Jodie Foster Thought Brad Pitt’s F1 Was Written by AI

Jodie Foster assumed the Brad Pitt racing drama F1 was scripted by artificial intelligence. Speaking at the Aspen Ideas Festival on June 30th, she recalled watching the film and instantly recognizing a by-the-numbers narrative. “The structure was exactly the structure that you would learn in school,” she said, according to Variety. “The actors say the lines exactly the way it would be written if a computer was writing exactly what would be the right thing for that time.” She delivered the remark with a laugh, but the observation was pointed: the film felt algorithmically assembled.

Foster was not being entirely dismissive. She acknowledged the film’s commercial success and said she sees AI as useful for “small helpful things” like previz. She revealed that her own film My Private Life used AI for a dream sequence, even though the resulting images “made no sense.” Her main concern is labor. She cited the practice of replicating background actors digitally and argued that unions must ensure performers are paid per use. “If we are able to dominate AI consistently over time,” she added, “we will be able to make things that reflect us.”

The F1 criticism lands because it mirrors a broader production tendency: prioritizing bold, easily trackable action over nuance. Film reviews noted long stretches of the movie where corporate logos fill nearly every shot and plot leaps that skip entire narrative laps. Whether or not the script touched a neural network, Foster’s instinct captures the sensation of watching a film calibrated less for surprise than for frictionless consumption.