Guillermo del Toro has issued a stark warning about the future of cinema, describing artificial intelligence as a form of “natural stupidity” and cautioning that the film industry is approaching a crisis point.
The Oscar-winning director made the remarks on Monday night while receiving the BFI Fellowship, the British Film Institute’s highest honour, at a dinner event in Hollywood.
Speaking to a room packed with industry figures including Leonardo DiCaprio, Jon Favreau, Michael Mann and Netflix executives, del Toro delivered a passionate defence of film as a fundamentally human art form.
“We are on the verge of image illiteracy. We are on the verge of cinema illiteracy,” he told the crowd.
The creative impulse, he argued, is as ancient as the images painted on cave walls, and it cannot be replicated by machines.
“We are told images can be generated by artificial means. The existence of an image is not just to be there. It is to connect us, to make us feel beauty,” he said.
“The pact between man and image is sacred.”
His connection to the BFI stretches back to his teenage years in Guadalajara, Mexico, where he would write to the organisation requesting 16mm prints of films by directors like Carol Reed to screen for his cinema club.
Receiving the Fellowship, he said, moved him deeply.
Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos, who introduced del Toro, recalled their first meeting when del Toro was developing an animated adaptation of Trollhunters for the platform.
“I went into the meeting thinking, ‘Why is this master filmmaker steering what I thought was a cartoon for us?'” Sarandos said.
“And then I watched Guillermo create a universe in front of my eyes.”
Del Toro framed his current chapter as one of giving back, teaching, advocating and preserving. “We are not gatekeepers. We are gate-holders so more people can come in and out of the church of cinema,” he said.
“I’ve been saved by images so many times in my life.” On the permanence of great films, he was equally expresive: “These films are never from the past. When someone sees them for the first time they are present.”
