AI takes the director’s chair, trailer for ‘The Sweet Idleness’ drops amid Hollywood backlash

Cinema history has just taken an unprecedented turn. Italian producer Andrea Iervolino has unveiled the trailer for The Sweet Idleness, a feature he claims is the first film ever directed entirely by an artificial intelligence “agent.” The director, dubbed FellinAI, is being presented not as a tool but as a virtual auteur, reshaping traditional notions of authorship in filmmaking.

According to Iervolino, the film is intended as a tribute to the poetic surrealism of European cinema. Its story imagines a future where only one percent of humanity still works, with labour transformed into symbolic ritual while machines sustain daily life. Set among vast cathedral-factories and surreal processions, the last human workers become performers in a strange spectacle of resistance against obsolescence.

The announcement comes at a time of fierce debate within Hollywood over AI’s place in storytelling. Recently, AI-generated actress Tilly Norwood ignited a storm of criticism, prompting SAG-AFTRA president Sean Astin to denounce her as “not an actor” but an imitation lacking lived experience and emotion. That controversy still rages, and the arrival of an AI director only adds fuel to the fire.

Iervolino insists the project is not intended to erase traditional cinema, but to provide an “alternative method of creation.” He describes himself as “Human-on-the-Loop,” a supervisor guiding FellinAI’s output, while filmmaker Andrea Biglione serves as “Human-in-the-Loop,” bridging algorithmic intuition with artistic sensibility.

Adding another layer to the experiment, the cast is being built through Actor+, an in-house agency that blends performances from real actors with digital reconstructions. These synthetic actors, the company says, will not vanish when the credits roll. Instead, they will persist across social media, interacting with audiences as “digital humans” who blur the line between character and influencer.

“The Sweet Idleness marks a beginning,” Iervolino said in a statement. “It is the union of human sensitivity with AI creativity. FellinAI never sleeps. Actor+ never dies. This is the future, and also a return to cinema’s poetic origins.”

While some see potential in these experiments, many in the industry view them as a threat to livelihoods, artistry, and authenticity. The trailer’s release may excite curiosity, but it also underscores just how fractured the conversation around AI in film has become. Whether audiences will embrace a director who does not exist is a question cinema is about to confront head-on.