Shekhar Kapur

Shekhar Kapur (born 1945) is an Indian filmmaker who moved between Bollywood and Hollywood decades before it was common: the superhero classic Mr. India (1987), the searing Bandit Queen (1994), and the Oscar-winning Elizabeth (1998) and its sequel The Golden Age. He is among the most senior figures in Indian cinema to embrace generative AI wholesale.

From ChatGPT experiment to AI series

In 2023, Kapur asked ChatGPT to invent a story for a sequel to his 1983 debut Masoom. The model read everything written about the film in thirty seconds and returned a credible moral dilemma — the rejected son, now a father himself, learning to forgive. Kapur was impressed but unthreatened, judging his own version better and declaring himself still far more creative than the AI. The actual Masoom sequel, he has said, contains no AI.

His other projects are a different story. In 2025 he unveiled Warlord, a science-fiction series created entirely with generative AI — an interdimensional warrior kept alive by a lover who pulls him between dimensions — telling Variety that sequences which once took months now take two weeks, making an otherwise unaffordable epic possible. At India’s WAVES Summit in May 2025, he pushed the logic to its provocative end: with AI he no longer needs Amitabh Bachchan or Shah Rukh Khan — he can create his own star. He has also argued that in India, AI adoption will rise “from the bottom of the pyramid,” democratizing production far beyond the studios.

Kapur pairs the enthusiasm with warnings about misuse, and his claim that AI stars can replace flesh-and-blood icons has unsettled an industry built on them. But at 80, he is directing more ambitiously than he could a decade ago — because, he says, the tools finally caught up to the imagination.