AI Thriller ‘Electric Child’ at Locarno77: Simon Jaquemet Interview

It seemed like a particularly big night for the Locarno Film Festival as a big topic was scrutinized on the big screen in the big square. Electric Child, written and directed by Swiss filmmaker Simon Jaquemet, and its topical exploration of artificial intelligence screened on the Swiss town’s Piazza Grande, the square that seats 8,000 people during the fest, on Friday night.

The movie is one of several in the Locarno77 lineup that deals with AI and technology issues. Its debut came a day after Edgar Pêra’s Telepathic Letters, which uses AI images, screened in an out-of-competition slot.

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Electric Child is a totally different film. “Sonny and Akiko’s joy upon the arrival of their first child quickly turns to panic when their doctor gives them unimaginable news,” reads its description on the Locarno website. “Desperate, Sonny considers using his experiment on an AI super-intelligence to prove the doctors wrong, but every action he takes risks a troubling and dangerous reaction.”

The cast includes Elliott Crosset Hove (Godland), Rila Fukushima (Arrow, Ghost in the Shell), and Sandra Guldberg Kampp (series Foundation).

Jaquemet was over the moon when he found out that Locarno would screen his new movie on the big square of the picturesque town. “I’m super curious about how it will work on the Piazza Grande because I think it’s quite a risky slot,” he tells THR. “It can be great and impressive with the big space and the sound, but I could also imagine people being totally shocked and saying, ‘What’s that?’ So I’m super, super curious.”

Jaquemet has long had an interest in artificial intelligence and felt it was time to make a film about it before the recent AI boom and all the attention it has received. “The idea is extremely old. As a teenager, I had a very nerdy phase, and I was reading all the books – Neuromancer [the 1984 science fiction novel by William Gibson]. And I felt okay, at some point, I have to make a computer thriller.”

When he started writing Electric Child during post-production on his previous film, thanks to his technology interest and connections, Jaquemet says, “You could feel strongly that something was happening and that AI was going to explode very soon because in the community, it was clear.” That said, “I didn’t expect it to get so big,” he says. “For me, it’s also surprising how fast it’s happening and how intense it is.” So his movie comes at a time when a broader audience may want to explore the impact of AI. At the same time, the creative says the film could have felt “even more kind of prophetic” if it had been ready a year or two years ago.

[The next five paragraphs contain some spoilers about the content and themes of the film.]

How did he decide on his way of approaching the complex topic of AI? “I’m super interested in the technological aspect and quite fascinated, but at the same time, I am critical, and I think the dangers are there – maybe not end-of-the-world dangerous, but the society dangers are really huge,” he explains. “That’s why I entered it more like an exploration, combining this story about AI with a story of parents and a guy who is a father afraid to lose his child. It is an exploration to really see the pain rather than something that is a black-and-white opinion. I more wanted to raise discussion.”

Bringing to life complex technology in the film, such as scenes that represent AI, machine learning and the like, meant another big decision. Instead of using “a 3D rendering of this game character,” the writer-director went for a “live-action layer, so you can probably better connect to that.” He adds: “I really tried to write it, including the parts that play in this kind of simulation or inside the thing, from the perspective of the AI – what it experiences. For this character, everything is totally real. And it’s an actress [Sandra Guldberg Kampp] who plays the character.”

That meant much research and preparation as well. “We looked at a lot of computer games with her to see how these characters move and all that,” the director recalls. “But we didn’t want to make it very obvious. So, first of all, I told her, ‘Everything for you is totally real but you have these kinds of restrictions with your body and move accordingly.’ What Sandra does may not be obvious at all, but she had quite a lot of restrictions on how she could move,” which viewers will feel when watching the film, he hopes.

Another challenge was to avoid making the film and its dialogue too inside baseball for audiences with less AI knowledge. “I really learned to code machine learning and all that, so I love all the language and stuff. It’s really funny, all this nerdy language and the names and all that,” Jaquemet tells THR with a laugh. “But then, of course, I knew I had to keep it as accessible as possible. I tried to make the film still accurate for someone who is maybe a computer scientist so that it will not totally put them off because, ‘Oh, this is oversimplified.’ That happens a lot with AI or computer topics.”

Finding a fitting ending for Electric Child was “quite a long journey,” Jaquemet says. “In earlier versions, the ending was much, much darker somehow, it was really very, very harsh. It was a bit of a struggle to balance if it should be a super depressing ending or not.” Avoiding major spoilers, the filmmaker says he ended up picking “almost a bit of a happy end, but then it goes off the [cliff]. There is a bit of a twist.”

Simon Jaquemet, courtesy of Miguel Bueno, NIFFF

The question on your mind now may be whether Jaquemet used AI in making Electric Child? “Not that much. It was quite early in generative AI,” he shares. “What we did quite a lot is we used AI in set design and costumes. A lot of the art that is interesting is AI-generated art, but it’s already vintage because it’s like two years ago. Towards the end, there is this kind of trippy moment that was also AI-generated.”

When Jaquemet learned to code, he started a project that involved “trying to teach an AI to find the difference between digital cameras and 35 millimeters.” In the end, “I had a model that was quite good in slightly manipulating colors,” he recalls. “And we did use that and processed the whole film with it. It’s quite subtle, but it gives it more of an almost organic quality.”

Will the Swiss filmmaker stick to AI as a theme to continue exploring in his next movie? He says he hasn’t decided yet. “One idea is to maybe do a film or maybe even a series that is kind of slightly inspired by the universe of Electric Child,” he shares. “Because there are quite a lot of questions. And then I have another science-based film idea, but I’m also thinking about a very simple non-AI, non-sci-fi.”

So how does Jaquemet feel about the risks of AI, including for film and other creatives? “The biggest worry is really more society impact,” he tells THR. “We are now pitted on a crossroads where you could say AI will lead to paradise for humanity or it could go the other way and even create more division of power and monopolies and all that. Even in the film world, I think the most dangerous outcome is that maybe some big companies or studios monopolize very powerful generative AI models and everyone else is shut out and they make insane profit with that.”

The filmmaker also shares that while he expects that “big, doomsday end-of-the-world scenarios are rather unlikely, I think it’s not completely out of the question.” But he points to the July 19 incident when cybersecurity company CrowdStrike distributed a faulty update to its security software that caused widespread problems with Microsoft Windows computers running it. Concludes Jaquemet: “I don’t think that we will have killer robots running on the streets, but that something could go wrong and maybe impact digital communication and all that – which would have, as we have seen with the recent Microsoft thing, a huge impact. I think that’s a very realistic danger.”