Actress Gal Gadot has a lead role in director Doug Liman’s upcoming film “Bitcoin,” a production built almost entirely on AI-generated sets and lighting rather than physical ones. Gadot and her co-star, Oscar winner Casey Affleck, filmed their scenes on a bare stage, with computer-generated environments to be added later.
Producer Ryan Kavanaugh says the approach was the only way the film could get made at all. A conventional production would have cost roughly $200 million; using AI for sets and lighting brought that down to $70 million.
Gadot addressed the arrangement on a recent podcast, making clear she sees no way around the shift in how movies get produced.
“The [AI] train has left the station. You’re going to work with it or be out of the game completely,” she said. “I am trying to make the best of it and protect what I can protect. The AI component in this movie is for sets and the lighting. We had a broad crew and a lot of people were working on this movie.”
What Gadot would not allow was AI touching her actual performance. She said she and her lawyers spent six months negotiating a contract to wall off that part of the process entirely.
“This was the longest contract I have ever worked on. It was six months for my lawyers to go through every scenario we could think about as far as the AI component of it,” she said. “I did not want AI to have anything to do with my performance. We had to protect that, to such an extent that SAG called my lawyers to ask for pointers to update the SAG contract to protect other actors. As far as the performances, it’s all me.”
Gadot did not pretend the technology doesn’t unsettle her.
“I am afraid of AI,” she said, “but I am going to be afraid and look away? No. I am afraid but I am playing with it and learning it and trying to educate myself.”
She also pointed to a practical upside on set: without waiting on traditional lighting setups, which typically consume much of a shoot day, filming moved faster and ran longer.
“Here we would film nonstop because we didn’t have to wait for lighting,” she said. “We would film on and on and on for 10 hours. So that was amazing. As actors, you’re always hot. You don’t cool off.”
The SAG contact with Gadot’s legal team over performance protections suggests the guild is already looking at how to build similar safeguards into future contracts as AI-driven production spreads across the industry.
