Ben Affleck Won’t Say How Animals Used His AI

Ben Affleck said he used AI for lots of things on Animals and then refused to name a single shot. The political thriller, which he directed, co-wrote and stars in, arrives in select theaters and on Netflix on October 9.

The software came from InterPositive, the 16-person company he founded in 2022 and sold to Netflix in March for $587 million in cash. He is now a senior adviser there. The same studio that will stream the movie owns the toolkit he will not itemize.

Affleck Won’t Name the Tricks on Animals

He said it on September 30 at the Screentime conference in Los Angeles, in a conversation with journalist Lucas Shaw. He compared a shot list to a magician walking onstage and pointing at the spare rabbit, or at the plant in the crowd.

I used [AI] for lots of things in that movie. I’m a little bit hesitant to point out what they are, or even talk about it, because in my business, we’re trying to foster the illusion of reality, right? It’s sort of like if you went to a magic show and the magician walked out and said, ‘Just before I start, I want you to know there’s another bunny under here. This guy’s a plant.’ It sort of ruins it, right? But yes, we did use it. And in fact, I thought it was a good example because it’s a very human movie. It’s not in space, it doesn’t have visual effects, but it allowed us to move in some cases more quickly, really mostly in post-production, to do things that otherwise we wouldn’t have been able to do.

Ben Affleck, director, Screentime, Los Angeles, September 30, 2026

That last clause is the whole method. He is not claiming a spaceship show. He is claiming speed in post on a kidnapping picture he wants audiences to read as real. Naming the fixes would, in his telling, break the spell. It would also turn InterPositive from a private workflow into a public spec sheet for a product Netflix just bought.

Some film fans now treat any AI credit as a reason to skip a movie. That reflex is the simplest argument for keeping the work off the call sheet. The harder argument is labor. A director who says lots of things and then names none of them leaves the people who still pull wires and paint frames by hand with a shrug.

Sixteen People, a Soundstage, and $587 Million

Affleck founded InterPositive in 2022 after watching early production models and deciding they were built by people who did not speak camera. He told Shaw he learned Python, walked into labs on the strength of his name, and had a brief panic. He called Matt Damon and said they had to make as many movies as they could in the next few years, because they were finished. Then he reversed himself, raised money, and spent about eight months shooting a private dataset on a controlled stage with a lot of cameras.

Netflix announced the purchase on March 5 and folded the whole staff in. Affleck joined as senior adviser. The cash figure stayed rumor until July 17, when a second-quarter filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission listed a March acquisition at about $587 million in cash. Ted Sarandos, Netflix co-CEO, has said generative AI workflows have already been used in roughly 300 of the company’s titles, with the largest share in post-production. Animals is not a side test. It is a title inside a pipeline that is already running.

HOW INTERPOSITIVE MOVED FROM STEALTH TO ANIMALS

1. 2022: Affleck founds InterPositive, shoots a private stage dataset, and keeps the company quiet.
2. November 2024: He files a patent under his legal name and tells a CNBC audience that visual effects shops are in trouble.
3. March 5, 2026: Netflix announces it is buying the company and taking all 16 staff.
4. July 17, 2026: A securities filing puts the cash price at about $587 million.
5. September 30, 2026: At Screentime, Affleck says Animals used AI for lots of things and will not say which.
6. October 1, 2026: At the Westwood Village Theater premiere, he calls the tools a discrete post kit that fails if you can see it.
7. October 9, 2026: Animals opens in select theaters and on Netflix.

Elizabeth Stone, Netflix chief product and technology officer, said the InterPositive team joined because both sides want tools that help storytellers rather than replace them. Bela Bajaria, chief content officer, said new tools should widen a filmmaker’s choices and not replace writers, directors, actors, or crews. Those lines are the public face of a sale whose private document talks in percentages of below-the-line spend.

What InterPositive’s Tools Are Built to Do

The company does not sell a prompt box that spits out a scene from a sentence. Affleck’s own account, posted when Netflix took the firm, is that the first model was trained to understand visual logic and editorial consistency, under problems every live-action crew already knows: missing shots, background replacements, lighting that did not land. The model is tuned on a production’s own dailies, the raw footage from that shoot, so the output is supposed to stay inside that film’s lens and light.

THE JOBS THE MODEL IS SOLD TO HANDLE

• Relighting: Correct or reshape light on plates that were already shot, without rolling the cameras again.
• Backgrounds: Replace or enhance what sits behind the actors, including work that used to mean extra units on other streets.
• Wires and cleanup: Paint out stunt wires and other gear that should never read as part of the world.
• Continuity and gaps: Fix match problems from shot to shot, and fill holes where a setup was never captured.
• Reframe and grade: Recrop existing shots and push mixing and color in post, inside the same model.

That list is why the magician line is doing two jobs. If the work is good, nobody in the seats should be able to point at it. If nobody can point at it, nobody can audit it either, including the guilds that spent three years writing rules around faces and voices. Affleck has been blunt that he would not use a system trained on the copyrighted work of peers, which is why he built a private set. He still will not say what the private set did to Animals.

The Patent Put a Price on Below-the-Line Work

In 2024, a patent application went in under Affleck’s legal name, Benjamin Géza Affleck-Boldt. The document, later reviewed in the trade press and posted on Google Patents as US12438995B1, is not a speech about judgment. It is a savings menu for producers. It says cuts on below-the-line production, the crews, extras, and departments that are not writers, directors, or stars, would be substantial, conservatively at least 10% to 20% of principal photography. It then names departments.

CLAIMED SAVINGS IN THE 2024 PATENT

The same application walks through one unidentified show whose below-the-line costs totaled $32.1 million and says the tools could take $7 million off that number. Those two figures are a sample budget, not the 10% to 20% range, which is the filing’s separate conservative band for principal photography. The text also floats a business model in which AI vendors charge a fraction of the money saved as their fee. Netflix now owns the vendor. Animals is an in-house title.

Affleck had already said the quiet part at a CNBC event in November 2024, standing with Gerry Cardinale of RedBird Capital, who co-founded Artists Equity with Affleck and Matt Damon. He did not see an immediate threat to acting or writing. He did say AI would push out more laborious, less creative, more costly parts of filmmaking. Directly: he would not like to be in the visual effects business, because what used to cost a lot of money is going to cost a lot less, and it is going to hammer that space. He added that maybe it should not take a thousand people to render something. The upside, he said, was a lower door for people who want to make another Good Will Hunting.

A 50 percent cut in visual effects costs, written into a patent, is that speech in a filing. So is 70% off background actors and stand-ins. Those are not bunnies under a hat. They are headcount. Affleck’s later line, that the work creates more human work, sits next to a document that scores the opposite for the departments that would pay.

Guild Protections Stop at Synthetic Performers

Performers spent 2023 on strike over digital replicas, among other fights, and spent 2026 tightening the next contract. SAG-AFTRA’s published stance is that every person has a right to their name, voice, and likeness, and that use requires consent and just compensation for likeness. The four-year TV and theatrical deal members ratified in June 2026, with 91.4% of those voting in favor and turnout at 19.3% of eligible members, adds a bar on fully synthetic performers. A producer who wants to put an AI figure in a human role has to show significant additional value beyond avoiding a paycheck, and the union cannot strike over AI again until 2030. The deal runs through June 30, 2030.

WHAT THE 2026 PERFORMER DEAL ACTUALLY BINDS

• Replicas: A digital copy of a real actor still needs clear written consent, a described use, and separate pay.
• Synthetic performers: Replacing a person, or that person’s existing replica, now needs a value justification, not just a cheaper extra.
• The gap: Relighting, wire removal, background plates, and continuity fixes are post tools, not replicas, so they do not trigger that consent machine.

IATSE’s 2024 basic agreement put AI language in for some crew, and a slice of in-house VFX workers at large fantasy shops have first contracts. Most of the global vendor workforce that actually composites and paints still sits outside those deals. Affleck’s refusal to name Animals shots lands in the hole those contracts left open. The uses he will not list are the uses a replica clause was never written to catch. If you cannot see the work, you also cannot bargain it shot by shot.

If You Can Tell, You Have Ruined It

The world premiere was October 1 at the Westwood Village Theater. On the carpet Affleck went further than he had the night before. He said his rule is simple: he would not use a system that trained on copyrighted work, or on an intelligence created by a peer, which is why the dataset had to be private and not extractive. He said he has no interest in movies where you type things and things come out, because he does not think anyone will care enough to watch them, and he would not want to be part of that if they did.

This is a discrete set of tools. It’s not about making fake people or replacing anybody, ever. It’s about another interesting post tool, and if you can see it or if you can tell what it is, like, you’ve ruined it. Just like a bad visual effect, just like a bad performance.

Ben Affleck, director, Animals premiere, Westwood Village Theater, October 1, 2026

He added that Hollywood’s live problems are theatrical attendance, labor stoppages, and production tax rebates, not AI, which he called deeply limited, not magic, not super intelligence, not sentient. He also said guild-signatory companies will not put you in a movie without permission and pay, and that handing the tools to people who actually make films produces better results than leaving them with tech platforms. At Netflix, he said, the pitch is whether you want to try this kit, not whether a model should mint a fake lead.

Take him at his word and Animals is an ethical case because the faces are real, the dataset is private, and the audience should not be able to catch the seams. Take the patent at its word and the same kit is a below-the-line discount, including a 70% line on extras, sold into a studio that already runs generative workflows across hundreds of titles. Both can be true at once. The magician metaphor just makes them hard to separate, which is convenient for the person who sold the shop.

Animals Opens October 9 With the Trick Unnamed

In the film, an LA mayoral candidate and his wife scramble to raise a ransom after their son is taken, and the choices they make can blow up the life they built. Affleck plays Mark Kimball. Kerry Washington plays Abigail. Gillian Anderson is the candidate’s fixer, Steven Yeun his campaign manager. Christopher Woodley plays the son, Denny. Connor O. McIntyre and Billy Ray share script credit with Affleck. Artists Equity produced, with Matt Damon among the producers. It is Affleck’s first directing job since 2023’s Air, and his second Netflix film after The Rip. The title is rated R.

Netflix put the trailer out in September, with Kimball talking about who people become in a crisis.

Plenty of productions are already doing quiet post cleanup and not holding a conference about it. Affleck’s error, if the skip-the-movie crowd is the measure, was saying lots of things out loud. If the measure is the crews who still do wire work and extra work by hand, the error is the other way: a $587 million sale, a patent that prices their departments, and a premiere speech that treats detection itself as failure. On October 9 the film starts. He still has not named the shots.