree desert, and ScreenDaily says it charts the rise and fall of a man whose investigation takes on mystical dimensions.

Dumont wrote the screenplay more than 25 years ago, after 1999's Humanity, which won the Grand Prix at Cannes. The disaster sequences made the film too expensive to produce, so he shelved it and made the California-set drama Twentynine Palms instead, in 2003. Generative AI is what made the project possible.

"The costs are on an entirely different scale compared to those of the traditional economy of the industry of cinema," Dumont told ScreenDaily, describing the results as "astonishing." He works scene by scene from his own shot breakdowns rather than feeding in the screenplay, and says he keeps control of the performances, the mise-en-scène and the editing. He can ask the virtual actors for "greater emotional intensity or anger," and he has used faces from Flemish paintings as references.

"I'm like a director working with a crew, except that my crew is a machine," he said. "I give it instructions constantly." In a France Inter interview on September 27, Dumont said he had already used AI on his previous film and called it an excellent assistant, though he added that it cannot help with artistic choices because it is too stereotyped.

His credits include Camille Claudel 1915, the Cannes competition titles Slack Bay and France, and the sci-fi satire The Empire, which won the Silver Bear Jury Prize in 2024.

Dumont is producing The End independently, with no sales agent attached yet, and plans to seek festival premieres before pursuing distribution and international sales. He said financing auteur films in France keeps getting harder. "Today I have complete freedom," he said. "I can do what I want."

For creators, the claim is about scale rather than spectacle. If a director with two Cannes Grand Prix can produce a feature from a home machine on a shoestring, the budget line that has kept ambitious independent film out of reach is the one under pressure. No clip, trailer or festival listing exists yet.

The End has no release date; Dumont says he plans a festival rollout and theatrical release in 2027.

Film card

• Title: The End
• Director: Bruno Dumont
• Format: English-language sci-fi thriller feature
• Made with: Generative AI; no tool named
• Status: Production wrapped; no footage released
• Release: Festival rollout and theatrical release planned for 2027
• Sales agent: None attached yet