Natasha Lyonne, Brit Marling to Debut AI Sci-Fi Film ‘Uncanny Valley’

From the Slums of Beverly Hills to the heart of Silicon Valley: actress, writer, and director Natasha Lyonne isn’t shying away from artificial intelligence, even as fellow creatives in Hollywood fret over what the tech means for their industry.

As revealed by The Hollywood Reporter, Lyonne is teaming up with The OA co-creator Brit Marling and virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier on a sci-fi film called Uncanny Valley. The movie will include AI-generated visuals from Asteria, a self-described “artist-led generative AI film and animation studio” co-founded by Lyonne and her partner, the filmmaker and entrepreneur Bryn Mooser. Asteria and its partner Moonvalley AI recently debuted the video model Marey, which they tout as “clean and ethical” because it was trained only on licensed content, whereas similar models have scraped publicly available or copyrighted material without permission.

Uncanny Valley, co-written by Lyonne and Marling, co-stars both actresses, with Lyonne making her feature directorial debut. It follows Mila, a teenage girl who becomes immersed in an open-world augmented reality video game, with the boundaries between physical and digital realities increasingly blurred. In a statement, Lyonne described working on the project with Marling as 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.” It’s not yet clear whether the film, which Lyonne has also compared to the films of the Wachowski sisters, who wrote and directed The Matrix, is intended for theatrical release or a streaming platform.

Presumably, generative AI will figure into sequences involving the game played by Mila. An Asteria representative told The Hollywood Reporter that the movie “will blend traditional storytelling techniques with cutting-edge AI technologies to create a radical new cinematic experience.”

AI has been a fractious issue across the entertainment industry and was a major sticking point in the 2023 Hollywood strikes, which found screenwriters and actors fearful that studios could use it to churn out scripts or insert a movie star’s likeness into visual content long after their death. Hundreds of actors, directors, and other film insiders — led by Lyonne — recently signed a letter urging the federal government not to loosen copyright protections preventing AI companies from training their models on a wider pool of writing, visuals, and more.

But while unions have pushed back on these tools, companies like OpenAI, which in West Hollywood this March staged a festival of shorts made with its text-to-video model Sora, have sought to convince Hollywood of their potential. Some studio executives, meanwhile, are eager to implement such models in their production flows, not least for achieving impressive visual effects with far less human labor.

All of which makes Uncanny Valley a precarious proposition for Lyonne and her creative team. On the one hand, it sounds like the story aims to comment on the latest innovations in tech while showcasing them, and Asteria has clearly marketed itself as a non-predatory AI company. On the other, the public has a generally negative view of AI, and is far less optimistic about its prospects than those currently working in the field. Among 2024’s Oscar favorites, more than one film faced criticism for relying on AI.

That said, it’s anyone’s guess whether Hollywood can fend off the machines in the long run, and those who embrace them now may just be adapting to the inevitable. As for Uncanny Valley, audiences will decide for themselves if it represents the future they want to see.