Lights…Camera… Prompt!

WHEN THE BOLLYWOOD film Raanjhanaa released in 2013, it wasn’t an instant hit. It did have music by AR Rahman, but its maker Aanand L Rai, who had given a surprise hit two years ago (Tanu Weds Manu), was still a relatively new name, and the lead, the debutante Dhanush, was known outside Tamil Nadu primarily as a singer of a viral song (‘Why This Kolaveri Di’). The story of an obsessive lover, along with the performance by Dhanush and music by Rahman, however struck a chord. And despite being made on a modest budget of just `36 crore, it went on to gross around `95 crore and became among the bigger hits from that year. So much so that when Rai reunited with Dhanush and Rahman, along with the film’s writer Himanshu Sharma, for a new film, ‘Tere Ishq Mein’, scheduled to be released later this year, although the two movies are said to share only a thematic similarity, the new film has been promoted as a sequel.

Sometime around the middle of last month, Rai and individuals from his film production firm, Colour Yellow Productions, stumbled on some social media posts about the re-release of Am­bikapathy (the title of the Tamil dubbed version of Raanjhanaa) with a new end­ing altered by artificial intelligence (AI). “This was about two weeks before the proposed re-release of the film…,” says Harini Lakshminarayan, the chief op­erating officer of Colour Yellow Produc­tions. “We discovered this completely by chance. There was no attempt to inform or to get approval from Aanand L Rai or the original creative team of Raanjhanaa.”

The rights to the film were held by Eros International, the film’s original producer and distributor, and the studio was now re-releasing the movie with a new ending in Tamil Nadu. The alteration be­came evident when the film hit theatres—despite the protests by Rai and Dhanush, and many others—earlier this month. The original film ends on a tragic note with the death of its lead, Dhanush. In the new version, this had been replaced by what has been described as a ‘happy’ ending, where the protagonist sur­vives. Neither the filmmaker, nor the actor had been consulted, and the new version had been achieved entirely by AI.

The use of AI has been growing rapidly in filmmaking across the world, much of it behind the scenes to improve efficiency. But nowhere had it been used this obtrusively and egregiously, and against the wishes of its original creators, to so fundamentally alter a pivotal moment in a film. It brought to life all the anxiet­ies the arrival of AI had generated in filmmaking that had so far not come to pass.

Eros International has tried to defend itself by calling the new version a “creative reimagining”, and not a replacement. “We are the sole and exclusive copyright holders and producers of Raanjhanaa, and are fully entitled, both legally and ethi­cally, to adapt and re-release the film. This includes re-imagining certain elements using advanced tools such as generative AI to reach newer audi­ences while preserving the original’s artistic soul. Contrary to the claims of ‘artistic vandalism’, our re-release is a respectful creative reinterpreta­tion….” it said in a statement. This of course hasn’t cut ice with most indi­viduals. “Promoting this as a ‘new ending powered by AI’ makes it sound like a harmless technical add-on, or a bonus feature. But that is profoundly misleading, given the chilling viola­tion of artistic intent and authorship that it actually is,” Lakshminarayan says. “Eros’ move erased the deeply human and collaborative creative process that intentionally and meticulously designed the film’s original climax—which is widely celebrated, might I add.”

What has generated even more fears is the comments by Eros International’s head Pradeep Dwivedi, where he has described the new ending as an “exploratory baby step” and confirmed that the studio is “significantly evaluating” its library of more than 3,000 re­leases for similar AI treatments. And it may not be just Eros Interna­tional. Other studios, if they felt there was money to be made, could follow suit and alter many of our most cherished movies. “Imagine dedicating years of your life to making a film, only to discover de­cades later that it can be fundamentally rewritten by a machine at the whim of a new executive, without your knowledge or consent. This isn’t just a scary proposition, it is clear and present danger to the industry,” Lakshminarayan says. “This crisis must become the catalyst for meaningful and enduring change within the industry. It is crucial to bring everyone to the table—writers, directors, produc­ers, lawyers, thought leaders—to tackle this together. To hammer out a code of conduct for the responsible and ethical use of AI tools…”

The arrival of AI in filmmaking has been met with much dis­quietude, especially in Hollywood. Protection of livelihoods from AI encroachment was among the key demands of strikers from the Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild, which virtu­ally shut down Hollywood for several months in 2023. Although the guilds managed to extract some limitations, the use of AI has been growing, and every conspicuous use of it, whether it was used to perfect the Hungarian accents of the characters of Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones in The Brutalist or enhance the singing voice of Karla Sofía Gascón in the musical Emilia Pérez, or have it de-age actors, for instance, Tom Hanks and Robin Wright for Robert Zemeckis’ Here, or resurrect long-dead actors or their voices, for instance, getting it to mimic the voice of Anthony Bourdain in the documentary Roadrunner, or the countless other episodes, each of these have been met with raised eyebrows and a lot of newsprint.

By comparison, the growth of AI in the film industries in India has been much quieter, although not slow by any stretch of imagi­nation. AI is today routinely used in pre and post-production across various film industries here. It is used to develop scripts, make vi­sual presentations as pitches to producers and studios, create story­boards or visual representations of scenes, come up with set designs, test camera angles and lighting setups, all of this even before a single scene has been shot. Its use in post-production is equally large, from the way shots are edited, cleaned up, voice dubs and subtitles are done, to much more. “In pre-production, AI is transforming concept design, previews, and even script analysis—it helps teams visualise ideas before a single frame is shot. Today, we can achieve a lot before stepping on set—from building virtual environments to testing camera angles and lighting setups—which saves a huge amount of shoot time, energy, and money,” says Bhavika Karwarkar, the founder of Mumbai Post House, a post-production studio in Mum­bai that has worked on a number of films and television shows. “In post-production, AI is revolutionising tasks like VFX cleanups, rotoscoping, dialogue clean-up. The biggest shift is speed and clarity—what used to take days can now take hours without compro­mising quality.”

Karwarkar’s studio began experiment­ing with AI earlier this year. Initially, they explored it in small ways, such as upscal­ing footage, doing quick cleanups, and exploring concept art generation. “The breakthrough moment was realising AI wasn’t just a gimmick—it could be an ac­tual collaborator,” she says. “People often say, ‘Let’s do it in AI to save budgets.’ Sure, AI can help with that—but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The real gamechanger is how it streamlines the entire process,” she says, talking about how AI-driven pre-vi­sualisation lets filmmakers know exactly what and how much to shoot even before the camera rolls, saving not just time and money, but making the entire process of filmmaking more efficient. “It frees us up to focus on what really matters: as filmmakers, we can pour our energy into creating stunning visuals for the audience, instead of spending endless hours just fixing them,” she says. “The way we once couldn’t imagine filmmaking without digital cameras, soon we won’t be able to imagine it without AI.”

AI has been growing outside the edit studios too, and creeping into the creative aspects of filmmaking. MG Srinivas, the Kannada filmmaker and screenwriter, today routinely uses AI tools when de­veloping his scripts. He bounces ideas off them, uses it for feedback, and feeds entire screenplays to tighten their pace and to check for loopholes. “They are like part of your writing team,” Srinivas says. “It does research for you, it gives you options. You can ask it to look for whether something has been done before, and if it hasn’t been done, how to execute it or how to execute it in a different way.”

Srinivas took this collaboration with AI a bit further in his 2023 film Ghost, a hit action thriller, when he tied up with an Iranian VFX firm, Asoo, to have the 60-something Kannada superstar Shiva Rajkumar de-aged when portraying a younger version of his character. He also used AI to clone Shiva Rajkumar’s voice for the Malayalam, Telugu, Tamil and Hindi dubs, and the results were so impressive that he started an AI voice cloning studio, AI Samhitha, that has since been used for multiple films. “The problem was that most voice cloning facilities came for other languages like English, Chinese, Russian or others, and there wasn’t any support for regional languages. So we started writing code, especially when we were cloning for Telugu, Tamil, Hindi and Malayalam languages,” Srinivas says.

While AI is now routinely used across Indian film industries to generate dubs in the voices of the original actors, the issue of lip-syncing, where the movement of lips rarely match the language being spoken, has remained. Srinivas is using AI to iron out this flaw for his next film, he says. He also plans to resurrect one of the South Indian screen legends, someone like Rajkumar, NTR or Puneeth Rajkumar, in a film, in a way that, he says, doesn’t hurt anyone’s sentiments and has the approval of the families concerned. “We don’t want to mess it up. We want to do it perfectly. We want to try it first with one of them, but if that works well, then we will think about getting everyone into a film at different timelines,” Srinivas sends.

Such a move, while it has been done abroad, will be some­thing of a first in India. It could potentially, if done well, open the floodgates for many more actors being brought back.

The music composer AR Rahman himself brought back two voices, Bamba Bakya and Shahul Hameed, both of who had passed away some time ago for a track in last year’s film Lal Salaam. Rahman did all that could be expected of him. He got the necessary permission from the singers’ families, compensated them for the use of the voices, and, in interviews, warned against its usage purely as a gimmick. “[You should do it] only when you really need it and only when you can do it. It should not be half-baked. It is not a gimmick,” he told one journalist. But can one really operate on good faith? What stops a less scrupulous composer or studio chasing social media virality from bringing back a voice just because he or she can? One can of course attain permission from a deceased artist’s family, but that can’t be the same as seeking permission from the artist when he or she was alive? And what of the ethics of such an endeavour? One could keep bringing back voices, again and again, through the decades and perhaps even centuries, in a way that the original singer’s autonomy is completely overridden and our hu­man impulse to discover someone new is lost.

THE CONTROVERSY OVER Raanjhanaa might have been the first big clash in India over AI’s improper use. But that is growing now. The recent announcement of an AI-made film, ‘Chiranjeevi Hanuman – The Eternal’, expected to be released next year, by a popular production house Abundantia Entertainment and Vijay Subramaniam, the head of Collective Artists Network, a top talent and entertainment firm, has been met with outrage from some quarters. The filmmaker Anurag Kashyap expressed his displeasure on social media that the head of an agency meant to represent artists and creators was now making a film bereft of them, while others like the director Vikramaditya Motwane pointed out that AI may be replacing filmmakers and creators.

Very little is currently known about the film, whether it will be made by AI entirely or will have some human in­puts, or whether it will be animated or have live action. It is however not the only AI-made film in development. The Hindi film screenwriter and film­maker Vivek Anchalia is currently working on an AI-made movie, Naisha , that he hopes to release around the end of this year.

Anchalia first began using AI tools when he would prepare visual presen­tations to pitch ideas to studios. Later, when he had some songs, which he had written and got composed by the well-known music director Daniel B George, and no money to do anything with them, Anchalia decided to use AI tools to generate some music videos to go with it. “But the tech was constantly evolving, and looking at it [what AI had come up with] felt like there was a story here that could be told,” Anchalia says. He put out a trailer and later some test scenes on­line, and the response seemed enthusiastic, with some streaming platforms, he says, also showing interest.

Anchalia has since launched an AI-native studio, Amazing Indian Stories, through which he will put out AI-made content, from full-length feature films like Naisha to micro-dramas that will only be a few minutes long.

Naisha isn’t however fully AI-made. While much of what we will see has been generated by AI, the music, dialogues and script have been created by humans. Even some aspects of the perfor­mances by the AI-generated characters, especially when emot­ing, will have been done by getting motion capture technology to map the performances of real humans, hired for this purpose, on to the AI characters. “That’s because AI is still not very good at consistently expressing emotions over a long period of time. And in a film, if the performance doesn’t feel real, then it throws you off,” he says.

The pace of AI’s development was however so rapid that at some point Anchalia completely stopped working on the film. “It was crazy,” Anchalia says. “Every five days, there would be a new update. And we had to redo everything that we had done before. Because the tech made everything look old, even something we made just a month before.”

In Chandigarh, the writer Khushwant Singh and his team working at Intelliflicks Studios were going through something similar when making their own AI-made film Maharaja in Denims. The film rights of the movie’s source material, Singh’s 2014 novel of the same name, had been acquired a few times, but no film had materialised, when an old friend who was visiting the city, Gurdeep Singh Pall, formerly a cor­porate vice-president at Microsoft (and currently, the president of AI Strategy at the US software firm Qualtrics) sug­gested they develop it themselves as an AI-made film. But there have been chal­lenges to making what Singh claims will be the first photo-realist AI-made film in the world. “The AI models are not that well trained on Indian faces, or going back to historic times, they’re not well trained, for instance, on things like turbans used, or the beards [sported by men from the Indian subcontinent]. So that’s what has been taking us some time,” he says.

The trailer and the few shorts of the movie, which spans multiple eras, that they have put up online so far, have generated a lot of interest. While the visual aspects of the film have been generated entirely online, the script, dialogues, music, and dubs have been created by humans. Singh and Pal hope to wrap up the film by the end of this year, and the two have also tied up with a studio to figure out how the film could be distributed for release.

While there are fears over what AI may unleash, and the recent episode with Raanjhanaa has generated much misgivings, there are also individuals like Singh who are more hopeful.

“Whether people like it or not, the sheer economics of it is go­ing to make people use it,” Singh says. “And in Bollywood, there are barriers and barriers and barriers. This will open a whole new world. Everyone will be on the starting line now.”

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