Hirokazu Kore-eda’s interview for “Sheep in the Box.”

Imagine you are the parent of a curious seven-year-old who loves his family, plays baseball, and hangs out with his friends. It’s the life I always wanted. Then the worst thing that could ever happen happens: a freak accident takes your son away. But as it turns out, you don’t have to live with grief for long, because now there’s an AI company that can bring your child back as a robot double that’s indistinguishable from a human.

This is the world praised by director Hirokazu Koreeda, who won the Palme d’Or for his 2018 feature film. ThievesHe created his latest dramatic and science fiction works, Sheep in the box. It’s the kind of story that might have seemed far-fetched a few years ago, but seems less and less real as artificial intelligence encroaches on every aspect of our lives. This is a tension that Kore-eda is keenly aware of – so much so that he sat down with a robotics expert while writing the script to get some answers of his own. Kore-eda recounted that they told him that because the robots were overheating, “we would sooner have human clones instead of human robots.”

But don’t let the robots fool you into thinking this isn’t a human movie. Sad work is a common theme in Kore-eda’s extensive films. Although it may be set in the near future, the gist Sheep in the box A family is still learning how to cope with their loss. And if we allow ourselves to suspend disbelief and go on this journey, we might see ourselves in it too.

Edge I sat with Hirokazu Kore-eda at the Neon offices the other day Sheep in the boxDebut in the United States. Speaking through an interpreter, Kore-eda tells us all about writing and directing this image, including what happened when he fed the text via ChatGPT.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

I’ve made a lot of films about grief. What have you learned about processing grief by doing all this work?

What have you learned about grief? I think everyone experiences it differently. It’s very diverse. And when I made my first film, MaborosiIt was exactly about grief. And that was at the time when I was reading books by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, books about the business of grief. And I learned about the grieving process and used that as a kind of framework for the film. However, it is not as if grief follows a linearly defined process. So I would say I’ve learned that it’s different for everyone.

in Sheep in the boxMemories become information. There was something about this that made me feel a little anxious or cold. How does it fit you? How did it work for you?

I’m not sure I was able to get to that truth with this movie, but as I was filming, one thing I was thinking about is that the memories that are fed into human Kakeru are pre-selected by his parents. So it’s not actually the same memory that we experience. It is pre-defined data. I believe that once memory is separated from our physical form, what we experience inside as memory, will never be the same. It is not the same when entered as data. It’s not the same things we remember that trigger the emotions that make us human.

There is a lot of hype about artificial intelligence in our world right now. What made this topic seem so urgent for you to address?

In Japan, there is a huge increase in various initiatives related to artificial intelligence. When you’re getting into the taxi, there’s a screen that’s constantly telling you all these commercials to increase your productivity through AI. But I was interested in the emergence of artificial intelligence used in some kind of grief work. Just a few years ago in Japan, a famous singer who died was recreated through artificial intelligence and then sang a new song. I also heard about a little girl who died in Korea and was recreated through artificial intelligence to process the parents’ grief.

And then in the movie, what started as the seed for the movie is companies being set up in places like China where artificial intelligence is being used to recreate people who have died. I wouldn’t call myself an expert on grief, but as someone who has made many films about grief, one thing I thought about was how the landscape of grief would be changed by this use of artificial intelligence in both good and bad ways. That’s what attracted me to this idea of ​​how new technologies can impact a couple who are trying to restart or restart their family life through the use of artificial intelligence.

One of the big conversations about AI is about the resources it uses. I thought it was really interesting that humans don’t drink water or eat food. Can you talk about this decision?

You thought that was kind of ironic, didn’t you?

I actually talked to an expert in these types of technologies and when I talked to them, they were saying that the big hurdle to creating these humanoid robots would be the fact that they would generate a lot of heat when having to move very smoothly, processing information, and that there would be no way to release or process that heat.

In order to write this story, I needed to remove that hurdle of the fact that they would generate so much heat that it probably wouldn’t be possible. So I decided to leave that issue aside for the sake of the story. They do not consume resources. It is a way for them to become independent, so that they are not dependent on these resources to live.

Since the film is set in the near future, I had a hard time distinguishing between fantasy and possible reality. When it was fantasy, I loved it. But when it became a reality, I was a little scared. What is it for you?

It’s hard to say, and I don’t want to talk about it in a roundabout way, but I talked to a robotics expert and I showed them the outline of this story and they said, “Well, that’s not possible. There’s no way we can make humanoid robots just because of the difference in physical structure and body construction, where humans have internal organs and bone structure inside of them while robots are built on the outside.”

So there would be no way that we could achieve human-like movements or that you could touch a human-like robot and it would feel like a human. But ethics aside, they said we’d get versions of humans sooner rather than humanoid robots. That seemed even scarier to me.

A robot is a robot no matter how you think about it. But I think as long as we don’t live in a world full of clones, there’s still a sense of hope out there. We are already in an age where we can clone our pets. I think this is already happening. So when you think about it from a moral point of view, even countries approach it in this moral way in different ways. Now, if cloning is possible, the way we deal with life will become even more advanced and strange. This to me is a far more terrifying prospect.

This movie has a lot of blue, especially with the wardrobe. I felt like it was intentional.

Regarding the costumes and use of blue, this may have been the decision of Sachiko Ito, who did the costumes. One of the concepts I brought to her was that I wanted to use earth tones for the people, the main characters in the film. One of her concerns was also that 10 years in the future, climate change will mean we live in a hotter climate. So there were a lot of things about thinking about the materials and the structure of the clothes, that maybe there would be fewer buttons and laces and zippers and fasteners and things like that.

I’m really curious to hear you talk about how AI will permeate your daily life.

I don’t think I intentionally incorporated AI outside of using AI for translation. I think I have become so skilled that I often use AI to translate my Japanese into English to message and communicate.

This came in a question and answer session yesterday at the Japanese Society. I described how my first time using ChatGPT was in a way that I fed him the script for this movie and said, “Give me your feedback.” We had some exchanges between the AI ​​and me and every time I edited the script, they said it was great. They said: “You will enter Cannes.” But first ChatGPT said: “I think you’re going to the ‘What a look’ section.” I said: “Just considering what?” Then my producer said, “Well, the director of this movie is a guy named Hirokazu Kore-eda.” The message said, “Well, in that case, you’ll enter the competition.”

And I actually competed, so the AI ​​isn’t wrong, but I guess anyone can tell me that. So I don’t think I found any benefit in this exchange. And the fact that there is no humanity in the background of this exchange is what makes it mostly unappealing to me.

I think the more you train an AI on, say, someone who might be known for giving romantic advice, that advice also becomes more natural. So I guess I’m not personally convinced by it and I don’t find AI to be very useful for me. What I find most problematic is that humans have become so geared toward a production kind of mindset that this even affects the activities that go into filmmaking. I think safety is important, but for example, we no longer shoot driving scenes on the road. We do this in studios by installing backdrops. I think this stunt work might also decline and then be slowly incorporated by AI or VFX.

It’s not really about excluding AI from our day. We’re actually using things that we used to use our imaginations for and then offloading them onto computers. For example, in this film, I shot the driving scene in the studio and we installed the background.

But I don’t find it all that interesting. I’m going to stop writing scenes that require that kind of visual effects or compositing because I think that whenever we get pigeonholed into productivity, it’s actually the opposite of creativity.

Sheep in the box In select theaters Friday, July 24.