I Love AI. And It's Killing Something I Love.

I was 13 years old, making my friends re-enact The Breakfast Club in my living room.

I was the director. I gave notes. I made people do scenes over. I had a vision. I had my dad's old video camera, no crew, no budget, and absolutely no business calling myself a director. But that's what I was doing, and I loved every second of it. To this day, I have no idea how I convinced a group of teenagers to spend their Saturday afternoon taking direction from me in my living room. Whatever I said, it worked. They showed up. They hit their marks. I still don't know how.

That obsession never left. It just never turned into anything real. Over the years, I bought jibs, dollies, stabilizers, drones, gimbals, lighting, and more camera gear than most people will ever touch. I made videos. I dabbled. I have a studio. I shoot photography and video in the hours I can steal for it, and through our creative agency BriteAgency we produce video content for clients too. See some of it at chrischase.com. All the gear, all the space, all the passion. But I never made a "movie". Not a real one. I have a film in my head that I've been carrying around for over ten years. I know the scenes. I know the shots. I know the feeling I want the audience to walk away with. And I've never made it. Probably never will. Not the old-fashioned way, anyway.

AI may finally give me the ability to make the thing I've been carrying for years. But it may also remove the very process that made me want to make it in the first place.

That's the setup. Here's what started it.

I was showing my wife a scene from Interstellar and talking about the performance, the way I always do when I love a movie. The one where Cooper sits down aboard the Endurance and watches the video messages from his kids after coming back from Miller's planet. One hour down there equals seven years on Earth. He's been gone 23 years. His son is a grown man. His daughter has lived most of her life without him. He promised he'd come back, and he watches the proof of what that promise cost.

Watch the scene here before I tell you what makes it extraordinary:

Here's the part that gets me. Matthew McConaughey went in cold on purpose. He never watched that footage in advance. No rehearsal, no preview, nothing. Because he believed that taking one is where you actually react. Everything after that is acting. Christopher Nolan broke his own rules to make it happen. He normally starts wide and works toward the close-up to let an actor warm up. For this scene, he flipped it completely, putting the camera on McConaughey's face first, before he knew what was coming. As a father, the thought of losing decades with his own kids hit McConaughey at a level no technique could have produced. You can feel the difference between a performance and a person. That scene is a person.

And that's what makes McConaughey worth stopping to appreciate. He doesn't play characters. He inhabits them. Rust Cohle, Ron Woodroof, Cooper. Each one feels lived in rather than performed. And that Interstellar scene, maybe two minutes with almost no dialogue, might be the clearest window into what he's actually capable of. His face does about six different things in four seconds, and none of it feels chosen. It feels like something that happened to him. That's the whole game right there.

And that is exactly what I love about filmmaking. Not just the movie. The craft behind it. The choices. The trust between a director and an actor. The decision to flip your entire process upside down because you know something true is about to happen, and you need to be ready to catch it. I don't just watch movies. I go down the rabbit hole after. I've probably watched thousands of hours of filmmaking videos on YouTube over the years. How shots were set up, why certain lenses were chosen, what the director was trying to make you feel and how they engineered it. I want to know how it was made, why those choices were made, and what the actors brought that wasn't on the page. That behind-the-scenes stuff is just as good to me as the movie itself. Sometimes better.

So here's where it gets complicated.

I work in AI. I use it every day. I help people use it ethically. My whole philosophy is simple: the easiest people to fire are the ones you haven't hired yet. Use AI to grow, not to gut. And for the love of everything, don't produce AI slop.

But I also know, with a reasonable amount of certainty, that the movie I've been carrying around in my head for ten years is more likely to get made through AI than through a crew, a budget, and a production schedule. And I honestly don't know how to feel about that.

Could AI produce a version of that Interstellar scene? Technically, yes. It could generate a face contorting with grief, eyes wet, jaw trembling, every detail hitting the right mark. And if you've never heard the backstory, you might not know the difference.

But here's what gets lost. The story behind why that moment exists. The father who showed up on a Monday morning and refused to rehearse because he knew his first real reaction was the only one worth capturing. The director who threw out his own rulebook because he recognized something genuine was about to happen. Other takes may have been usable. But the first one was the one. That is not a workflow. That is not a prompt. That is two human beings who trusted each other enough to do something uncomfortable and caught lightning because of it. AI can generate the image of that story. It cannot have lived the story. There is no backstory. There is no Monday morning. There is no first take. It will probably even generate blooper reels someday. Funny ones. But they won't be real. Nobody will have actually tripped over a cable or cracked up between takes. There will be no story behind them either.

If you're watching a movie purely for entertainment, none of that matters. You feel what you feel, and you move on. But for people like me, that backstory is half the art. The humanity behind the camera is part of what makes the thing on screen matter.

I'm not saying AI-made films can't move people. They can. I'm saying something different gets lost when there was no human moment behind the moving image.

So where does that leave me?

Honestly, I'm still working it out. If AI gives me a way to finally get my vision out of my head and onto a screen, part of me will be genuinely thrilled. Ten years is a long time to carry something around. But I'd be lying if I said there wasn't real grief in it too. Because the version of making that movie I always dreamed about wasn't just about the finished film. It was about running track through a building so you could get that smooth dolly shot that makes an audience feel like they're floating through the scene. It was about finding the right camera angle that makes an audience feel something they can't explain. It was about the conversation between a director and an actor where something unexpected happens, and you both know you just got it. That experience, that whole messy human process, is probably not how my movie gets made. And that loss is real, even if the end result is something I'm proud of. What I won't lose is the creative vision behind it. The story is still mine. The shots are still mine. I'd just be directing a very different kind of crew.

The craft is the point. The collaboration, the accidents, the moments of accidental magic between real people on a real set. AI can generate around those things, but it cannot actually replace them. It can give me a movie. It cannot give me the Monday morning.

And watching that become optional is genuinely crushing, even as I spend my days helping people use the very tools making it optional.

I don't think AI is going to change how I feel about any of that. It's just going to make it easier to pretend I don't miss it.