Why ‘House of David’ director thinks AI can save Hollywood jobs

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For the 1926 silent film “The King of Kings,” director Cecil B. DeMille constructed a full-scale set of Jerusalem on the backlot of his Culver City studio, employing hundreds of workers to do so.

One hundred years after the original filming, Jon Erwin made his own movie about Moses, ‘The Old Stories: Moses,’ also starring Ben Kingsley. Interestingly, it was filmed on the same studio grounds now owned by Amazon MGM Studios.

The upcoming three-part series, a prequel to ‘The House of David,’ utilizes artificial intelligence to create much of its unique look, including the buildings, desert landscapes, and supernatural elements. It will premiere on Amazon Prime this Thursday.

What usually takes months of filming with a large team and travel to different places was accomplished in just one week, right here in Los Angeles, with a crew of only 100 people.

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Artificial intelligence is fundamentally changing how movies and TV shows are made in Hollywood, affecting everything from the stories themselves and the actors’ performances, to the production process, the jobs available, and who holds the power. In our series, Hollywood Tomorrow, we’ll be looking at all these changes in detail.

The director of the series, Erwin, explained that they created a large-scale historical drama entirely on a soundstage, much like James Cameron with ‘Avatar’ or Jon Favreau with ‘The Mandalorian.’ He believes this approach, which focuses on capturing strong performances and utilizing the skills of the production team, can significantly reduce costs for studios.

With technology changing so quickly, more and more filmmakers and studios in Southern California are exploring how artificial intelligence can transform the process of creating movies and television shows.

Victoria Schwartz, director of Pepperdine Caruso School of Law’s entertainment, media, and sports law program, notes that while some people are hesitant, most are realizing AI is now a permanent part of filmmaking. She emphasizes the need to rethink how films are made to take advantage of the opportunities AI offers.

Okay, so as a total movie geek, I’m really fascinated by this. Erwin’s one of the first directors working for a big streaming service who’s actually using AI throughout the whole process of making a show or movie – not just in post-production, but from start to finish. It’s a pretty big deal, honestly!

He recently started Innovative Dream, a new production company in Manhattan Beach that’s supported by Amazon. It will offer virtual production facilities for rent to other film studios and also create training courses for up-and-coming filmmakers.

While many in Hollywood fear AI will cause job losses, Erwin believes the opposite could happen. He suggests that if used responsibly alongside human work, AI could actually bring some production jobs back from overseas, even as it eliminates other roles.

Erwin believes the biggest risk to jobs in the industry isn’t necessarily competition, but rising costs and lengthy production times. He explained that faster, more affordable production could actually increase employment opportunities overall, as studios are more likely to approve projects when they’re budget-friendly.

Computer graphics have been a staple of Hollywood filmmaking since the 1990s, but creating realistic scenes traditionally took a lot of time and effort. It often required large teams of artists and months of work after filming to add actors or large groups of people into digitally created environments. A lot of this detailed and time-consuming work, called rotoscoping, was often done by companies in countries like India, where labor costs were lower than in California.

By 2019, shows like Disney’s “The Mandalorian” took this technology even further. They used huge LED screens to display incredibly realistic digital backgrounds – everything from “Star Wars” spaceships to forests and deserts – while actors performed as if they were actually there. A team of digital artists would spend months creating these environments and then display them on the screen during filming.

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AI takes the process a step further.

Erwin, working on “Moses,” is a strong advocate for a new filmmaking approach he calls “hybrid” production. This method combines traditional live-action shooting with the power of AI and virtual production techniques. Instead of completing filming and visual effects separately, this process allows them to happen nearly at the same time. Footage shot with actors is quickly shared with editors and AI artists right on set, letting the director and cast see almost-finished scenes almost immediately.

He explained that creating necessary materials can take just three or four days, a huge improvement over the previous ten weeks. This speed allows teams to build the setting for a shoot while they’re actively filming.

Erwin, age 43, was raised in Alabama and has become known for his work on faith-based movies like ‘I Still Believe’ and ‘Jesus Revolution.’ He’d long hoped to bring biblical stories to life on a grand, epic scale.

When he proposed a drama called “House of David” about the life of King David, the studio heads weren’t immediately convinced. They suggested he find a less ambitious project, as he explained.

To show how Goliath came to be, actors performed in front of green screens. Then, artificial intelligence created a fantastical scene with a stormy sky, rain, mountains, and winged angels.

This project was among the first to use generative AI in a large-scale commercial production. The series, which launched last year, attracted 44 million viewers globally and became the most-watched show on Prime Video in the United States.

By the second season, the team was using 30 different tools—including both standard methods and artificial intelligence—to create images, sounds, and video. They also changed their filming approach, moving some production from on-location shoots in Greece to a studio in Los Angeles with an LED screen.

Artificial intelligence dramatically sped up the creation of battle scenes and allowed for much larger crowds – numbering in the thousands – compared to traditional computer-generated imagery. The number of AI-created scenes increased significantly, jumping from 70 in the first season to 400 in the second.

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Avid Technology, known for its professional video and audio editing software such as Media Composer and Pro Tools, has partnered with Google Cloud in a multiyear agreement to utilize artificial intelligence.

Jeff Thomas, who directed two episodes in Season 2 using generative AI, stated that each episode cost under $5 million to produce. This challenges the common belief within the industry that the show needed a much larger budget – around $12 to $15 million per episode, similar to ‘Game of Thrones’. Erwin didn’t reveal the production costs for either the ‘House of David’ series or the upcoming ‘Moses’ prequel.

According to the Bible, the battle involved 100,000 soldiers on each side. Erwin explained that this scale hasn’t been depicted on screen before due to a lack of resources, but they are now able to accurately portray its vastness.

Erwin came up with the concept for “Moses” during the Christmas holidays, wrote the script in January, and then used AI to produce a four-minute trailer. Amazon approved the series later that same month.

Kingsley was short on time, so Erwin quickly filmed all three episodes on a soundstage in just one week – a process that used to take six months.

Erwin quickly created the Red Sea’s water and waves—in under an hour—using AI technology from Kling AI and Luma AI. Traditionally, this would have taken weeks. They experimented with 18 different versions of the sea parting, choosing the best ones to allow the director to see a realistic tidal wave projected onto a massive, wrap-around screen.

“‘Moses’ really represented a whole new method of filmmaking for me,” Erwin said.

To create the important scenes set in the Egyptian palace hallway where Moses confronts the Pharaoh, the production team cleverly used cardboard boxes to build the columns, then enhanced them with detailed carvings generated by AI. While the actual set could only hold around 20 extras, AI technology allowed them to digitally add hundreds more background actors, making the scene appear much larger and more populated.

Erwin utilized generative AI to add to existing scenes of sand and rocks, and also to make the actor Kingsley look younger for the role of a young Moses.

But some things were off limits for AI, including Kingsley’s performance.

He believes our faces are incredibly detailed, and the subtle changes in expression are genuine indicators of how we feel.

Rather than creating the character alone, AI helped with the design process. Erwin initially pictured a bald character resembling Moses, but after receiving feedback from Kingsley, they refined the appearance to include weathered hair and a mustache.

Erwin stated his firmest boundary is recasting an actor. He explained that if he can’t collaborate with actors, he doesn’t want to continue working in the industry.

Erwin responded to concerns about AI replacing background actors by saying it’s not the right way to frame the issue.

You know, it’s not about figuring out if ‘Moses’ would have been cheaper some other way. It’s about the fact that without this deal, the movie simply wouldn’t exist. That’s how I see it – it wouldn’t have gotten made at all, period. It’s a different kind of calculation, really.

The film industry in Hollywood is shrinking, resulting in fewer movies being filmed in Los Angeles and a significant decrease in entertainment jobs – down 30% since 2022.

He believes this toolset could significantly improve efficiency – completing tasks three to five times quicker and at a cost of less than 30% of what it currently is. He even suggests it could help prevent job losses within the industry.

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2026-05-13 13:32