Mobilized’s Steven Jay interviews Michael Caporale.
Michael Caporale has spent an entire life behind the lens of a camera. So, it is with over fifty years practicing his craft, that we have chosen to interview him regarding the introduction of the AI program SORA, and what it will mean to the production community and audiences alike.
Michael earned a B.F.A. from Syracuse University in 1971 while also studying Photography at their Newhouse school of Journalism. He went on to attain a Masters in Fine Arts in 1973 from the University of Illinois studying painting and photography.
Whether as a Director of feature films, or as a Panasonic consultant training National Geographic as they transitioned from film to HD, or the many other companies such as Lockheed Martin, Versus, the Director’s Guild of New Zealand and the Democratic National Convention of 2008, he has left his mark on the medium. Michael made the first ever feature film shot on a VariCam in 2001 and travelled from Anchorage to Nome filming the Iditarod for Panasonic in 2005. In 1989 he created the first all-digital edit facility in the Midwest, “Finis,” and was instrumental in the development of AVID, the first Apple MacIntosh edit system. He has authored seventeen screenplays, three novels, three biographies, two cookbooks, a book on politics and one on filmmaking. His varied experience in the arts qualifies him to speak on the subject of AI and the future of filmmaking.
Steven Jay: Sometime around the beginning of the 20th century, the motion picture and the first motion picture studio was created in West Orange, New Jersey by Thomas Edison. The studio was a house on train wheels. To use the sun as lighting, the house would be pushed along a circular train track and the roof of the house would be open and aligned with the position of the sun. This was the earliest stage for filmmaking. There was no sound. It was very, very cumbersome, very difficult and very costly to make those movies.
Years later, movie production relocated to California, where it was sunny most of the time, not just four to six months of the year. Now we fast forward to today. The year is 2024. Motion pictures, have transformed considerably. Tools and technologies exist that our forefathers never could have imagined and the AI revolution has people panicking, scared of losing their jobs, or opening a new window of incredible opportunities.
Michael, I understand that you were inspired by a story regarding a newest AI technology called SORA and comments by the actor, Ashton Kutcher praising it as a game changer.
We’re calling on you, due to your extensive background, to elaborate on what this means for the future of filmmaking and the production process.
Michael Caporale: On a previous day, you and I were discussing Sora because of statements that, or press releases, or whatever… that Ashton Kutcher had made, after viewing several small clips of imaginative little shorts that Sora had created, scenes that were virtually impossible to film in the physical world… and predicting, Ashton was predicting that soon Sora would be able to make entire feature films.
Now, that’s where it stirs up a big controversy for filmmakers, because filmmakers will be saying to themselves, and many are, “What happens to my job?
I’m an actor, you don’t need me anymore? I’m a director, I’m a sound man, I’m a composer, I’m a producer.” Whatever. “I’m a prop person, I’m a wardrobe person, I’m a caterer.” What happens to all those jobs? And what’s gonna happen with Sora as it’s adopted by independents and large studios alike, is just like other technological revolutions where the old world continues to exist for a period of time as it migrates to the new world. It’s never gonna go away.
We still have craft. We still have people that hand make furniture when we have factories that do it easily.
You can still buy a handmade Martin D45 deluxe custom guitar for $21,000. But you can get a factory-made one, exactly the same, in China for around $300.
These things will continue to exist for a while, while there’s a transition, but ultimately, just like the automobile replaced the horse drawn carriage and the horse as a method of transportation, the job for street cleaners that went around shoveling up horse shit is gone.
The job for stables that house the horses in between their duties in commuting travelers… all those stables and barns are gone.Yet, we still have horses, but horseback riding is a hobby. It’s a pastime, a joy to be able to go to a stable and ride a horse. So, you wanna own a horse? You either have to have a farm or you have to be very wealthy and have somebody else take care of the horse. The horse that didn’t go away, the shit shovelers did.
And what’s gonna happen to film production is, eventually as films become more easily done by independents, the studio system is gonna have to give way, because anybody will be able to create a movie in its entirety and be on an equal footing with the studios.
Now, I wanna take a look back and use art history, my own sort of simplistic version of art history, if you’ll permit me, as an analogy.
Look at the changes in the technology and what this meant, and what happened historically for art as a sort of an analogy for what Sora is going to do to the film industry.
So, we can go back thousands of years and we can talk about… there were cave painting, but those cave paintings in France were still stories and they were recording the hunt. So the very first art that we can identify was storytelling, and we can fast forward to the Egyptians who used pictorial, pictographs, whatever you wanna call them, and Native American tribes who were writing, drawing on stone in the ie of mountians. You can go to Moab, Utah and see the “Newspaper Rock” there and all of the storytelling that occurred throughout. It has occurred historically in many, many forms.
But Western art from the time of Jesus and the Romans from One AD, had a heavy emphasis on religious iconography.
That was the story and it was used by the church as a way to propagandize and indoctrinate the people in a belief system that sustained the growth of the church and supported the church and its endeavors. Many of which were wrong, many of which were actually evil but that’s not the point. Religious art was used to teach, tell these stories and keep the members of the church in the fold.
Eventually that gave way to “History” as a subject matter. Actually, that gave way to historical painting and art was something that was used by the very wealthy to memorialize themselves historically.
Photography did not exist… and so skilled artists were employed on commission to paint pictures of wealthy people which filled the museums in Italy and Russia and all over the world and that also developed into historical paintings, scenes of battle, scenes of great events, the signing of the Declaration of Independence, so on and so forth, or the creation of the Constitution. Historical events were documented in painting. And so, they were all derivates of “realism,” landscapes, seascapes, historical events etc….
but there was also allegory and there were hidden meanings in paintings that were done as disguised forms of social or political protest, much like the writings of Charles Dickens, Jonathan Swift or Lewis Carroll.
But eventually what happened was painting styles started to expand and there were artists like Rembrandt who used a much looser style whose brush strokes were not as “ smooth and polished.” And you can go up to a Rembrandt painting and you can see that it’s not at all like the previous paintings that in some senses I hesitate to use the word, it was cruder in it’s execution, although very sophisticated and consequential.
And at a little bit of a distance, your eye would merge all of those brush strokes and see it as a different, as another painting as previous paintings, but as you got closer, you saw the artist, meaning you saw the artist in the paint. You saw what the artist was doing that identified the artist, what we call style, which fast forward takes you to Van Gogh because there’s nobody painted quite like Van Gogh. But he was in the middle of a revolution called Impressionism.
And whether you’re talking about Manet, Monet, Gauguin, Degas, Van Gogh, whomever… Renoir, these were more like interpretations of the physical reality that they viewed, but in a softer light that invited participation from the viewer.
Put it all together and see what they saw, even though what they were painting wasn’t as accurate in a photographic sense, the minuscule details that previously had been a part of the French Academy and every other landscape painter, portrait artist, et cetera, historical painter, that preceded them, the were able to convey something else of themselves.
And so Impressionism hailed the beginning of abstract painting.
And what is abstraction?
Abstraction, the word means to remove, to take something out of. So now what has been started with Impressionism takes us forward into all the various art movements, where there has been a quest for artists to find what is pure and essential to that art form. And we’re using painting as an example, but it’s all art forms. But in paintings, artists were thinking about, well, what do I really need?
And there were movements that followed and there were movements that basically said, well… all you need to have art, to make a painting, are the plastic elements, paint and canvass.
You don’t have to have a reference to something in the real world. You just have to have paint and canvas. And of course, at that point, there is still a factor that was necessary to the creation of art. And that was the human being that made it.
And then you go forward a little bit and artists were saying, well Andy Warhol was saying, you don’t even need the artist. He had a little factory of people that made the art and he just signed it.
Now, that’s an older concept because there were schools that artists like Caravaggio and other very, very, very famous Renaissance artists and so on used to create paintings. Not all the paintings were done by those Masters or perhaps some of them were just completed by them. But Warhol made it a statement. He basically said, you don’t have to be an artist. You don’t have to have an artist to create art. So, he had his factory make his make art and took the artist out of the picture.
So now you’ve got the plastic elements as are regarded to be critical to the creation of art.
You’ve got the human being, artist as human being or the human being as artists, removed from the picture.
What’s left?
And the answer was concept.
If you have a concept, it can be art.
Now, it’s important to understand that there’s always been a relationship between technology and art. And I can think of two really important examples of how technology is linked to art, and the first has to do with music.
There was a time when composers could only write bass notes so low because the instruments that they had at the time could only play bass notes down so low. But once larger pipes were created for pipe organs, composers could start to write music with lower and deeper bass notes.
And that changed music.
Another example is acrylic paint. Acrylic paint dries very quickly, and it became possible then with acrylic paint to mask off areas. Usually this was done with masking tape then to paint fields of color. And these paintings were referred to as hard edge and as a category they were called color field paintings. It was simply just geometric shapes, usually rectangles and squares, that were just broad fields of color and nothing more.
And that was not possible with oil paint. It was only possible once acrylic paint had been created. And that changed art and it developed a whole new category of painting.
So to start, you follow the transitions where you remove subject matter, you remove the plastic elements, you remove the artist, the only thing that’s left is concept. And so, from a strictly philosophical point of view, the only element that cannot be taken from art, the only element that cannot be abstracted is concept.
Without a concept, you don’t have art.
Now that’s analogous to the film production community because without a story, you don’t have a movie.
You can take everything else out.
You don’t need a director to have a movie.
You don’t need a producer. You don’t need a special effects guy or anything else. You can go right on down the line. There have been movies made without directors, without producers. There have been movies made without actors.
None of these things are essential to the key, the purest sense of defining a film. What is a movie?
Can it be made without these things? Yes.
What is the one ingredient in a film that you cannot take out of a film because it would cease to be a film?
And that’s story.
So, then you have to look at that and say, well, if story is the only thing that cannot be abstracted, then the only person that’s critical to the creation of a movie is the writer.
And now Sora can be the bridge between the imagination of the writer and the completion of a film without any interpretation, without any conflict, without any battles with egos that are each seeking their own glory, without the financial restraints of a limited budget, of the time restraints, to acquire locations, acquire the actors, get the sets built, buy the wardrobe or rent the props or get the period vehicles or travel to Scotland to film “Rob Roy” or whatever, do a period piece like “Shogun.”
These things all require huge amounts of money and the integration of a team.
But with Sora, the writer not only can make their own film, in its entirety without interference by outside parties, but also, now in a unique position, they have been granted the freedom with Sora to write whatever they want.
Their imagination is free to wander and write about unknown things, science fiction or dreams and fantasies. Surrealists could go wild with Sora.
But there’s nothing between the writer and the writer’s thought process and ideas and the completion of that, or I should say the realization of that in a finished product that we call a movie or a film.
And so what will eventually happen is a writer can sit down, think of anything they want and write a screenplay and that screenplay then can be put into Sora and Sora will complete it and make their film for them.
Now, that’s a very good thing.
It opens up the possibility for audiences to experience stories that otherwise would never make it to the screen, from writers who otherwise would have to go through many, many gatekeepers and an approval process and a watering down process and a lot of egos to get something made that may or may not sort of reflect the original concept that they wrote about.
Books, as you know, get bought, the rights get bought, movies get made and often the movies are not like the book. People see the movie, they read the book, and they prefer the book.
In some cases, that’s even better.
In some cases, not so much.
The history of movies is littered with stories about relationships between directors and producers and actors and directors and so on that had conflict. And I’m not saying that that conflict is in and of itself a bad thing because with conflict comes growth. And I’m not saying that all writers’ ideas are perfect.
There’s a place for socialization and there’s a place for interaction and there’s a place for collaboration. All of that can still exist even with Sora because it can all happen before anything is input into Sora. 
So there can be a team, but in the end, it’s the writer who makes the movie and that’s the promise of Sora.
Steven: It’s obvious to me that the “winners” of this new game are gonna be the people who know how to write. And I don’t mean that anyone is a writer because anyone can learn how to type, but that doesn’t make a story.
Michael: That’s correct. We all have pencils that doesn’t make us writers.
Doesn’t make us artists either. Yeah, there will be good and there will be bad and the good will rise and the bad will sink, you know? But there will be opportunity for everyone and the good writers, the ones that have learned their craft will be the ones that are making the great movies of the future. So my advice to anyone that wants to be a filmmaker is don’t study filmmaking, don’t study how to be a director, don’t study acting, study writing. Get a degree in English, read books, read everything you can get your hands on, read history, look at art, indoctrinate yourself culturally.
Get as many experiences as you possibly can because all those experiences are gonna be part of your writing in the future.
It’s important that you study human nature, but it’s also even more important that you become proficient in the practice of the English language as it’s applied to writing. So go to college, get a writing degree. You can go to a graduate school and get a master’s degree, but throughout that entire process, read, read, read. I mean, you should be familiar with Shakespeare. You should be familiar with all of the classics, all of the great writers, all of the great philosophers.
This is your treasure trove. This is your reserve.
This is where you will go when you wanna write a story because it will be instinctual.
It’s like anything, it’s like a muscle, it’s muscle memory. The more you practice it, the better you get at it. And at a certain point, the writing just flows because you have these great reserves of skill and experience that you’ve gained by studying and by practicing.
And that’s what’s gonna make a filmmaker, not somebody who knows how to set an F stop on a camera or how to shoot HD, or what the difference is between an MOV and an MPEG.
None of that matters.
You don’t need to know Final Cut or Premiere or DaVinci Resolve to make a movie. You don’t have to have a sound man. You don’t have to have a team of players. I made a movie and I had, at any given time… I probably had 50 people on the set between the actors, the extras, the caterers, the craft service people, the wardrobe people, the location people, the crew, myself, my producer, et cetera.
And we would pick up and we would move from location to location. And we would have to plan the events of our shoot very carefully, work around rain, work around day and night problems, work around overtime, work around the limitations that SAG imposes on the use of their actors, work around the financial limitations of our budget, the amount of money that we raise and make compromises all along the way. Compromise, compromise, compromise, compromise, compromise, compromise all along the way. I had a mutinous crew at times. They didn’t understand. They didn’t care about the film. They were there to get a daily paycheck and that was it. They are craftspeople. They’re not artists.
And yet so much of the quality of my film rested in their hands and I had to be the taskmaster. I had to hold their feet to the fire and make it happen in spite of them. I had to enforce my will and my vision on people that didn’t understand it and did not wanna cooperate and wanted to have it easier on themselves because we were gonna hit overtime and they wanted to go home.
That’s the nature of filmmaking as it exists today.
That’s all gonna go away. Gonna go the way of the shit shovelers.
Steven: Are they in the studios in quiet panic mode?
Michael: Well, I don’t think they are because they’re gonna be able to make movies this way too. The people that are in quiet panic mode are all the individuals that worked on movies because they’re not gonna be needed anymore. The studio can just get a writer, pay the writer, and take advantage of Sora just like anybody else. But also, they can buy the movie from the writer and distribute it, or they can just get their own writers, pay them a salary, make more movies than before, movies and then after, pick the ones that they wanna put into distribution. Whatever that form of distribution will be, most likely streaming, but think about this… Currently, as it exists right now, let’s suppose a studio ha 100 scripts and they say, “Okay, but these are the top 10 and of these top 10, this year we’re gonna make these four.” What about those other six that never got made or the others that will never be seen?
With Sora, they can make them all.
With the proper resources in computers, rendering farms, whatever it’s gonna take and believe me, that technology will advance, it’s possible. They can make all 100 movies and then they can sit back and watch them and they can say, “Oh, these are the ones we’re gonna take to market and these, yeah, they’re not such good ideas, but you know what? We can stream those on these other alternate channels.” It’s kind of like having an A team and a B team.
You’ve got your farm teams and then you’ve got your major league teams and pretty soon the studios are gonna start classifying the creations they make with Sora as A movies, B movies, and C movies and they’ll make C movies like the Roger Corman style movies and the horror movies and all of those kinds of films that are not art forms but are just entertainment in its lowest form.
They might shudder at the thought of that today. That’s not where the money is for them. But like a Procter and Gamble that owns many different types of detergent all on the shelf in the store… Tide competing with Era, competing with Gain, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, all P&G brands.
Just like that, the movie studios can be making B and C movies like a Roger Corman film or a cheap horror film, things that aren’t necessarily going to be moneymakers now but in the proper context as items on the shelf can be moneymakers that add to their total bottom line.
So, it’s a boon for studios. And actors too, who have established their worth to put butts in seats. Tom Cruise, for example will never have to worry because like all actors, he owns the copyright to his face. Understanding that is key, because Tom can write more Mission Impossible movies starring himself, (his AI likeness) and if the studio distributes it, he will get not only the proceeds from licensing the film, but also the SAG residuals, just like before.
So, like I said, “… the only people who stand to lose are the shit-shovelers and the whip-snappers.”
There will be a transition period, and just like the move to clean energy, they will have to transition to work that they can apply their craft to. It may not be filmmaking.
Steven: This is an incredible time to be creative.
Michael: It is.
Steven: To simplify this entire conversation in one or a few sentences, what would you say that gives advice and hope to the future generation of filmmakers, storytellers, and artists?
Michael: Well, if what you desire is to be a filmmaker, as I said previously in this conversation, you need to be a writer. You need to learn to write. And if you will apply your labors to endeavor to become a writer, then as they say, the world is your oyster. You can get made whatever you can think of, whatever you can in your mind visualize, whatever you want to explore, just for the sheer pleasure of seeing where it goes. You can go on your own journey without the idea of a destination and find the destination quite unexpectedly, and you can make a creation of something lasting of that journey, and share it with the world.
Steven: It was a day like any other day but this day was different.
Michael: Exactly! Thank you.