Alex Proyas

Alex Proyas (born 1963) is an Egyptian-born Australian director whose gothic visual style defined The Crow (1994) and the cult classic Dark City (1998), and who brought Isaac Asimov to the multiplex with I, Robot (2004). After Gods of Egypt (2016) he stepped back from studio filmmaking — and reemerged as one of the first established directors to make features with generative AI.

Sensoria and Heaven

Through his Mystery Clock Cinema channel, Proyas released teasers for Sensoria, a feature with an all-AI cast whose imagery and voices are entirely AI-generated. The story follows “NPCs” — forgotten inhabitants of a dystopian 1974 city deemed non-essential by the authorities. Proyas branded the project plainly: video and voice by AI, written and directed by a human, calling it his experiment in conveying a personal vision “via the machines.”

In April 2026, Deadline reported that Ex Machina Studios and K5 International were reviving Heaven, a passion project Proyas had been unable to mount for years, with K5 pre-selling it at the Cannes market. The sci-fi film — a bureaucrat escapes his collapsing life into a technologically perfected afterlife that proves an illusion — will be produced with Ex Machina’s proprietary AI tools, which the company says build large-scale worlds at controlled budgets while prioritizing human actors.

For Proyas, AI is less a novelty than a route back to the screen: a director famous for expensive, world-building visions can now attempt them without nine-figure budgets. Detractors see AI slop dressed in auteur clothing; Proyas answers by putting his own name, taste, and decades of craft on the results.