Kore-eda Hirokazu was making a film about artificial intelligence when he decided to ask it for a note. He shared the screenplay for Sheep in the Box, set in the near future, with a generative AI chatbot he called “Chat-kun”, and went back and forth with it several times.
The chatbot’s advice was straightforward: “However, if you fleshed out the protagonist's mother a little more, it would be a better film.”
Kore-eda accepted the logic of the suggestion. “What it said was correct. But it only ever says correct things. And I wondered what it was that made this so boring,” he said.
After a few rounds, he ended the relationship. Kore-eda concluded that Chat-kun had no personal history of cinema and had never lived a life that needed it.
He did not use AI on the film. “I'd like to stand on the human side. So I intend to keep AI out of the process as much as possible,” Kore-eda said.
Sheep in the Box, which debuted at Cannes, follows a couple who take in a humanoid robot made from the data of their son, who died aged 7 two years earlier.
Ayase Haruka plays Otone, an architect who cares for the robot. Yamamoto Daigo, in his first lead role, plays her husband Kensuke, who insists that the robot is only a machine.
The title refers to the box drawn by the pilot in Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince, where the sheep must be imagined by the little prince.
Rimu Kuwaki plays the child-robot. During casting, Kore-eda asked child candidates to move and behave like robots.
One of the film’s turns comes when the humanoid asks his mother whether she would be happier if he did not exist. Kore-eda said the line lands because it is an unexpected comment from a child.
Kore-eda is receiving the Cinema Honorary Award at the Singapore International Film Festival.
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