As the founder of the beloved crowdfunding platform Seed&Spark, Emily Best has access to vast amounts of data about which of its films do best. So when it came time for her solo directorial debut, “Mr. Jesus,” did she look for patterns or trends she could exploit to make a crowd-pleaser?
She absolutely did not.
“Mr. Jesus” is about AI, but didn’t use it — or any data-crunching tools that tech companies use to create the algorithms that often decide what you see. Best worked out the idea for the short film with her husband, Brennan Kelleher, who stars in it.
Then they got feedback from people interested in AI, people of faith, and, perhaps most importantly, their neighbors. The latter group was especially important, because Best and Kelleher shot “Mr. Jesus” in and outside their own home.
“I live in a really diverse community outside of Atlanta, Georgia, and I have neighbors on all sides of the spectrum,” she said Sunday in a post-screening Q&A of “Mr. Jesus” at the Houston Cinema Arts Festival. “In order to shoot this movie, we had to shut down our street for a couple days, and so I had to put letters in the mailboxes of all my neighbors, some of whom were very conservative Christians.
“And obviously they wrote to me, like, ‘What is this movie you’re shutting our street down for?’ And I was like, ‘I’m not going to lie about this,’ and I gave them the premise: This down-on-his-luck actor wakes up one morning to discover his image has been stolen to make a generative AI Jesus, and now everyone thinks he’s the second coming.”
She didn’t anticipate the response.
“They all universally said, ‘That’s hilarious, and it seems so important right now.’ And I was like, okay, great!,” said Best.
Emily Best on ‘Mr. Jesus’ and Those Long Privacy Agreements We Don’t Read
The film doesn’t mock Jesus or Christians, but “it’s certainly poking fun of a certain kind of religious leader,” Best explained.
Its main target is technology companies — and film companies – that can use a person’s likeness in ways that the person may not like, thanks to lengthy contracts that almost no one ever completely reads.
“Mr. Jesus” includes an extreme use case, in which one man’s face inspires a religious fervor he doesn’t control. But it’s a metaphor for countless situations in which AI trains on almost all of us.
The short film, which got a very warm reception in Houston, is also a proof of concept for a TV show. It may be released independently: Best has little expectation of it going to a major streamer, given its topicality and the slowness of the usual Hollywood development process.
In a separate panel discussion on Monday, Best noted that social media platforms could easily use photos of your children to train AI on making more realistic-looking AI kids.
You can opt out, of course — but The Atlantic once reported that it would take 76 workdays to fully read all the privacy terms and conditions you’re confronted with in a year. And that was 14 years ago.
The panel Monday spelled out the challenges we all face in deciding how to use AI ethically, if possible. Best and her fellow panelists — including Houston artists RUEROB and Gonzo 247 — wrestled with the idea that all technological advances involve tradeoffs: That Friends episode you’re getting ChatGPT to write, just for you, may be possible because of an unwanted data center in someone else’s town.
In her own life, Best tries to strike a balance, and to use technology for good. Seed&Spark, she explained Sunday, wouldn’t actually provide great insights into what makes a mass-market hit, because the platform isn’t designed to mimic the mainstream. Its purpose is to raise up artists outside of it.
“Unlike the rest of Hollywood, 80% of films on Seed&Spark are owned by women, 65% have queer themes or queer filmmakers, 65%, or actually it’s probably closer to 75% now, are filmmakers of color, and that’s because we don’t get a shake elsewhere,” she said. “We built Seed&Spark for the margins… we were built for a different, maybe anti-algorithm universe.”
You can read more about the Houston Cinema Arts Festival here, and read more of our festival coverage here.
Main image: Brennan Kelleher in “Mr. Jesus”
