Shawn Levy
Director and Producer
Director of Deadpool & Wolverine and Star Wars: Starfighter, producer of Stranger Things. He calls AI an inevitable and “essential” part of filmmaking’s future — provided it supports the creative voice rather than replacing it — while saying he has yet to use it in any meaningful way.
Why this score
How the formula works →- 38%nuancedHolds a documented two-sided view
- 31%nuancedSupports AI only with conditions
- 23%pro3 pro-AI statements (forceful)
- 8%anti1 anti-AI statement (measured)
Includes the ×1.25 multiplier for having a stake in an AI-impacted field. Evidence splits 23% pro, 8% anti, 69% direction-free → Nuanced
In his words
I think it’s going to be essential, but I think to hide our heads in the sand and pretend that it’s not going to be not just an emergent but an essential part of our lives, not just filmmaking lives, [but] lives lives, I think that would be naive and foolish.
Biography
Shawn Levy (born 1968 in Montreal) is a Canadian-American director and producer whose films have grossed some $3.5 billion worldwide. He directed the Night at the Museum series, Real Steel, Free Guy, The Adam Project and Deadpool & Wolverine, and through his company 21 Laps Entertainment he is an executive producer of Stranger Things. He wrapped Star Wars: Starfighter, starring Ryan Gosling, in 2026.
No AI de-aging on Stranger Things
Levy’s first brush with the AI debate was practical rather than philosophical. The final season of Stranger Things was delayed for years by the pandemic and the 2023 strikes, leaving a cast of child actors visibly older than their characters. After an offhand remark of his was widely read as hinting at digital de-aging, Deadline asked him in November 2023 whether the production would use AI to make the kids look younger. His answer was one word — “No” — followed by a shrug at how far the speculation had travelled.
I kind of was surprised that one sentence I said around this topic traveled so widely. The bottom line is, we know what we’re doing on this show. Our cast is brilliant. And these characters that the Duffers have created are so vivid. I’m not worried about everyone suiting back up and bringing them to life.
“Something to embrace, not fear”
By April 2026, deep in the edit on Star Wars: Starfighter, Levy gave Variety a fuller position at the Breakthrough Prize ceremony. He was blunt about his own track record with the technology — he had not used it — and equally blunt that this would not last.
To date, I’ve not incorporated AI in any meaningful way in any phase of my storytelling process, but I have no doubt that in the course of my career we will see its integration.
The condition he attaches is authorship. Integration has to be responsible, he said, and has to preserve what he called the primacy of the creative voice — singular and irreplicable — rather than substituting for it. He also said he spends part of every day trying to increase his own fluency around the regulatory options surrounding AI, which puts him closer to Christopher Nolan’s insistence on human authorship than to the studios racing to deploy the tools.
To the point that many smarter people than I have made, it’s about integrating these technologies responsibly and with still the primacy of the creative voice and not a potential replacement for that voice because I think that what you get from creative voice and vision is singular and irreplicable, but if we can use these emerging AI capacities to support storytelling in still a kind of creative and human first workflow then I think it’s something to embrace, not fear.
Quote sources
- Variety, 2026(variety.com)
- Deadline, 2023(deadline.com)
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/shawn-levy
