Jason Silva made a 25-minute AI film in five days by talking

"The Dervish" is a 25-minute psychedelic film set in the 1960s, and every frame of it was generated with AI. Jason Silva made it in five days, and he told High Times how he did it, in an interview the outlet published on October 13, 2026.

SLOP TV did not conduct this interview. Everything below comes from High Times' write-up by Javier Hasse, and the quotes are Silva's words as that article recorded them.

Silva hosted National Geographic's "Brain Games" and created the YouTube series "Shots of Awe", where he has riffed about technology and awe for more than a decade. The film is credited to him and Rus Yusupov, a co-founder of Vine, who designed the AI filmmaking tool Silva used. That tool, Director, runs inside iMessage: you text it an idea, a script or a reference, and it sends back a plan and shots for review. Silva says it has spread mostly by word of mouth.

He calls the method "vibe directing." His argument is that a director was never the person writing the script or running the camera. "The director has always been the vibe director," he said.

In practice it meant getting into a flow state with cannabis, landscape and music, then riffing out loud into a speech-to-text model, the way he has riffed into a camera on "Shots of Awe." A language model turned the riff into a shot-by-shot list, and the list went into the video model. He ran that loop 26 times, once per three-minute chapter.

What came back, he says, matched what he saw behind his eyes. "I didn't invent it. I described it," he said.

The prompts carried style, not just plot. He said he could ask for cutting like the movie "Snatch" and sound design like a Danny Boyle film, and have the model fold those cinephile references into the cinematic prompt. Asked what he could not get the model to do, Silva said there was nothing. He called the week a fever dream, then corrected himself to "hypomanic," which he described as mania's exuberance paired with high executive function.

The obvious objection is that a film with no crew has no camera operator, no art director and no actors. Silva does not dispute the arithmetic. He said he has no access to Hollywood budgets, producers or resources, so the tool is additive for him. "This doesn't replace them. This exists alongside them," he said.

He cast his own family and friends, building the characters from photo references. His brother is the hedonist, a friend named Edgar the wounded seeker, Yusupov the artist, his father the trickster. "All of them are different shades of my psyche," he said. He appears only in cameos.

For a creator weighing the workflow, Director's own page fills in the practical side. New members get 2,500 free credits after verifying an email. A $49 top-up buys 4,000 generation credits, there is no subscription, and the credits do not expire. New projects start in Seedance 2.5 Draft at 480p, higher quality costs more, and failed generations do not use credits.

The interesting claim here is about scale. One person held a 25-minute, multi-location piece together by describing it, inside a text thread. Whether that workflow survives past one maker's distinctive voice is not a question the interview answers.

Watch the film and Silva's companion making-of video below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0e1GMOA-f8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roiodDElUcw

The full interview is at High Times, and "The Dervish" and its making-of companion are on Silva's Shots of Awe channel.