[The film project described in this story from The Hollywood Reporter sounds like it’ll be of interest to those who study or create presence experiences (and anyone who, like me, is a fan of the Netflix series Russian Doll or the Peacock series Poker Face. More details from a story in Decrypt follow below and for more quotes from the principals, see coverage in IndieWire. –Matthew]

[Image: Natasha Lyonne, Brit Marling, and Jaron Lanier. Source: IndieWire]

Natasha Lyonne Set to Make Feature Directorial Debut With AI Film — With Help From Jaron Lanier (Exclusive)

The actress and the tech pioneer will also work with Brit Marling and AI studio Asteria on ‘Uncanny Valley.’

By Steven Zeitchik
April 29, 2025

You are not a gadget — but you might be immersed in an artificial intelligence-generated film.

In one of the more unusual creative collaborations to come along in a while, The Hollywood Reporter has learned that Jaron Lanier — the longtime technology innovator and sometime-skeptic — is teaming with Natasha Lyonne and Brit Marling for a new feature film that will be set in the world of immersive video games and make abundant use of AI.

Uncanny Valley, as the project is called, is backed by Asteria, the new AI-based studio founded by Lyonne and Los Angeles-based filmmaker and entrepreneur Bryn Mooser. Lyonne will direct from a script she wrote with Marling; both will star.

Centered on a teenage girl who becomes unmoored by a hugely popular AR video game in a parallel present, the movie will blend traditional live-action and game elements. The latter will be created by Lanier as well as Lyonne and Marling. And the entire enterprise will draw on AI from Asteria partner Moonvalley via a model called “Marey,” which unlike systems from companies like Runway and OpenAI, is built only on data that has been copyright-cleared.

A representative for Asteria says the film “will blend traditional storytelling techniques with cutting-edge AI technologies to create a radical new cinematic experience.”

Whether the film is being geared toward theatrical, streaming or a more cutting-edge platform remains to be seen.

While AI has recently been floated as a way to fill in postproduction gaps and speed up workflow, it has seldom been integrated into the narrative of the film itself, and certainly not with the kind of top-tier names involved here.

Since co-founding Asteria, Lyonne and has been tinkering with large language models as she seeks to become one of the veteran actors at the fore of new forms of storytelling. The movie marks her feature directorial debut; she also directed upcoming episodes of her Columbo-esque Peacock hit Poker Face, which returns for its second season next week.

With the project, Lyonne also pushes further into narrative experimentation that began with the time-looping Russian Doll, while Marling continues the shapeshifting themes that The OA exhibited. (Her partner on that Netflix cult hit, Zal Batmanglij, is also a producer here.) She called this and other sci-fi projects “a tool of resistance.”

More than just another indie project, Uncanny Valley could offer a key early test of whether generative AI will automate and dilute content, as some critics have contended, or whether it could expand creative possibilities.

Mooser, who has a slate of projects at Asteria that rely on its licensed-based model, said he believes this project will work because it comes from storytellers instead of programmers. “When artists lead the tech instead of the other way round, trailblazing and unexpected advancements are possible,” says Mooser, who is producing along with Justin Lacob, an executive at his documentary company. Lyonne is producing via her Animal Pictures banner.

Lyonne noted in a statement that her and Marling’s work on the project — ChatGPT couldn’t come up with this — is like if “Dianne Wiest and Diane Keaton, at their loquacious best, decided to take a journey through The Matrix for sport, only to find themselves holding up an architectural blueprint.” She also called Lanier “a bona fide polymath, a philosophically expansive personal hero and a singular, sage-like character for the ages.”

After leaving Atari to found a crucial VR startup in the 1980s, Lanier has become one of Silicon Valley’s leading thinkers through turns at Microsoft Research and general parts of the public sphere, even as he has also often expressed skepticism for what Big Tech was wreaking. 

“I’m disappointed with the way the Internet has gone in the past ten years,” he told The New Yorker in 2011. “I’ve always felt that the human-centered approach to computer science leads to more interesting, more exotic, more wild, and more heroic adventures than the machine-supremacy approach, where information is the highest goal.” (Lanier advised Steven Spielberg on Minority Report, if any of those themes sound familiar.)

His 2010 manifesto You Are Not a Gadget argued for reclaiming personal data — never mind humanity — in the face of then-growing social-media power. And while he has said that tech can be a powerful tool for artistry, he has also recently noted that AI, unlike VR, can limit consciousness.

Lanier and Lyonne previously appeared together at a Tribeca Film Festival panel at which he made that distinction and said, “In virtual reality you could make very, very strange experiences, you could turn into different animals … you could split up your body into pieces and feel a diffuseness … you could change your sense of time … you could flow your bodies with others.”

But he believes this project can center both technology and humanity even with the use of AI. In a statement to THR, Lanier said, “There is a story here about technology, but it is really about people, and the unpredictable thread of connection that joins us across generations, technologies and divergent weirdness.”

—

[From Decrypt]

AI Can Enable Bigger Visions’: Natasha Lyonne to Direct and Star in AI-Powered Film

In Uncanny Valley, Natasha Lyonne will explore the fallout from AI in a satire developed with futurist Jaron Lanier and writer-director Brit Marling.

By Jason Nelson
April 30, 2025

[snip]

Since the public launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, Hollywood has been grappling with how to adapt to the emerging technology. In 2023, generative AI was a key factor contributing to the months-long strike by the Writers Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA.

In March, Lyonne joined other entertainers—including Mark Ruffalo, Paul McCartney, Cynthia Erivo, Cate Blanchett, and Chris Rock—in signing an open letter to the Trump Administration to uphold existing copyright protections against AI training, after Google and OpenAI requested that the laws be relaxed.

Despite concerns about AI, movie studios and filmmakers are seeking ways to leverage the technology to their advantage. In November, “Blade Runner” and “Gladiator II” director Ridley Scott said he is trying to embrace AI.

“I don’t think it’s going to create jobs except for very high-end specialists,” Scott told the New York Times. “You can have done in a week what would take 10 guys 10 weeks.”

The upcoming film “Watch the Skies,” a Swedish UFO thriller set to hit U.S. theaters this May, will be the first full theatrical release to utilize visual dubbing technology developed by AI company Flawless. This technology digitally alters actors’ lip movements to match English dialogue, making the film appear as if it were shot in English.

“A lot of filmmakers and a lot of actors will be afraid of this technology at first, but we have the creative control, and to act out the film in English was a really exciting experience,” Watch the Skies writer-director Victor Danell said in a making-of-featurette.