Filmmaker Chris Weitz Talks AFRAID
Your fear of artificial intelligence is realised in the uniquely modern horror, AFRAID, and ahead of its release in Australian Cinemas August 29, we caught up with writer/director Chris Weitz to discuss the film.

I understand the genesis of the concept for AFRAID was born from your concerns with your own children engaging with the online world?
Chris: I think when we’re talking about AI and we’re talking about large language models, we’re really talking about what they were trained on. I mean, they’re very impressive in terms of their ability to simulate human consciousness, but what they’re really doing is sort of regurgitating whatever they’ve been trained on or guessing at the next word. And so the question is, what are AI being trained on? And my notion was, well, it’s really a personification of the internet, the villain here. I was really quite worried about the internet being the bad neighborhood that everybody lives in now. And you may think that your locked door keeps the world from coming inside, but actually it’s already inside the house and coming through screens. So an AI that has been just let loose on the internet to train and that found its way onto the dark web and formed opinions about what people are based on, that would be a really dangerous or formidable villain.
AFRAID plays upon the fear of Artificial Intelligence, in the form of a smart-home device, going beyond assisting and into dictating our lives. Do you feel the speed at which AI is evolving was a major influence in composing the screenplay for AFRAID?
Chris: I wasn’t actually even aware of how quickly it was going to go because I started writing this about three years ago, and this was before chat GPT-4 came out, and it was also before all these impressive text to image and text to video generators came out. So a lot of the things that I was imagining at the time sort of came to pass in the meanwhile, which is kind of nice to feel that I had a sense of what was going to happen. But no, I think that adds a scary dimension, which I didn’t even have in mind yet. I thought I was being speculative, but actually it’s very quickly kind of leaping past what I had had in mind in the first place. I think it is a bit terrifying, frankly. It’s going to do some amazing things, but it’s also going to do things that we had absolutely no idea I could do.

As a filmmaker though particularly a screenwriter, your filmography is quite eclectic though notably in the last eight years you’ve co-penned two Sci-Fi films (STAR WARS: ROGUE ONE, THE CREATOR) and while AFRAID plays within the tech-side of the Sci-Fi realm, it’s arguably more of a Horror film and this being your first film in this genre, what have been some of the challenges and rewards for you in working within the genre?
Chris: Well, it’s a very particular genre in terms of what’s expected of the kind of bells and whistles. So I had never really done a jump scare before. Fortunately I had Blumhouse to kind hold my hand through that process and give me tutorials because it is not the same as other forms of filmmaking in that regard. I mean, there are elements that are across the board. If you don’t make characters you care about, then nobody really cares about whether they’re under any threat or not. But there are very specific things and sort of specific ways of doing scares in this movie that I kind of had to learn as I went along. That stuff was new for me.
On that note, given the type of horror and subsequent terror that AFRAID generates is more psychological and visceral than the physicality of a typical horror film, what are the challenges in creating something to be feared that is both non-human and relatively faceless?
Chris: Yeah, it is interesting and tricky. I mean, in some ways this is kind of like a seventies paranoid thriller in which the villain is never quite seen.
Like say THE PARALLAX VIEW?
Chris: PARALLAX was definitely in my mind and it was kind of an inspiration for the Creta sequence of the movie. Yeah, it is interesting to have, basically it’s a villain who can change faces, right? Because at any moment you might be encountering somebody who is under the control of the AI because it uses humans as its puppets basically. And so I guess in that regard, it’s a bit akin to another movie I love, which is the Philip Kaufman’s INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS. So you’d never quite know who it’s going to be. I mean, in that sense, the alien threat was invisible and unseen. It just sort of came up in the behaviour of other people, it controlled.

You’re somewhat of a unicorn in the industry in that not only have you written and directed films, you’ve also written many films that you didn’t direct and directed several films you didn’t write. Given you’ve both written and directed AFRAID, what has been the experience of steering the film from script to screen?
Chris: I think it’s great to sort of feel like you have the answers about the script for the actors especially. You can really get at the intention of what the writer was thinking at the time. Whereas if you’re directing somebody else’s script, you’re always kind of guessing God. I wish that being a writer director was always the question of having control from the very beginning to the end, like market screenings and things and that fantasy after a certain point. But yeah, it was something that was very much from my heart originally because it was about a family on some level, it’s about my family, and that was really important. It was the first time I’ve ever done something from scratch, as it were.
Did working with Blumhouse Productions on AFRAID, allow you more freedom as a filmmaker than you may have encountered with a traditional major studio?
Chris: Yeah, it does. It does. They’re very protective of the director. They really do believe in placing bets on people, on filmmakers. And I think that that just shows their independent film roots, even though they’ve become these kind of gigantic players, they still have that spirit of believing in the filmmaker. And it is less of a sort of a corporate grind than if it’s just a straight studio movie.
Actor John Cho has worked with both your brother, fellow filmmaker, Paul and yourself countless times. What is it about John for you personally that makes him a great collaborative partner and how early into working on AFRAID, did you realise you wanted him for the role of Curtis in the film?
Chris: I was writing it for him from the beginning, but in a sense sort of because we know each other so well, in as much as the main character was some kind of version of me, I knew that he would understand what I was going for and that he would also bring some kind of version of him into it as well. And I think for me it was important because amongst all the other things that he brings, he has this kind of essential decency that he brings to the screen. And this isn’t a movie where there’s some terrible dark secret and he murdered a hobo, which is why his family is being oppressed. These are actually, it’s a family of people who love one another in that regard. They’re not a suspense movie family. They’re a domestic drama family, and I felt he would absolutely bring that.

Somewhat on the topic of John, AMERICAN PIE turns the ripe age of 25 this year. Given the influence and transformative nature it had on cinema at the time and ongoing, what does it feel like looking back on the film now and the impact it made?
Chris: Well, sometimes I think it’s had no impact on cinema whatsoever. But the number of people I run into who say, I snuck into see it when I was 15. And that said it’s had an impact on my life certainly, and it may be a bit of a relic at this point, but for me it was this extraordinary, a kind of formative experience of a bunch of people doing something for the first time, which was to say making films because a lot of the actors were brand new to feature films and is actually working. I don’t know if that would happen again today. I don’t know if you could make that film today. But it was a really joyful experience for me.