Martin Scorsese on AI Storyboards: 'It Let Us Work Faster Without Cutting Corners'

Martin Scorsese has signed on as an advisor for Black Forest Labs, an artificial intelligence research company, and he’s already putting their technology to work on his own projects.

The Oscar-winning director said in a statement Tuesday that he’s been using the company’s FLUX system to build storyboards. For someone who has hand-drawn his own boards for seven decades, the shift was notable.

“There’s always been this problem of how do you communicate what you see in your head to your cast and crew,” Scorsese said. “Some things you have to see and feel.” He described the tool as “creatively freeing,” allowing him to share his visual ideas more clearly with production designers, art directors, and cinematographers. “During pre-production, time costs money, and this allowed us to move faster without sacrificing quality or craft.”

Scorsese name-checked his earlier experiments with technology—3D on Hugo, de-aging on The Irishman—as part of a career-long willingness to try new methods. He tested the AI storyboard tool on a recent scene and said it saved production time and reduced strain on the crew.

Black Forest Labs released a video showing Scorsese using the platform. In it, he noted, “If you have a tool like this, you could figure it out much quicker and save production time, and also less wear and tear on the crew.”

Scorsese joins James Cameron—who joined the board of Stability AI last year—as a high-profile Hollywood advocate for AI tools. Not everyone shares the enthusiasm. Guillermo del Toro told The Hollywood Reporter in October that using AI to generate creative work from scratch “would be like spitting on God.”