In the first thirty seconds of the director and artist Paul Trillo’s short film “Thank You for Not Answering,” a woman gazes out the window of a

An A.I.-Generated Film Depicts Human Loneliness, in “Thank You for Not Answering”

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2023-05-27 00:30:06

In the first thirty seconds of the director and artist Paul Trillo’s short film “Thank You for Not Answering,” a woman gazes out the window of a subway car that appears to have sunk underwater. A man appears in the window swimming toward the car, his body materializing from the darkness and swirling water. It’s a frightening, claustrophobic, violent scene—one that could have taken hundreds of thousands of dollars of props and special effects to shoot, but Trillo generated it in a matter of minutes using an experimental tool kit made by an artificial-intelligence company called Runway. The figures in the film appear real, played by humans who may actually be underwater. But another glance reveals the uncanniness in their blank eyes, distended limbs, mushy features. The surreal or hyperreal aesthetic of A.I.-generated video may rely on models trained on live-action footage, but the result “feels closer to dreaming,” Trillo told me. He continued, “It’s closer to when you close your eyes and try to remember something.”

“Thank You for Not Answering” is an evocation of loneliness and isolation. A reedy voice-over—from an A.I.-generated vocal model, trained on Harry Dean Stanton’s monologue from the film “Paris, Texas”—reads a script written by Trillo, a voice mail on an answering machine, mourning the loss of possibilities and memories, perhaps of the ruins of a relationship. “One day, the entirety of our lives will be at our backs and the what-if of it all will still haunt me,” the eerie voice says, rambling over the film’s two and a half minutes. Trillo wrote the script during the height of the pandemic, a moment of total disconnection. He set it over a cascade of A.I. imagery: flashes of flooding subway cars, phone booths in the desert, elegantly dressed people at parties, and apartments lit up at night. The vibe is part Edward Hopper and part David Lynch—a filmic inspiration of Trillo’s.

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