Jon Favreau on the Future of Star Wars, AI, and New Filmmaking Technology

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0:34This episode of The Town is presented to you by AMC Networks. Billy Magnuson and Zach Galifianakis star in the new series The Audacity on AMC and AMC+. Influence rises, people unravel, and CEO meltdowns are business as usual among Silicon Valley elite. Executive produced by Jonathan Glatzer, a writer-producer of Succession and Better Call Saul. Watch new episodes of The Audacity, Sundays exclusively on AMC and AMC+. It is Thursday, April 16th. We are here in glamorous Las Vegas at the annual CinemaCon convention for theater owners. Thanks to everyone who's come up and said hello this week. Even the guy who insisted I take a plastic sword souvenir from Masters of the Universe, the Amazon presentation last night.

1:19I'll always cherish that. We did a great panel with producers Jerry Bruckheimer and Emma Thomas yesterday that will run as an episode of the show next week. And today we have a special treat, a conversation with Jon Favreau. Jon is a fascinating figure in Hollywood. He kind of straddles both the world of A-level studio filmmaking as the director of everything from Iron Man to Chef to the Lion King remake and the world of technology. He was one of the first top filmmakers to embrace digital filmmaking and the sophisticated process he used to make movies like The Jungle Book and The Mandalorian TV show.

1:54He's back with The Mandalorian and Grogu now, the first Star Wars movie in seven years. So I talked to him about that, the pressure to relaunch the franchise, of course, the AI questions, all of it. Today, it's Jon Favreau, live from Vegas, baby. From The Ringer and Puck, I'm Matt Bellany, and this is The Town.

2:16One of the reasons why I wanted to have John here is because he is at the perfect epicenter right now of what's going on in the entertainment business. He is a legendary filmmaker. He's been an actor, producer, writer, done pretty much every job in the business. He was an usher at one point in your life. That's right. That's right. And he also is one of the rare filmmakers that has credibility in the technology community based on the technologies he's used in his films and his shows over the years and just being a smart, inquisitive guy about technology. So we're going to talk a little bit about that, especially as it relates to your latest film, Mandalorian and Grogu.

3:01There's a lot of confusion out there about your process. there are people that say oh well he he doesn't shoot on location he doesn't he doesn't do practical uh filmmaking anymore he's a digital guy but that's not really true like take us through the process on this film well uh thanks for having me thanks for all those nice things you just said um the you have to separate what we did for the streaming show and and for here the streaming show we had months to do it in each season we had to turn around less than a year this one we have years. And so part of the challenge for the streaming show is how do you make it look cinematic?

3:40How do you make it look like Star Wars? Even though it's for the small screen, how do you make it feel like a cinematic experience for people at home? It was the first time we're asking people to watch it on streaming. It had been a long time before there's anything on television for Star Wars. This is the first attempt to transition a streaming hit to theaters. That's right. Well, just to wind back, just getting it on the small screen and make it looked like it could, and we saw premieres and marketing screenings of it, and what we did for the small screen really held up for the big screen, but we had to do it in a compressed amount of time, and so we came up with new technologies like the wraparound video screen.

4:18We called it the volume. Yes, I visited the volume. You were there. It's quite something. It's definitely impressive. And after three seasons of that and then other shows that shot on the volume, there were limitations as far as what you could present. And so now by doing a film, we partnered up very early on. We knew it was going to be a theatrical release. We knew we were going to be working with IMAX. We met with IMAX. We screened great versions of who had worked with that format and asked questions. And so we took the time to build vertical sets, to build practical sets. We did use some of the same technology, but mostly for interactive light and for reflections, which are important for when you're on a stage so that everything's not blue screen.

5:03But if you, people will see pictures behind the scenes. We built jungles. We built tanks. We built pits. We built forests. And then we also shot out on location as well. So it allowed. Oh, you did? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Not a lot. And by the way, sometimes it's a layer that you're shooting and you're shooting part of that layer, not in that environment and you're compositing it together. but we use all technologies, whatever tells the story the best. And so we're using technologies that wind all the way back to the original tech that ILM was using, like motion control miniatures. We have a lot of miniature work, but we also have state-of-the-art CG sims that ILM is at the forefront of.

5:46So to us, it's a mixed bag. It's like a magic trick. And we even have a sequence that we work with Phil Tippett, a fully stop motion sequence in the film. Oh, interesting. That's the challenge because I was driving around L.A. with my 10-year-old and we saw the billboard. And I said, are you interested? And he said, Dad, that's a show. We'll be right back. So that's the challenge here. You have to ratchet it up. Yeah. So here's the trick. You got to deliver something that the audience enjoys regardless of the medium. And in this case, what could we do that we couldn't do before? We have to treat it like the first season and the first episode of The Mandalorian, which is don't assume anybody's seen anything, but also make it clear to the people who've been with Star Wars for 50 years that this is something that is for them.

6:44And a lot of that has to do with the way that you detail things. There's stuff that Star Wars fans will pick up on that the casual younger fan might not. But we can't forget that this is the first time. Star Wars hasn't been in theaters for almost seven years. There are audience members who are not old enough to know Star Wars in the theater. We have to invite those fans in. We have to make them feel the way that I felt when I first saw Star Wars. I was born in 66. So in 77, I was the perfect age to see it, and my mind was blown. There's a feeling that Star Wars gives you on the big screen when it's done well.

7:19And that's what we concentrated on, really delivering that feeling. And was there a creative spark that said to you, this is an idea that is theatrical, that is going to deliver what you just described? This was a matter of us, before going into the strike and the lockdown and all that, not the lockdown, but the strike, thinking we were going to be doing a fourth season, writing a fourth season. and then, like with the Dodgers, you get a tap on the shoulder and the bullpen, do you want to pitch in the big game? And we have been talking about doing something for the big screen with this for a long time.

7:57I thought it was going to probably be some exploration of mixing different media, like something for streaming and then having a theatrical component. I didn't know what would—none of that really emerged. and then I finally got asked would you be open to doing exploring these characters for the cinema and you have to completely switch hats then yeah it's different filmmaking style completely different and it's also you know if I did another season you assume everybody's seen everything up to that point if I'm going to do this I have to assume like season one episode one that there are new people ironically instead of new people seeing it because it's on the small screen It's new people seeing Star Wars for the first time on the big screen.

8:43Because when you go to the movies, somebody might be a big fan, but you want to be able to bring somebody who's not. No, my kid's never seen a Star Wars movie in a theater. And I got to make it work for that audience, too. And so Star Wars has always been about emotion, spectacle, humor, excitement, fun. And if you think about it, when we first saw Star Wars, it's been since renamed Episode IV, New Hope. George Lucas dropped us right in the middle of a storyline, but I never felt like I was at a loss because I understood who the good guy was, who the bad guy was, and he pulled me into that experience, and I think he was influenced a lot by the cliffhangers of his youth, and we really lean into that kind of pulpy, fun space opera thing, so I think anybody who's a fan of sci-fi will be able to jump in, but then...

9:33That's what struck me about the show initially was that it's essentially a Western. It's an episode of the week, challenge of the week, Western. And even the music and everything sort of evokes that. Do you have an inspiration for what the movie version would be? Yeah, we always go back to George's influences, right? So George was very much influenced by samurai films, by Westerns. And there's been a conversation between the Western and the samurai film from the beginning. Star Wars is, you have to think of it not just as a genre in and of itself, but as a lens for other genres. And so by going to what influenced George, we find that that gets us to a feeling of consistency and authenticity.

10:15And he, if you remember, he originally was exploring getting the rights to Flash Gordon before Star Wars. Flash Gordon is a much different format. It's big, it's fun, it's fantasy, it's pulp. You think of fantasy artwork. these are scale uh uh these are scale set pieces that work for the big screen in a way that they wouldn't for the small screen and so we started leaning into the roots of sci-fi space opera like flash gordon and like what inspired star wars and the filmmakers of that generation um i wanted to switch a little bit to some more industry specific questions you must get asked the AI question all the time and the use of AI in filmmaking and where is where is all of this going because you've successfully used technology in your films uh what is the most promising aspect of AI from your perspective and what do you think is the scariest or worst possible scenario here so anytime you answer a question about AI it's going to have a terrible shelf life because you'll ask me next time we talk, oh, you said this.

11:25How come that's not? So let me just give that caveat that I'm reticent to say anything with any sort of sense. But you have your own experience. You know what you and your filmmaker friends are talking about. That's right. So I think that there's... Movies have always been about the conversation between technology and storytelling. A filmmaker will have a story they want to tell and they'll invent something new and the next filmmaker will take that tool or that piece of camera equipment and use that to inspire something else they could a story they could tell so this is very uh this is not a new conversation for the film industry the real question is or is is it different is this breakthrough in tech different enough in degree to actually be a difference in kind in other words is this just another innovation or is this going to change everything and what do you think not just for our business.

12:22I've always been very thoughtful and slow in my adoption of new tech. If you look, I didn't even play with CGI. I was using stop motion and elf. I was using force perspective. It wasn't until Iron Man that I felt convinced with hard surfaces that I really embraced CGI, which was many years after Jurassic Park. And then finally by Jungle Book, I was like, okay, hey, I understand this, let's really lean into this tech. I think that there is the, we need to have better conversations around AI because there's a lot of confusion about what the term even means. Well, there's generative AI and then there's process-oriented AI, but I'm talking more about the generative stuff.

13:03This is a big deal though. I think that AI as a tool, once we get aligned with the studios, with the guilds, with the filmmakers, but most importantly with the audience, what they want. then we could start to explore where it's used and how it's used. I've found that we're not going to be able to have one standard because different filmmakers draw the line at different places. But I do think that we need to have clarity about what's the spectrum of these machine learning tools. Do you treat generative AI the same way you treat rig removal for wire shots or segmentation when you want to separate a subject from a background.

13:47So I think that there's a whole hierarchy of different technologies that we have to have a conversation about and then have transparency as to what tools we're using so that the audience understands what they're buying and then let them decide how we do this and we have to figure out as an industry how not to undermine what we've built over a century in this storytelling culture around cinema. But like, are you cool with AI-generated scenes? For what I'm doing now, I have not used that. And I think that I want to understand things better and we have to have a more transparent conversation about...

14:27Because you could look at that question through many lenses. How does it affect different unions and guilds? And you're a member of what, four of them? Yeah. Yeah, have you scanned yourself for acting purposes, you know, so that they will have you forever? I have not, but Marvel has enough of them for me. I'm sure. And I'm younger in them, so I like those better, yeah. I know, but I've talked to actors who, that's part of the gig now, is you make sure that you have yourself at particular ages so that it can be used. And each member of each craft prioritizes different concerns about emerging tech.

15:05You know, with the directors, it's very much about creative rights. With actors, it's about image protection. With the studios, it's about copyright protection, training data, output. So we're not yet having one consistent conversation across all the stakeholders. But how has your personal filmmaking process evolved with respect to technology over the past, say, five years? So the tech that I'm really leaning into now is more game engine. We were using Unreal Engine on the screens for the volume. We use it for previs, the things I'm collaborating with on the parks. Unreal Engine is being used there.

15:42And I find that using the developments that have been made around game design is starting to... It used to be, let me put it differently. There used to be filmmaking. There used to be visual effects that had its own pipeline, gaming, and animation. Four completely different trades, four different pipelines. Those stacks are starting to resemble one another and share innovation. And a lot of the tools that we've been using when you visited us on Lion King, those were consumer-facing products around Unity Game Engine that we were using as a filmmaking tool before we ever rendered a frame. And so we're adopting essentially an animation pipeline for planning, reducing the window of production, which allows it to be less compelling for us to want to push production offshore.

16:31So we do a lot of planning ahead of time and a lot of finishing and visual effects. And that's part of why I've been able to keep all my productions. It's amazing. You are able to shoot in L.A. You're like the only filmmaker I know who's been able to keep all of his productions in L.A. Reveal the secret right now for how you've done that. You have to be responsible to the people who are hiring you to make sure that whatever resources they're investing in your production is going to be a win for them. And so that means finding new ways to be responsible and innovative, often leveraging technologies that are developed by other people.

17:06A lot of what I'm using is stuff that Jim Cameron built, and I could learn from those people. And often it's combining technologies or workflows that other people are using and optimizing them for either cost savings or for creative, increasing the quality of creative. How do you get the labor costs down? when you what in what regard isn't it more expensive to hire particular artists and artisans and storyboard people all these people within la it's you have such a a a skilled workforce in both cinema and technology available to you here and by the way you could also work with you know working on an animation project now for oswald yeah we're doing 2d animation and the animators, some of them are here, some of them are in Canada, some are in Spain.

17:57So there's a remote work situation where you can hire people for different aspects of planning. But when you're getting to pre-production and production, we have that workforce here. And that workforce is not, it's not a big team either. It's a lot smaller than filming. When you go to a set, those shooting days, that's the expensive part of the process. Iterating in game engine and coming up with renders of previs that you could evaluate editorially and then really get precise before you ever roll camera that's a trick they've been doing since you're not shutting down streets or anything like that no and you don't have trailers you don't have people you know and then when you film use a union crew use the best people you could hire let's get the most work done

18:44in a classroom of sodas most stay quiet then there's mr pib sweet cherry bold outburst the kind of flavor that gets attention bull kick of cherry lucasfilm let's talk about lucasfilm you have a relationship with dave filoni yes um he is now running creative for lucasfilm um with lin one yeah yes with lin one how is lucasfilm going to change from your view going forward they have now said that they're they're focusing on film rather than tv and streaming is that true and How is it going to change? I think there's exploration going on, not just at Lucasfilm, but across the board about what's the, how do we mix the, how do you meet the audience where they are?

19:30Whether it's for streaming, what's that model? Or is it in the theaters? I think this is part of why myself and a lot of filmmakers are here is because this is such an important moment, an important year, because we love movies. and this summer already has been a very, has shown some really good signs with wonderful films, wonderful filmmakers. And if you look at the slate all the way to the end of the year, you have great filmmakers coming out with things. There's a Star Wars movie this year. There's a Star Wars movie next year. We haven't had one for seven years. Can these theater owners expect Star Wars movies on a more regular cadence?

20:10I mean, that's not my job. It is, though. When I get in there, I do the best I can. I love the movie business. I love Star Wars. I love that I'm getting a chance to... The one thing that always felt a little bit that we sort of yearned for was not just seeing reactions in premieres or online, but I remember the feeling of a whole crowd reacting to a Star Wars movie when it's done well. And the chance for me to take a swing at doing that and feeling the energy in the room. And I think one of the conclusions that streaming is coming to is that a driver to streaming could also be films that are in theaters that people are excited to see, and that will draw people to their Disney Plus accounts, maybe more so than even exclusive content that's films that are done.

21:04I think they're still exploring the model. I'm downstream of all of that. I just concentrate on the things I have understanding and control over, and that's just making the best movie I could make. And that seems to be, that seems to, it's all I could do and it's the only thing I'm doing. There's not a Mandalorian trilogy in the works. I don't know. We have people at the table out here that I could talk to. Presumably they would inform you if that were the case. Right now this is about doing this and getting this to the screen. I think that every, we're learning so much in real time, not just about Star Wars, but about the whole industry.

21:40And as you're saying, Emerging technologies also represent competition for attention in this attention economy. And so you're asking people to go to a movie theater and not look at their phone. It's the amount of humans times the amount of hours in a day, and that's a finite number of attention. And we have to fit into that world. When we grew up, the question was, what movie are we seeing this week? we have to make that part of the conversation again by having something cool out every week so that people want to come oh an applause line there we go um by the way thank you for the sandwich i did not properly thank you if you have not been to the chef truck at park mgm it's delicious so plug that's roy choy open a truck with the food from the movie chef so yeah thank okay so yeah the challenge with star wars is interesting though because as much as it is a enduring franchise.

22:36I asked you in 2019, you said it's the perfect mix of myth and technology, which I liked that, because I think it does address why it's so appealing. But there's limitations on Star Wars, it feels like. It was a contained story that George told that has now been expanded upon. You were the first one to really hone in and take something from Star Wars and make it feel unique and separate. Do you think that Star Wars, for all of the canvas that can be painted on and for all the great stuff that's been done and Andor is a great show, do you think that there are inherent limitations to that mythology and what it can be?

23:19I don't know. I mean, I've gotten to participate in Star Wars, in Marvel, in bespoke new content, if you want to call it that, reductively, but stories that don't have their grounding in any source material. And I'm playing around with Oswald for Disney +, which is a character that is established, but people don't know that well. I think that there's a lot to, there's tremendous benefit to tapping into something where there's already real estate in your audience's memory. Well, but that's a negative, too. People have expectations for Star Wars. And the fans in the past have been pretty vocal about that.

24:03And there were some changes made between episodes eight and nine to address some of the fan responses and arguably didn't help. I think that you have, you know, when I, I'm very fortunate that the people at Lucasfilm are first and foremost fans of Star Wars. And so I find that if we talk something through, there usually aren't big surprises of how the audience is going to feel. If we're excited to see something, if we're excited for a storyline, if we're having fun telling that story, more often than not, people are feeling that. Now, I can't control things I can't control, but I can take full advantage of this opportunity to make something that I'm excited to share with people.

24:52and it's an interesting part of my job is you try to have a strong vision. You try to push things through in a direction that you feel some creative certainty about. But at the end of the day, it's about the audience. If you do your best job and people don't feel it and don't connect with it, it just doesn't feel right. It's just not satisfying. And what I like about Star Wars is that there's an engaged audience that's ready and waiting and paying attention. And now it's my shot. It's my shot to entertain them and to show them what I think they're going to like and something that fits into Star Wars and keeps it going for the next generation.

25:34I think the people you're talking about who don't know about Star Wars, we need to address that. We need to show them what's cool about it. And then if Star Wars isn't the thing, something else is. I mean, things are popping up. I see now in my son's generation there's an openness to looking at a video game um uh based uh sure that was 10 15 years ago that was not seen as an addressable audience yeah uh with uh you're seeing anime i think that there's lots of influences coming in what's nice about star wars and marvel is it seems to still be in the culture and then the zeitgeist of younger people we just have to present them with something that gets them excited about seeing it in a movie theater a few years ago you said that if chef was made, it would probably go to streaming.

26:22You still think that? I think I would defer to the people in this room. I think that everything is a function of budget, distribution, marketing. Well, but clout also, you could insist. You could. And if you had the big, I think it's a matter of how much money you're spending and how much you're trying to get back. I think that limited theatrical runs are a great thing. I think it works well for streaming. It was the model when I started off in the 90s, you would do an independent film. You wouldn't necessarily make a lot of money in the theaters, but it would make a name for itself. And then when it went downstream to other, you know, to the secondary markets, you would make money on video or DVD rentals a different time.

27:09But the model is essentially the same. So I think that you could have limited bespoke releases for important small films and that and and you could do a limited marketing campaign but i think it's very difficult to compete with a movie like chef up against uh what did that movie 60 80 million what it cost no no what did it do in theater something like that yeah i think it may you know and it costs like 13 yeah so i think there's always room for that uh but i also think that there's room for things that don't that bypass theaters and just uh people self-distributing So I think that we're part of a larger spectrum.

27:45But people starting out can put their work out there and don't have to wait. Even swingers was very expensive for what we had. Was it? Well, it was like 175. By the time we bought all the rights to the music, I think it was closer to 300 ,000. By the way, feel free to resolve the rumor that's always been out there that you secretly directed swingers. No. No? Doug directed swingers. Doug Lyman directed swingers, for sure.

28:13filmmakers must approach you all the time when they're thinking of or about to work with the volume what percentage of movies do you think in the future will utilize things like the volume i think it depends what the tool set of emergent technology related to machine learning is because there are tools that will be coming online that allow for quicker and less expensive segmentation, meaning you can film somebody and separate them from the background without having to have the volume or having to have a green screen. That is not resolved yet. It's part of the larger conversation that needs to happen around technology, but I know that the capabilities are emerging.