Martin Scorsese — the Oscar-winning director of Goodfellas, The Irishman, and Killers of the Flower Moon — has signed on as an adviser and partner to Black Forest Labs, a German generative-AI startup that makes the FLUX family of image-generation models. The partnership, disclosed June 2, 2026, includes a video showing Scorsese using FLUX to storyboard scenes from his next film, What Happens at Night, a drama starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence about a couple who travel to a small European town to adopt a child. It marks one of the most consequential endorsements of generative AI by a working filmmaker — coming from a director whose entire reputation rests on the primacy of craft.
Scorsese Joins a Growing Hollywood Consensus
Scorsese framed the adoption in his signature terms: evolution, not capitulation. He noted he has created his own storyboards for seven decades and identified a persistent creative problem — the gap between what a director sees and what the crew understands. "There's always been this problem of how do you communicate what you see in your head to your cast and crew," he said in a statement. "There are some things you have to see and feel." The FLUX tool, he added, allows him to share visualizations "more clearly and efficiently" with his production designer, art director, and cinematographer, describing the results as "enriching cinematic intelligence."
In a video recorded at his New York City office, Scorsese demonstrated the workflow by referencing the famous Copacabana Steadicam shot from Goodfellas, the unbroken take that tracks Henry Hill through the nightclub, and explained how tools like FLUX could compress the staging and communication process that such intricate sequences require. "If you have a tool like this, you could figure it out much much quicker and you could save production time, and also less wear and tear on the crew," he said. "During the pre-production process, time costs money, and this allowed us to move faster without sacrificing quality or craft."
He drew direct comparisons to his past technology experiments: 3D cinematography on Hugo, and the digital de-aging techniques used on The Irishman. "Cinema is a young medium, only around 125 years old, so we have to be open to how it can evolve," he said.
Scorsese is not the first marquee director to publicly back an AI company. At the 79th Cannes Film Festival in May 2026, Peter Jackson received an Honorary Palme d'Or and used a masterclass the following day to call AI "just a special effect." James Cameron joined the board of directors at Stability AI, the maker of Stable Diffusion, in September 2024. And at Amazon's "AI on the Lot" event in Culver City on May 29, Rogue One and Jurassic World Rebirth director Gareth Edwards said he wants to eventually create a hybrid generative-AI film, describing the technology as "a second-unit director who is a billionaire on acid."
What Is Black Forest Labs, and Who Funds It?
Black Forest Labs was founded in August 2024 in Freiburg, Germany, by Robin Rombach, Andreas Blattmann, and Patrick Esser — three researchers who previously built Stable Diffusion at Stability AI. The startup develops the FLUX model family, which powers image generation across a range of commercial platforms, including Adobe's creative suite, Elon Musk's Grok chatbot, and ElevenLabs.
The 70-person team raised a $300 million Series B at a $3.25 billion valuation in December 2025, co-led by Salesforce Ventures, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, NVIDIA, General Catalyst, Temasek, Canva, and Figma. Total capital raised exceeds $450 million.
Rombach told the New York Times that Scorsese's involvement represents "a great proof point that this works." The connection was facilitated through overlapping financial relationships: BroadLight Capital — an investment firm co-founded by Rick Yorn, Scorsese's longtime manager — is a Black Forest Labs investor. Michael Ovitz, who co-founded CAA in 1975 and is an angel investor in BFL, also helped broker the partnership, according to the Times. Whether Scorsese holds a personal financial stake in the company is unclear; Black Forest Labs did not confirm or deny it, and Scorsese's representative declined to comment.
How AI Storyboarding Changes Pre-Production
The specific application Scorsese is championing — using generative AI to produce visual references during pre-production — sits at what many in the film industry regard as the most defensible point of AI entry. Unlike post-production or performance capture, where AI touches the final work an audience sees, storyboarding and pre-visualization are planning phases. The output does not appear on screen.
The practical argument is about communication and speed. Directors often describe storyboarding as an imprecise translation layer: a hand-drawn board conveys composition but rarely captures light, texture, or period detail precisely enough for a production designer to build from. AI image generation compresses that gap — a director's verbal or gestural description can yield a photorealistic reference image in seconds rather than hours.
For productions at the budget level of Scorsese's films, that compression has real financial value. For independent filmmakers with smaller crews and tighter schedules, the impact is potentially more significant.
Why Artists Are Pushing Back
Not everyone received the announcement as a straightforward story about efficiency. Within hours of the disclosure, named artists made their objections direct and public.
Karla Ortiz, a concept artist whose credits include Rogue One, Thor: Ragnarok, Black Panther, and Doctor Strange, and who has previously testified before the Senate on AI and intellectual property, wrote on X that Scorsese "throws every single storyboard artist he's ever worked with under the bus, as he demolishes their livelihoods with models that are likely trained on those storyboard artist's same works."
Director and animator Sam Deats was equally pointed. "It takes literally seconds for me to storyboard a shot, there is absolutely no reason to need AI built on the stolen work of millions of artists to storyboard your vision," he wrote. "Have some damn pride and respect your peers."
At the core of both objections are two distinct but related concerns. The first is economic: AI image generation displaces the work of concept artists and storyboard artists who currently do this work for pay. According to the UK's Society of Authors, roughly a quarter of illustrators reported losing work to generative AI in a 2024 survey of its members. The second is legal and ethical: AI image models are trained on enormous datasets of images scraped from the web, and the training data for FLUX has not been publicly disclosed. Ortiz's implication — that the model Scorsese is using was built on the work of the very artists whose jobs it now threatens — reflects a concern at the center of multiple ongoing copyright lawsuits against AI image companies.
Scorsese has not publicly addressed the criticism. And the response underscores why his endorsement carries weight in both directions: the same authority that makes his adoption significant to those who view AI tools favorably also makes his pivot feel personal to the artists who spent careers supplying exactly what FLUX now produces.
Del Toro, Cannes, and a Field Dividing in Real Time
The Hollywood AI debate has produced a genuine spectrum. Guillermo del Toro, director of Pan's Labyrinth, has been among the most outspoken opponents. He told the Hollywood Reporter in October 2025 that using AI from the outset of a creative project would be "like spitting on God," and later told an interviewer he would "rather die" than use generative AI in his films. He condemned the broader shift as an age where some believe "art can be done with a fucking app."
The 79th Cannes Film Festival in May 2026 crystallized the tension institutionally. The festival banned generative AI from its Official Competition, requiring that eligible films reflect "human effort." The Tribeca Festival has taken a different approach: it is set to host the world premiere of Dreams of Violets, a 75-minute fully AI-generated docudrama about the January 2026 massacre of Iranian civilians by government forces, on June 10. Directed by Ash Koosha — a filmmaker born in Tehran who left Iran in 2009 — and produced for approximately $2,000, the film was made without physical cameras, actors, or sets.
These two festival decisions, weeks apart, reflect how thoroughly the industry has split on a question that Scorsese's announcement now makes impossible to treat as theoretical.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Martin Scorsese using AI for?
Scorsese is using Black Forest Labs' FLUX generative-AI model specifically for storyboarding and pre-visualization during the pre-production of What Happens at Night, his upcoming film starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence. He has said the tool helps him communicate visual ideas to his crew more quickly and precisely than hand-drawn storyboards alone.
What is Black Forest Labs and how does FLUX work?
Black Forest Labs is a German AI research startup founded in 2024 by former Stability AI researchers, including CEO Robin Rombach. Based in Freiburg, Germany, it develops the FLUX family of text-to-image models, which generate photorealistic images from written or verbal descriptions. FLUX currently powers image generation across platforms including Adobe's creative suite, Elon Musk's Grok chatbot, and ElevenLabs. The company raised $300 million in December 2025 at a $3.25 billion valuation.
Why are storyboard artists upset about Scorsese's AI endorsement?
Artists including concept artist Karla Ortiz and director-animator Sam Deats argue that AI image models were trained on artwork created by human artists without their consent or compensation, and that Scorsese's adoption of these tools threatens the livelihoods of the storyboard artists and concept artists who have worked on his films. The UK Society of Authors found that roughly 25% of illustrators report having lost work to generative AI.
How is AI storyboarding different from traditional pre-production?
Traditional storyboarding relies on hand-drawn or digitally illustrated panels created by specialized artists, a process that takes hours to days per sequence. AI storyboarding tools like FLUX generate photorealistic visual references from text prompts in seconds, allowing directors to iterate more quickly on compositions, lighting, and staging before committing to a physical shoot. Scorsese's use is limited to this planning phase — the AI-generated images do not appear in the finished film.
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