Do we follow the tall, stilted, morally questionable man in cargo pants?
It’s the question up for debate among the collection of four teenagers leading Jason Zada’s “Terrarium,” a found-footage style story about the group that takes shelter underground following some unspecified catastrophic event. It’s a late Wednesday morning in September at Hollywood’s BLT Studios, and I’m on the set of “Terrarium” during one of its final days of production.
Three of the characters — Tim, Devin and Reese, with the fourth, Lila, represented by the camera — are panicked, worried the strange-looking man is leading them to some abject horror. What road are they venturing on? Where, indeed, is this man taking them to?
It’s unclear because, as I gaze at the monitor in front of Zada, I see no road, because there is no road. There is also no set of a road. Instead, the actors in this film are filming on a well-lit soundstage, flanked by black tarps to hide the film’s 26 crew members from view, against nothing. There are no props, no Volume-like screens displaying an ominous setting. Nearly everything, save for the humans themselves, will be generated using AI.
“Terrarium” is what its production team is calling an AI-hybrid production, where a team of 15 to 20 AI “artists” use the technology to generate the locations and the props around the human actors. The snack-filled convenience store the characters check out? AI. The dark, eerie underground tunnel the ragtag group finds themselves in? AI. Even how the foursome is positioned in the film is done using AI, with Zada having each actor perform against an individual camera and piecing together composites of the group, making it appear like they’re staged in a scene together.
The film was announced in May following Amazon’s AI on the Lot event, a co-production between Zada’s Secret Label, an AI-driven entertainment studio, and the AI production platform Artlist, which is financing the film. The film is executive produced by Steven Schneider, a native producer in the horror genre whose credits include “Paranormal Activity,” “Insidious” and last year’s “The Long Walk,” and its cast includes the likes of “Stranger Things” and “Starship Troopers” actor Jake Busey, “Love Island USA” season seven personality Ace Greene and relative newcomers Kylee Levien and Austin Willard. Zada aims to complete the project by next week, and the film is still seeking a distributor.
Amid fears in Hollywood that AI will kill jobs for actors and crew members, “Terrarium” represents a test of whether the technology can really provide the cost savings long envisioned while maintaining the traditional production workflow. Zada believes AI will let the film’s production team to achieve its goal of making a microbudget film (he and the film’s producers refused to disclose its cost) for what he claims will make it look like a movie with a $40 million budget.
For Zada — whose last feature was 2016’s “The Forest,” which grossed about $40 million against a reported $10 million production budget — he sees it “as the future of how you make films.”
“I think if we were on a larger budget, maybe some of this would be shot on location,” Zada says as we sit in a green room across the hall from the soundstage. “But then again, every time I think about that, I go, ‘I shot my last movie. We were in a forest for a long time, getting eaten by bugs and spending a week doing night shoots and having to sleep for a few hours during the day. ’I don’t miss that.”
Even in the future, the pitfalls of filmmaking rear their head.
Busey, who appears to play the film’s villain, is walking in place as the characters deliberate in the scene I witness, but a few issues arise. First, as the teenagers squabble about whether to follow him, Greene’s character misses his line. Zada then gives Busey a note to move a bit ahead of the characters, demonstrating the distance between him and the teens — but then he repeatedly forgets his mandatory “You guys coming?” line.
“I’ll give you the cue, Jake,” Zada says from behind his monitor. But that doesn’t happen, as Busey pulls himself out of the scene for what appears to be an unprompted break. Movie magic.
About an hour later, with the scene wrapped, Busey and I are sitting across from each other in the green room, where he’s still in costume. His spirit is up, perhaps because it’s his final day of filming, though he acknowledges the empty soundstage presented its own unique challenges.
“It’s far more difficult as far as the acting portion goes because you’re really going back to kindergarten,” he says in his grisly tone. “You’re really going back to cowboys and Indians running around the backyard, and you really are those characters. You think you really are Zorro. You really are the Hulk in your mind when you’re 7 years old, and you have to bring that to this medium.”
The “Terrarium” script, also written by Zada, came to him through his manager and agent, who warned him that AI would play a role in its production. But the script, he says, “really blew my mind,” and the fact that they wanted his performance “tells me right then and there that they’re not just replacing actors.”
“The big fear for us actors, when it comes to hearing the term ‘AI movie,’ the big fear is that you’ll have companies that’ll do a full body scan, and then they will entirely complete you doing a performance that you weren’t even there for, and that’s the scary thing,” he says. “This film is not that. This film, they’re taking our performances and putting them into the world inside the computer, and then all the crazy backgrounds and worlds, and traveling and morphing from one world to another world to one room to underground to outside to all that stuff would be really impossible without.”
I ask if he’s run this new type of filmmaking by his father, comedic legend Gary Busey. “No,” he say, acknowledging the concept could be a lot for an 82-year-old, one whose career was spent largely on real sets.
“He started his working days on the sets of ‘Bonanza’ and ‘Gunsmoke’ and all those Westerns and different episodic TV shows and then big movies,” Jake says. “I gotta say that, I would not want to work in a world where every film I did was an AI hybrid type of thing like this. I wouldn’t want to completely change over to it, because there’s something that’s really satisfactory about working on an actual set, being out in the actual desert with the actual wind hitting you in the face, and all that.”
But while Busey has had decades of experience working on real sets, the “Terrarium” environment could be a model for some of the film’s younger stars.
Levien, 17, plays the film’s lead, Lila, and much of the film is shot from her point of view. She says she spent much of the time negotiating her contract ensuring her performance remained intact, not wanting it to be a product of “AI impersonating me.” But despite an extended conversation with Zada ahead of the film’s shoot — where he acknowledged much of her time would be spent performing against a camera, forcing her to imagine nearly everything else — even she was surprised by the unusual production model. “It was kind of like a curveball, but at the same time, it helped me grow as an actor because you’re envisioning everything in your head,“ she says.
“To be on set the first day, I remember just getting that reassurance that, yeah, AI is changing our backgrounds, it’s changing whether we’re sitting or standing, and like if we’re moving our hand or not, if we’re catching something, holding something, props, everything like that,” she says. “Learning the AI is working with that, but not with what’s going on with our facials or behind our eyes or our acting… knowing that boundary was set was very reassuring to me.”
Keeping the actors engaged like that was paramount for the production team, Secret Level head of narrative and producer Christina Lee Storm tells me, especially for actors registered with SAG-AFTRA. The film worked extensively to operate under the union’s new rules surrounding the use of digital replicas and AI, especially when new scenes would emerge throughout the four-month production.
“The markers are really transparency and consent,” Storm says. “I’m huge on that. We have to have that, and I think that having the ability then to say to these actors, “This is what we’re doing”…It’s that education to say, if you do it right, if you have the right production company, the producers who are making sure that this is being done correctly and responsibly, then it’s OK. There’s always going to be bad actors, and that’s where like something like the No FAKES Act needs to sort of get solidified and all that by the government. But I think that I draw the line is: Are we doing a professional project? Yeah… If it’s professional, we need to hold this line.”
Still, nearly everyone involved acknowledged that AI films aren’t for everyone. There’s still intense hostility from audiences surrounding the use of AI in movies, from backlash against Eli Roth’s “Ice Cream Man” to outrage over the David Dastmalchian-led “Late Night with the Devil.”
Schneider knows it well, having helped produce “Late Night with the Devil.” He tells me he learned about the use of AI on the film after it had already been completed, but he says the experience taught him that, in using AI, “we have to be above board.”
“There’s no excuse for not being above board with our use of AI,” he tells me over a video call. “Not that we or anyone involved in ‘Late Night with the Devil’ was trying intentionally to deceive, but you know what they say, omission is sort of just as bad as intentional deceit, right? So I think, in terms of a lesson for me, it’s like, communicate. Let people know what your intentions are in terms of the deployment or employment of AI tech, and we can try to do it in a way that feels like it’s being sufficiently respectful of human labor.”
Zada also understands the wariness surrounding AI, but he dismisses critics of the tech as people whose opinions over it — from its impact on the environment to the proliferation of data centers across the country — amount to “hearsay.”
“To me, hating AI for filming is the same thing as hating CGI,” he says. “Every film will eventually have some form of AI in it, and to me, it’s just another tool that we will allow to make films. I don’t see it as an existential threa. And for me personally, if we could make films in four months or five months versus a year or two years, and we can make them in a fraction of the budgets that we used to make them at, more films are going to get made.”
The use of AI also lets the team tinker with the backgrounds as they’re shooting, he says, rather than waiting for a lengthy post-production process to fill in the world. To demonstrate, I sit in on a behind-the-scenes reel the Secret Level and Artlist teams prepared for the actors and crew to give them a glimpse of what the film looks like.
The assembled cast and crew hadn’t seen what the team had done with their performances as cameras rolled. But as they watch the roughly two-minute clip, their faces light up. Their side-by-side performances against individual cameras have been composited to put them in the same room. A scene that sees Greene’s character’s father burst into flames prompts several forms of “Wow!” It’s remarkable footage, if surreal to see something stitched together without real sets. “That’s the future,” someone quips as the clip ends.
The crowd applauds, marveling with a mixture of shock and awe at what Zada and his team have done with the footage. “I wish I’d seen it before we had our talk,” Busey quips to me, and Zada rolls it back a second time.
“That’s the roughest you’ll ever see,” Zada tells the crowd. “Every single time we’re working on it, it just keeps getting better and better. And when it goes to post production and all that kind of stuff, it just gets better and better. But the amazing thing is, if that’s the worst it’s gonna look, just think about the possibility.”
It’s that possibility I think about as I walk out of BLT Studios. As I step outside, I see the crew filming a scene inside an actual, parked sedan, one of the few props used within the film. AI could indeed be the future. At least it’ll be one with a real car.