Does AI-produced film ‘Maharaja in Denims’ mark a shift in Indian cinema?
- Khushwant Singh’s historical novel is set to be adapted for the big screen with no sets, actors, or even cameras, in a first for India’s film industry
- Unlike Hollywood, India’s film industry is cautiously optimistic about AI due to the lower production costs and doubt that it can replace human creativity
When Indian writer Khushwant Singh in 2014 published his novel, Maharaja in Denims, he did not foresee that it would one day be adapted for the big screen – much less that it would make history as a film with no sets, actors, or even cameras.
The story – about a Punjab teenager who believes he is a reincarnation of a prominent historical figure – may well be the world’s first feature-length film generated entirely by artificial intelligence (AI), and its production marks a potentially huge shift for India’s massive film industry.
“AI is the way forward and it has opened doors to limitless creative possibilities, and will surely disrupt traditional norms, shaping world cinema,” Singh, 51, told This Week In Asia.
He called AI the new paradigm for “accessible and efficient creativity”.
The film will be produced by Intelliflicks Studios in the northern Indian city of Chandigarh, a joint venture between Singh, its CEO, and tech guru Gurdeep Singh Pall, a former corporate vice-president at Microsoft who oversaw business AI projects.
India’s film industry already has a few small-scale AI-generated experiments in the works. Filmmaker Guhan Senniappan plans to include a 2.5-minute AI sequence in his coming Tamil film, Weapon, while Shekhar Kapur had a script generated by AI for the sequel to his 1983 film, Masoom. But Intelliflicks’ effort will propel the use of AI to an unprecedented level in Indian film.
Spanning three different eras, Maharaja in Denims follows wealthy teenager Hari as he experiences flashbacks from three of his past lives – as Indian Sikh ruler Maharaja Ranjit Singh, who was known as the “Lion of Punjab” for protecting the region from Afghan invasion in the 19th century; a victim of India’s partition in 1947, when around 100,000 Sikhs were killed; and a victim of anti-Sikh riots in 1984 that killed more than 2,733 Sikhs.
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The film will be generated by AI, save for the script, which will be written by an as yet unnamed writer. Intelliflicks released a trailer for the film earlier this month.
Pall, 57, said human creativity would be blended with AI to generate digital sets and film shots, as well render music and dialogue.
Singh said producing Maharaja in Denims in the traditional manner would have cost at least US$6 million, but AI allowed them to produce it for a sixth of that price.
But AI-generated filmmaking has its challenges. The studio’s creative director Revant Bogra faced numerous hiccups in creating a likeness of Ajmal Kasab, the lone surviving attacker of the 2009 terror plot in Mumbai. Intelliflicks also faced hurdles in lip-synching scenes with long dialogue sequences.
Pall said new research and new AI models were emerging rapidly, often every week, and those helped reduce the amount of effort required to create scenes or movement in the background of a still image or a higher-resolution version of a scene.
A disrupter in Indian film?
Unlike Hollywood, where actors and screenwriters have staged protests over AI-generated content in cinema, India’s film industry – the world’s largest producer of feature films with more than 1,200 releases a year in some 25 languages – is still trying to gauge the impact of AI.
Calling AI in films a “nascent, albeit rapidly evolving, technological shift”, Nitin Tej Ahuja, the CEO of the Producers Guild of India, said it was too early to assess how disruptive the technology would be for Indian filmmaking.
Ahuja told This Week in Asia that AI could help producers by speeding up and enhancing production processes and values, but producers had to also be mindful of the unauthorised usage of their intellectual property.
Recently, Indian voice actors expressed concerns over the use of their audition recordings, telephone conversations or even publicly available audio to create AI-generated voice clones.
Last year, Bollywood actor Anil Kapoor, best known for his role in Slumdog Millionaire, won a court case regarding the unauthorised use of his name, likeness, image, voice and any other aspect of his persona through AI.
Cinematographer Sudeep Chatterjee, of Gangubai Kathaiwadi and Bajirao Mastani fame, said he did not feel threatened by the advent of AI in films, as it could only aggregate information from work he had already created, but not emulate his creativity or life experiences, let alone the inspiration that will fuel his future artistic efforts.
“Art is generated in the mind, and AI can never learn what’s going on in my mind for future projects,” Chatterjee said.
Echoing these sentiments, screenwriter Manu Sharma, 46, whose latest release is Dono, said that AI “might replace junior writers at entry level – because they may not have much life experience to offer in their writing”.
Ruchika Roy, 46, who wrote the screenplays for films including Dil Bekaraar and 24 India, said AI was a useful tool in that it efficiently summarised what it has understood of her writing, which allowed her to identify gaps in her stories more quickly.
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While there are fears about whether writers would be paid well or even hired if AI could generate stories, Roy said writers brought a specificity and sense of the unexpected to their writing, something that could never be duplicated.
But Roy said she believed AI could give Indians access to a far wider range of films than they’d previously enjoyed, as anyone with access to the technology could now create a viable story in a fraction of the time.
“People who are currently the gatekeepers at television channels and over-the-top media platforms will have to look beyond films that they feel only A-grade actors will sign on to,” she said.
