Since striking in 2023, artists have brought the rapid acceleration in the use of generative AI in film to the forefront of contract negotiation and cultural consciousness. Filmmaking is a creative endeavour, but it is also a technical practice. Artificial intelligence is beginning to automate the practice of filmmaking in all stages of production, from CGI, location scouting, to script editing- roles that for over 100 years have been fulfilled and honed by humans. The permeation poses an industrial revolution that confronts filmmakers at every level of the industry with a two-fold threat: an existential threat to the value of their skill, art and creativity, and secondly, an upheaval of the livelihoods of the most vulnerable. 

 Just like cinema and technology, fashion, advertising, and film have always had a complex relationship. Every year, Prada enlists a visionary filmmaker to direct a campaign for their signature Galleria bag- Jonathan Glazer directed Johansson in the 2024 campaign, and artists such as Willy Vanderperre have contributed their interpretations to commercials for the brand. 

 In 2025, the filmmaker commissioned was Yorgos Lanthimos. Lanthimos is no stranger to the surreal, nor a muse. In Ritual Identities, his incantation of a galleria ad, he follows Scarlett Johansson as she relays an intricate ritual to a faceless partner and traverses New York City collecting strange ingredients. The partner is later revealed to be another incarnation of Johansson, the ingredients creating a third clone who emerges from a chrome sphere in the final scene of the ad.

 For every image and choice in the narrative of Ritual Identities, there is a real-world parallel to what AI threatens to corrupt. 

There is a timely poignancy to a filmmaker using a platform within the advertising industry to reaffirm the humanity of art and the importance of autonomy. The advert is a microcosmic reflection on the uniquely human aspects of the creative process, and the relationship to identity- a commentary existential threat AI poses to upending everything Lanthimos presents as vital. 

The advert itself opens with a shot of human hands—specifically, someone holding another person’s hand, an image of anatomy generative AI finds particularly difficult to replicate. The ritual is communicated through word of mouth, an old-fashioned method juxtaposed with the futuristic ability Johansson’s character possesses. Her skill and knowledge are passed down intimately. 

Johansson lists such things as a ‘morning breeze. Not before 5am, and no later than 12’. There is an experiential quality to every ingredient,  whether it’s being capable of feeling a morning breeze, to having dead loved ones to whisper the names of, to breaking an antique Chinese vase—something that speaks to practised and irreplaceable artistry. In particular,  this act of breaking, so that no two pieces would be identical, and no two vases would break the same way, either. 

 Lanthimos cuts to beautiful wides and curious cityscapes, old always blending with new. The city is more of a backdrop, the setting of each place Johansson goes to collect her items, devoid of people— the kind of places that someone living in a city as large as New York might carve out for themselves, spaces they might want to protect or covet. 

He utilises jump cuts, moving from static close-ups to wides of Johansson’s actions. It’s typical of his strange and disjointed style- one he utilises in Dogtooth, moving between wide shots of different closeness to show character actions with and without the presence of their observers on screen.  The technique is rare in narrative film; it’s widely considered to break the invisibility of an edit. But the way in which Lanthimos utilises them allows the audience to experience the detail of each action and ingredient, a strangeness we may not question without the wide shots that contextualise Johansson’s contrarian tasks with more familiar settings—a clear contrast of old and new, and a clear contrast of the surreal and mundane. 

The point Lanthimos seems to be making, and an idea expressed in some of the specific requirements for the ritual, the whispered names of dead loved ones, the ashes of any song about love or pain, is that the components of an identity are not immediate. The components of an identity are holistic, rooted in experience and emotion, the best and the worst of the pendulum of human existence. A generative AI does not have dead loved ones; it cannot feel a morning breeze. It may be able to write a song about love or pain, but it cannot feel either.

The building blocks of an identity, and the components that inform an artist’s work, are impossible to reduce to the inputs or limits of a generative AI. It requires Johansson, as a creator, to interact with the world around her. 

In Nimic, a short film directed by Lanthimos, a cellist is confronted with a woman who suddenly starts to copy his every move, inserting herself into his life in every conceivable way; sleeping in his bed, speaking at the same time as him, eating his same breakfast. No one around him seems alarmed, and there would be no clue that she would eventually entirely consume him and his identity. Save for a lasting scene, where she is unable to play the cello, butchering a solo we’ve heard the lead play beautifully.

Nimic and Ritual Identities are two sides of the same coin: how we would react if something or someone started to recreate us. The key difference, and the throughline to AI, is represented by the choice of Johansson to embody a woman with autonomy over her image, likeness and identity. The counter-narrative that Lanthimos conceives of is consent. The two pieces depict the significance of when something is created with care, attention and the good intentions of an artist. One in which a livelihood is usurped without consent, without accountability, and without explanation. One concludes in a companion, a new self, and one concludes in a knock off, a destruction of the self. 

There is a particular significance to this being the first collaboration between Lanthimos and Johansson. Their filmographies are both imbued with the speculative and the dystopian. Johansson voiced the AI ‘Samantha’ in HER, an eerily predictive digital girlfriend.

The New York Times reported in 2024 that Johansson alleged OpenAI chief executive, Sam Altman, approached her and her agent twice to be the voice of one of their chatbots. She declined. OpenAI later suspended the release of its voice chatbot ‘SKY’ when Johansson threatened legal action over the similarities to her voice. She spoke out again when an AI video was released depicting her and other Jewish celebrities criticising Kanye West. She said that while she vehemently agreed with the need to end hate speech, the misuse of AI was not the path to preventing it.

The autonomy Johansson has over her identity and replication, as well as the autonomy she gives her creations and collaborators, is in direct contrast with the application of artificial intelligence, and the violations a woman of her visibility might face should we fail to exercise the same care and restraint her galleria character does. 

Cloning, doppelgangers and replicants are not a unique convention. But Lanthimos does not employ the design or interpretation that previous iterations have included. His creator is not a team in lab coats, or a mad genius, or a corporation bent on producing a disposable labour force. Nor is the method by which his clones are created reliant on lines of code or futuristic supercomputers.

The act of creation itself is treated reverently by Johansson’s character. She is not creating hundreds of incantations in her likeness. There is the sense she enjoys the process, that she is creating a friend or companion rather than a copy or footsoldier. 

Not only does AI posit the ability to recreate an actor like Johansson’s voice over and over again for infinite applications or roles, but developing software also poses the ability to create an actress aspiring to her level of fame, acclaim and visibility without agency or independence. Eline Van der Velden, the creator behind the controversial AI actor Tilly Norwood, recently announced she has plans for 40 more AI celebrities. 

The nature of a technology that is evolving faster than we can respond with research or regulation poses an existential threat to those, such as Johansson, with the potential for users to profit from the replication of their identity. 

In Ritual identities, there is the ever-present narration as  Johansson explains in person, out loud, the process by which her clone might replicate the ritual. In sharing this knowledge, they stand on equal footing-  it’s implied that the third clone will come to share in the secret. Johansson does not wield the details of the ritual to control her creation; she shares in the catharsis and process. 

Whether for an audiobook or pornography produced without consent. At a time when artists are fighting for protection of their identities, as well as their professions, AI is farming online archives of film, art and media to imitate them, and corporations are attempting to mass-produce actors.  Lanthimos’s depiction of creative responsibility and identity is a representation of restraint and autonomy. 

The success of filmmakers like Lanthimos is defined by their ability to create work no one else can. Work that is so unique and special because it leaves you searching for a film or story that captures a feeling and has an impact only they can have. Instead of being able to find a piece in a similar genre or narrative, you are left with only their filmography or references.

This is not a status afforded to all, and is foundational for the distinct differences in the media exploring the existential rhetoric in the advent of AI, and the very real impact to the working class. 

The Hollywood Reporter, one of the most influential outlets in the American industry and on the global stage, reported in January of 2024 that in the next three years (a staggeringly short amount of time for a technology in its infancy), AI tools and applications threaten the security of over 204,000 jobs. The most vulnerable being digital artists, concept artists, animators and translators.

These are people at the behest of an unstable, freelance-based industry. These are people working second jobs and creating unpaid work to get their foot in the door on their art on a producer’s desk. These are people with mouths to feed. These are people with talent, skill and potential. They are people who simply do not have the bargaining power, nor the job security of individuals like Lanthimos and Johansson.

The marketing industry has a huge production sector; the making of television, cinema, or online video ads requires crews composed of individuals with the same skills and experience required for films: actors, cinematographers, sound recordists, editors, writers and set designers. Those workers who may want to work in feature film and scripted work, practise their craft, sustain themselves, gain experience and make connections through the commercial industry. A subsection in which brands such as Prada lead and others follow. 

In an interview with The Independent, in discussing his relationship to Searchlight, the company that backed The Favourite, and Kinds of Kindness, among other features, Lanthimos said that “they have faith in filmmakers…. It’s kind of the same relationship with other people in the crew or other actors. If they actually believe in you and they want to support you, they’ll do that.”

It is poignant that in this moment,  Prada mirrors Searchlight’s investment in artistry and selects an auteur filmmaker. And a figurehead such as Johansson for their campaigns. 

Just like the strikes, Ritual Identities represents a distinct choice for studios, creatives and regulators. In the near future, there might be the option to prompt a generative AI programme to ‘ create a 60-second Prada Galleria ad in the style of Yorgos Lanthimos’ or a Prada ad actually directed by Yorgos Lanthimos. Lanthimos seems clear on the things he values most about human artwork and the need for studios and brands to trust filmmakers and their crews.  

The chips filmmakers are left with in the face of AI are skill, individuality and audience. Their greatest hope is leaders such as Lanthimos and Johansson, the stars with voices more likely to be heard than their own. 

Ritual Identities represents a hope that filmmakers working at the highest echelons of the industry will use the talents and tools at their disposal, creating work that makes a statement, work that could only ever be theirs. 

Where the potential of Ritual Identities falls, and why I think it provides such ground for the conversation, is in demonstrating the tools; medium, metaphor, and meaning, by which artists and brands can separate themselves from the advent of automation, reaffirm the vitality of exclusively human experience in the creative process, and commit themselves to protecting their profession and their colleagues. Ritual Identities represents a symbolic crossroads for the film industry- the advert is fertile grounds for a battle cry for human art and the hope for us yet. I can only hope the right people are listening.

Images courtesy of Bethany Weeks (CC BY-NC 2.0) and Ishmael Daro (CC BY 2.0)