Gore Verbinski Talks About Taking on the AI Revolution in Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die

For Gore Verbinski, the title of his new movie isn’t just a fun little tag. Instead, he regards Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die as “kind of a mantra.”

It’s a phrase that keeps cropping up in the film, insidiously injected into the popular consciousness by an AI that will soon be responsible for the decimation of half of humanity, while the survivors become VR-addicted zombies. However, Verbinski said, “In our movie, our AI isn’t Skynet killing you with machines. It’s worse. It wants you to like it. It’s going to demand that you like it.”

The only person who can prevent this fate is a seemingly unhinged time traveler (Sam Rockwell) who must assemble a ragtag team of strangers from the Norms diner on La Cienega Boulevard. Their mission? Insert control mechanisms into the AI before it becomes self-aware.  “I’ve thought of this movie as Dog Day Afternoon becoming Akira,” said Verbinski.

Controls and guardrails for AI are a big conversation in tech right now, and the consensus among many developers, ethicists, and technologists is that the best time to insert those mechanisms and ethical decision-making structures is long past. All that can be done now – unless someone invents a time machine – is work out how to ameliorate the damage and reduce further risk. So how scared of AI is the director of Mouse Hunt, The Ring, and the Pirates of the Caribbean films? “It’s coming,” he said, “so at some point fear isn’t going to help and you have to engage.”

But why is AI coming? In part, and as shown in the film, it’s because its growth and development is really happening out of sight, and what the average person sees is just the cool stuff that makes their life easier. Quite literally, the “have fun” bit. Verbinski explained, “Who wouldn’t want their own Radar from M*A*S*H so you could just say, ‘Hey, where’s my this?’ The problem is that it’s not really going to be yours. So is it serving you, or are you serving it?”

Of course, the problem with making a film about AI is, as Verbinski puts it, to “futureproof” the script. However, Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is more about the ethics than the tech. Verbinski described himself as not a Luddite, but he’s still wary of the impact of AI on the internet, where AI-powered search systems and websites have become a feedback loop of misinformation. Or, as Verbinski bluntly explained, “It’s already drinking its own piss.” That would be OK except that now the LLMs are pissing in our information water supply too. Verbinski sighed. “I want to get an actual Encyclopedia Britannica, pre-AI, just to have it.”

He may even be closer to the actual Luddites than the name implies. The group were not like the Amish, simply opposed to any kind of technological advancement on principle: Instead, the Luddites were textile workers in 19th century Britain who warned that growing mechanization and industrialization would lead to worse pay, worse products, and a general decline in standards of living. Sound familiar?

Of course, the specter of unrestrained capitalism hangs over it all. Rival corporations and rival nations have gone all-in on AI technology, in the race to be first to an unclear finish line.  Which all points to the third part of the title: The “don’t die” bit. Verbinski said, “We are driving on this road, and we keep changing the tires but the road is full of nails and we don’t have the ability to sweep them up. We’re just going to keep driving and changing tires. It’s madness.”

That’s where Verbinski truly shows his actual Luddite tendencies, in pointing out that there are options to a faster, cheaper, more profitable mindset. He said, “Just because someone is going to make something that isn’t necessarily good for us, does it justify that we should beat them to it?”

Verbinski is quick and proud to point out that there is zero AI used in Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die. That’s almost a point of resistance now, as the technology is seemingly being weaponized against the arts and creative industries. He said, “I do find it interesting that this thing isn’t going immediately after solving the cure for cancer or getting us to Mars. It’s going, ‘I can make music for you.’ ‘I can make a movie for you.’ ‘I can make an illustration for you.’ As humans, we want to sit around a campfire and tell stories. If you take away stories, what are we?”

The joy of a good story is often in its unpredictability, and that’s imperiled by our increasingly algorithmically-driven approach to media, which Verbinski referred to as “a feedback loop. … That thing that says, ‘You liked this, you might like that.’ No, I watched one thing on Nazis. I don’t love Nazis. I don’t think you know me. I don’t know me. I want to explore. I don’t want to be told.”

For Verbinski, it’s always the unrepeatable, imprecise nature of genuine human creativity that makes art interesting, even worthwhile. That’s something that modern AIs, with their habits of perfection, symmetry, and giving audiences a quick, cheap serotonin kick, aren’t designed to create. “I’m a fan of the flaw,” Verbinski said. “I’m a big fan of the genuinely awkward moment that if you ask an actor to repeat it they go, ‘I don’t know what I did.’ It’s like a sax riff with a squeak. ‘Do that again!’ ‘I don’t even know what I did!’ So you’ve got to be prepared to capture it.”

Never was that more true than in when he was filming the opening scene of Good Luck, an 11-page monologue delivered by Rockwell as he dances, leaps, and stomps around Norms. Verbinski worked extensively with Rockwell on the choreography to make sure he would hit certain points on certain words and certain beats. “Even with that, there are no two takes that match,” Verbinski laughed. “You’d think for such a great dancer he’d hit his part.” To deal with that looseness and variation, he explained, “You have to do a little less Kubrickian composition, a little more Hal Ashby. You have to embrace a looser frame, and that’s important in this movie. It’s a movie that feels like it’s occurring, and as the taffy twists you morph into something more compositionally enigmatic.”

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die opens in theatres on Friday. Find showtimes here.

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