SEOUL, South Korea — South Korean director Yeon Sang-ho built his films on artificial intelligence. Her latest film, “Paradise Lost,” revisits the theme from the psychological thriller about a mother who spends nine years with an artificial intelligence version of her lost son until his real son comes home.
Kim Hyun-joo plays Ryu So-young, whose son Sun-woo is kidnapped during a school camping trip. In his anguish, he relies on the forever 10-year-old to be revived by artificial intelligence with augmented reality glasses. When the real Sun-woo, played by Bae Hyeon-seong, returns as an adult stranger, he finds himself torn between the two.
The “Train to Busan” director’s previous artificial intelligence-themed films include the 2023 Netflix movie “JUNG_E” and the zombie thriller “Colony”, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival this year.
“Paradise Lost” premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and opened in North American theaters on Friday.
The film came from an unlikely source: Yeon’s mother, a housewife who works as a cleaner. When his son Yeon, who had never formally studied screenwriting, worried about how difficult it was to write stories, he told him that anyone could do it.
He wrote a story of about three pages about a mother and her son in a village; this story eventually became “Paradise Lost”; Its title came from John Milton’s epic poem about the expulsion of humanity from paradise.
Yeon spoke to The Associated Press about the film, the limits of artificial intelligence and why Asian filmmakers may be more open to the film than Hollywood.
This interview has been translated and edited for clarity and brevity.
YEON: Mostly relationships. Continuity in a relationship is key to seeing someone as the same person. AI Sun-woo had held this role for nine years. But he doesn’t really think. He gives appropriate reactions to So-young. Can you call this a relationship? Even more tragically, isn’t true human identity found in relationships with people?
YEON: I see AI as a very complex manifestation of users’ desires. So when AI Sun-woo cries, I think it’s more of something deep inside So-young coming to the surface than it is her own judgment.
Artificial intelligence is a manifestation of collective intelligence, so it is difficult to say that it is capable of deep thinking. I don’t know how this will play out in the distant future. But the way to find out is very simple: If you tell the artificial intelligence to do something and it says “I don’t want it”, it has started to think. Artificial intelligence does not refuse. My children absolutely refuse.
Can there be a heaven where there is no pain as long as contemplation exists? If only good things had happened, after a week there would be no good things anymore. So I never really understood the paradise in Milton’s “Paradise Lost.” I felt something similar when looking at AI.
YEON: I feel like that. But “AI” is a very broad term. To avoid AI, you need to stop searching; Even search engines use it. Some talk about the environmental damage of data centers, but how much of that comes from movies?
English-language films had a much larger market and much larger budgets. More or less expensive films had to be made for the English-speaking market. This is breaking down as artificial intelligence and many other technologies develop, and artificial intelligence is accelerating this. Asia’s small market kept him from even considering doing science fiction. Now Asian movies can cover more topics, so I think AI is more acceptable.
YEON: Filmmaking sometimes requires collective intelligence. We survey 100 people in blind previews before release. In a way, this is a test of collective intelligence; It works on the same principle as artificial intelligence.
We’ve turned “AI” into something of an icon, but when we look underneath it, we see the question of how much collective intelligence popular filmmaking requires. I find discussions that gather everything under the title of “Artificial Intelligence” unproductive. If the question is wrong, there can be no answer.