Richard Linklater
Filmmaker
Director of Boyhood and the Before trilogy, famous for filming real time passing. Insists AI cannot make cinema — “No algorithm is gonna do that. No prompt is gonna do that” — and would rather shoot a film across 20 years than use AI de-aging.
In his words
The hardest thing to do is still to tell a compelling story that people want to see and be engaged with. That’s a lot of points you have to hit — that’s acting, that’s story structure, that’s pace, style. No algorithm is gonna do that. No prompt is gonna do that.
Biography
Richard Linklater (born 1960 in Houston) helped invent American indie film with Slacker (1990) and has spent three decades making time itself his medium: the Before trilogy checked in on the same couple every nine years, and Boyhood (2014) was shot with the same cast across twelve. His 2025 film Nouvelle Vague, a loving recreation of Godard shooting Breathless, is practically a manifesto for handmade cinema.
“No prompt is gonna do that”
Asked about AI in a late-2025 AFP interview ahead of Nouvelle Vague’s Los Angeles premiere, Linklater was unbothered rather than alarmed: AI is “just one more tool,” he said, but one that “doesn’t have intuitions or consciousness,” and he suspects it will prove “less revolutionary than everybody thinks” in the near term. The core of filmmaking — compelling story, acting, structure, pace, style — remains out of reach: “No algorithm is gonna do that. No prompt is gonna do that.”
His practice backs the talk. Rather than use the AI de-aging that let other directors span decades in post-production, Linklater is shooting his adaptation of Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along over twenty real years, letting his cast age in reverse story order the honest way — what he laughingly calls his “hanging-on-to-humanity approach.”
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/richard-linklater