For twelve years, I tried to make a movie about a man who stole a corpse and slept with it for 7 years. A TRUE story.
Already, I realize I have not made things easy for myself.
The film is *Von Cosel*, based on the true story of Carl Tanzler, the eccentric radiology technician who became obsessed with a young tuberculosis patient named Elena Milagro de Hoyos in 1930s Key West. After she died, Tanzler eventually removed her body from its tomb, brought it home and spent years attempting to preserve it.
So: necrophilia. Corpse theft. Obsession. Death. Delusion. The usual ingredients financiers look for.
For years I researched and wrote (links available). I tried, on and off, for more than a decade to figure out how to make the thing. And the problem wasn’t writing it. I knew what the movie was. The problem was that the movie I could see in my head and the movie I could realistically afford to make lived in two completely different economic systems.
This is not exactly an exotic problem for independent filmmakers.
You compromise. You rewrite. You reduce locations. You ask what can happen in a hallway instead of a ballroom. You learn that your sweeping historical epic has, through the miracle of independent film financing, become three people standing next to a rented fern.
And then AI arrived.
I know.
I’m sorry.
But suddenly, this strange little movie that had been sitting around my head for twelve years became possible.
Not easy. Not automatic. Not “type a sentence and go have lunch while the computer makes your movie.” But possible.
So I made it. Over many many dark nights behind my laptop screen.
And somewhere along the way I discovered something I hadn’t anticipated: I had apparently chosen a filmmaking technology even more objectionable than necrophilia.
That’s impressive.
I should make something clear before this turns into one of *those* articles. I am not here to convince anyone that AI is good.
I’m not particularly interested in convincing you that AI is bad, either.
I am also not claiming that festivals are rejecting *Von Cosel* because it uses AI. Maybe they’re rejecting it because they don’t like it. That remains one of the oldest and most reliable reasons for rejecting a movie.
