Rian Johnson
Filmmaker
Writer-director of Looper, The Last Jedi, and the Knives Out mysteries. Declared “f— AI” on his 2025 press tour, calling it “something that’s making everything worse in every single way,” and signed the March 2025 letter defending copyright against AI training.
In his words
It’s something that’s making everything worse in every single way — I don’t get it.
I mean, I get it in a ‘This makes sense to save money by not paying artists’ way. But then, what the fuck are we doing? Is this where we want to be?
Biography
Rian Johnson (born 1973) debuted with the high-school noir Brick (2005), bent time travel around Bruce Willis in Looper (2012), directed the most argued-about Star Wars film, The Last Jedi (2017), and then built one of the last original franchises in Hollywood with Knives Out and its sequels, starring Daniel Craig as detective Benoit Blanc. With producing partner Ram Bergman he runs the company T-Street.
“F— AI”
Promoting the third Blanc mystery, Wake Up Dead Man, in November 2025, Johnson gave The Hollywood Reporter one of the bluntest AI verdicts of any A-list filmmaker: “Fuck AI.” He elaborated that the technology was “making everything worse in every single way,” allowing only one cynical exception — “I get it in a ‘This makes sense to save money by not paying artists’ way. But then, what the fuck are we doing?” He had also put his name to the March 2025 open letter from 400-plus creatives urging the White House not to grant AI companies a copyright exemption for training.
The stance puts him in friendly tension with collaborators — Natasha Lyonne, star of his series Poker Face and a co-organizer of that same copyright letter, has since embraced what she calls ethically sourced AI filmmaking. Johnson, for his part, drew a line between subject matter and endorsement: telling stories about a technology, he noted, is not the same as blessing it.
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/rian-johnson