Filmmaker Ram Gopal Varma on Wednesday made a strong pitch for the use of advanced artificial intelligence (AI) in cinema, arguing that emerging tools could democratise filmmaking and dismantle the industry’s traditional gatekeeping structures.
Citing S. S. Rajamouli as an example of how established directors secure massive budgets, Varma questioned how many similarly talented individuals across the country never receive comparable opportunities or financial backing.
“@ssrajsmouli is the no. 1 director because he makes the most expensive films and the most successful ..People fund him a 1000 crores or more because of his track record and all that again is due to his unsurpassed creative imagination. But now in a country of some 120 crore people, who knows how many more Rajamoulis or even better than him are there in small towns, villages, engineering colleges, and government jobs right now,” Varma wrote in a long X post.
“People who have creative vision , but who will never get access to neither the film industry nor funds to put their vision on screen. The opportunity gate is locked for them and the keys are only with a few chosen ones,” the filmmaker added.
Varma praised AI platform Seedance 2.0, claiming it has upended the conventional model of film production by enabling individuals to create large-scale cinematic sequences from descriptive prompts alone.
“Now Seedance 2.0 just kicked that gate down and set it on fire. This can take just their descriptive prompts and create a cinematic, multi shot, sound designed, devastatingly impactful scenes that look like they cost 100s of crores and took months or years to make. Suddenly, a creative guy in Gorakhpur or Coimbatore or Satara or wherever, doing a mundane job to feed his family, who can’t even afford to come to Mumbai can just write a scene and the likes of Seedance makes it for him and that is true democracy in motion,” Varma further added.
Calling it “true democracy in motion,” Varma said such tools shift power away from industry elites. “Real democracy is taking the tools out of the hands of the elite and putting them in the hands of the people. Seedance just did that to cinema,” he added.
The Satya director further predicted filmmaking’s traditional ecosystem could become redundant if AI evolves to generate full-length, theatrical-quality films.
“A director’s primary job is to take a scene on paper and transfer it onto screen. No more star issues. No more producers panicking over budgets. No more 300 people standing around waiting for one shot. Just one person. One prompt. One mind,” he wrote on X.
“The film industry as we know it with its unions, its crores of ‘overheads,’ its ‘only we know how to make films’ arrogance will die Not slowly. Not peacefully. It will get murdered brutally But at the heart of it, this is actually the liberation of cinema,” he further said.
"Welcome to the new era. Where only talent matters more than access. Where the murderer is also the saviour. And there will be no going back ever So is it THE DEATH OF THE FILM INDUSTRY ? or is it THE ULTIMATE DEMOCRATISATION OF THE FILM INDUSTRY," he concluded his post.
