Romain Gavras Says AI Copies of “Storm” Miss the Point of the Film

The short film for “Storm” was built the hard way. Directed by Romain Gavras as part of his audiovisual project Gener8ion, with Yung Lean in front of the camera, it runs as an unbroken take shot on 16-mm film. The dancers came out of a two-month casting search and rehearsed with choreographer Damien Jalet for three days. Gavras has said the budget was “very, very, very, very low” and that he worked for free, and that it took roughly 15 attempts to land the take.

That labor has since been flattened into a genre. Anonymous users have been feeding the film into AI tools and swapping out Yung Lean and his crew for dogs, babies, grandmothers, Elon Musk, Jeffrey Epstein and Hitler. Gavras told Vulture the copies “made me sad for all the people who put in so much work on our video,” adding that “a trend like this can make even good work look lame.” He said part of him wanted to quit filmmaking, move back to Greece and grow olives.

He insists the film was never meant as commentary on AI. What he sees instead is a kind of dare: the practical craft of “Storm” read by tech people as a challenge to be answered. Gavras has looked into suing, though tracking anonymous users makes that impractical, and he turned down licensing inquiries from AI companies on principle. The copies are also part of why he brought the project to the MTV VMAs, where it was nominated for four awards. His argument is simple. “They’re missing the swagger of Yung Lean,” he said. The imperfection, the interior life of a person dancing or smoking a cigarette, does not transfer yet.