Danny Boyle said Ink uses around 30 seconds of generative AI, and Jack O'Connell is part of the film carrying that choice into the Venice Film Festival this week. The director tied the brief use to old photographs and mice scenes, making the AI debate concrete instead of theoretical.
“There’s about 30 seconds of it in our movie where we animate a couple of old photographs,” Boyle said. “Oh, and there’s some mice.” He added, “It’s very good for animals, and we had some mice that run around The Sun newsroom.”
Venice Film Festival and Telluride
Ink opened the Venice Film Festival this week before going on to play Telluride, giving Boyle a live platform to explain exactly where AI entered the movie. The film stars Jack O'Connell, Guy Pearce and Claire Foy, and it charts the rise of The Sun in the 1970s under the editorship of Larry Lamb.
Boyle also said, “It doesn’t really matter what I think about AI. It matters what 20-year-olds think about it. Is the honest truth. My opinion of it is that it’s a very useful tool in many ways, provided you use it respectfully and provided you pay actors if you’re going to replace them with some kind of AI embodiment.” That puts the film on a sharper line than a simple effects claim: the AI use is short, but Boyle is treating it as a test case for consent, compensation and how far a production can go before the work stops looking like human craft.
The Sun newsroom mice scenes
Boyle said he had previously got in trouble with PETA early in his career for using real chimpanzees in 28 Days Later, which explains why he framed the mice work as a practical alternative. Some viewers have already questioned whether AI was used to reanimate old images of the Kray brothers and Margaret Thatcher, but Boyle’s comments narrowed the known use to the photographs and the newsroom mice scenes.
He also warned, “The danger with the tech giants and their AI is that they will be able to replace journalism. They’ll be able to have an AI journalist who’s much more efficient, cheaper, etcetera, ecetera, and will that AI journalist speak truth to the power that created it?” That is the real pressure point here: not whether a film used 30 seconds of AI, but whether the same tools end up cheapening reporting while a movie about media power is still in release.
December and Netflix in January
Ink already carries an 85% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and the Studiocanal and Netflix film is set to launch in cinemas in December and on Netflix in January. For readers deciding whether to track it now or wait, Boyle’s comments make the film worth watching as both a period drama and a clean example of how a major festival title is using AI without pretending the subject is off-limits.
