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Gal Gadot may not be returning as Wonder Woman, but she will soon star in Doug Liman’s “Bitcoin,” a $70 million, AI-enhanced film starring Casey Affleck as the inventor of the cryptocurrency. When asked why she’s starring in the film, Gadot echoed the answer given by many of her peers on the topic of working with AI: that she doesn’t want to get left behind.
“I’m afraid of AI, but I am going to be afraid and look away? No,” Gadot said on Josh Horowitz’s “Happy Sad Confused” on Monday. “I’m afraid and I’m playing with it and I’m learning it and I’m trying to educate myself with it, because I think that the train had left the station, you know? It’s one of those things. It’s either you’re going to…”
“Work with it,” Horowitz offered. “To ignore it is at your own peril.”
“Or be out of the game completely,” she replied. “So I’m trying to make the best of it and protect whatever I can protect, but the AI component in this movie is for sets and for the lighting. We had a very broad crew and a lot of people were working on this movie.”
TheWrap exclusively visited the set of the film, formerly titled “Bitcoin: Killing Satoshi,” back in April. Liman’s latest is produced by Acme AI & FX, founded by Ryan and Matt Kavanaugh, Garrett Grant and Lawrence Grey, and shot on a custom soundstage over the course of 20 days.
Individuals involved with the biopic, written by Nick Schenk, claim that it would have cost $300 million — over $100 million more than “Michael,” currently reported as the most expensive biopic of all time. Using AI to replace traditional lighting and sets got that price tag down to a still-hefty $70 million.
“This was the longest contract I have ever worked on,” Gadot said. “I think it was six months for my lawyers to go through every scenario we could think about as far as the AI component of it because I absolutely did not want the AI to have anything to do with my performance, and so we had to protect that. By the way, to an extent that SAG had called my lawyers to ask for pointers to update the SAG contract to protect other actors, blah blah blah, knowing what we’ve been through. As far as the performances, for me, you know, it’s all me.” You can watch the full interview below.
Gadot appeared on “Happy Sad Confused” ahead of the release of her new action movie “The Runner,” hitting Prime Video on Sept. 2. There, she also discussed her departure from the role of Wonder Woman, claiming that DCU co-CEOs James Gunn and Peter Safran asked her to reprise the role in a third film, but that she “saw the way everybody else were handled.”
“The Henry situation was not being handled elegantly, to say the least,” she said, referencing Henry Cavill’s exit from the franchise.
