Steven Ascher Is “Looking Forward” With New Short And Implementing AI

Oscar nominated filmmaker Steven Ascher (Troublesome Creek: A Midwestern) directed Looking Forward, a short essay film which explores how “our feelings about the future affect how our lives unfold.” Ascher elaborates on that theme on a personal level in the following interview. With the use of black and white stills and implementation of AI, Looking Forward explores one’s interweaving relationship with time and space. Ascher talked to CinemAddicts co-host Eric Holmes about “looking foward” with his storytelling.

I’m here with Steven Ascher, the writer and director of Looking Forward. It was described as a video essay. Most of the images are AI generated, which adds are really surreal (atmosphere). So the way you had the short, it seems like a stream of consciousness aesthetic. And then with the AI images, it adds a real, really surreal kind of feel to it. Where did the whole concept of this come from?

Ascher: I discovered this amazing book called The Third Reich of Dreams, which was written by a researcher in Germany in 1933. She was having Charlotte Beradt was having nightmares about Hitler’s rise to power, and she thought it would be interesting to interview other people about their dreams during this time.

And it was an incredibly powerful book, and people were kind of processing what Hitler meant even before the worst had happened, subconsciously in their dreams. So I started trying to get the rights to the book and experimenting with AI imagery as a way to kind of capture dream like analogues to what was going on.

And, you know, AI is this incredible tool where you can type in a text prompts and then get images. At the time that I was doing it, the algorithm was more primitive than it is now. And so what was coming out with these images that had errors in them that were actually fascinating and very expressionistic faces are not carefully rendered. Sometimes you would get bizarre errors like three arms, but other times you’d get these just really fascinating things.

I asked for two men wearing fedoras in a room in 1930 talking on the phone, because that was one of the dreams, and it rendered and in afternoon light, which you can also specify the quality of the image. And it rendered this amazing shot of these two guys in fedoras. It almost an (Edward) Hopper like painting. And one of them was talking on an iPhone because that’s what the I thought a phone looked like. So I saw a lot of potential in this, in this, in this tool. And as it turned out, I couldn’t get the rights to that book. But I then pivoted – the reason the Hitler theme had been so resonant is (it) so much about what was going on in our own country. About how institutions were being, undermined and, democratic principles were being undermined in plain sight, and people were acting like it was no big deal or a lot of people were.

So I started to think about the kinds of threats that we’re all under, and the ones that we pay attention to and the ones that we ignore. Like everyone else, we had all gone through the pandemic and the lockdown and isolation and both feeling fearful about the future and cut off from the rest of society. And kind of wondering what the future meant.

I had always thought of myself as an optimist, but I was beginning to wonder if that was right and if I still did? Or if that was actually a useful way to think about what was going on in the world. So I ended up making a much more personal film about my own thoughts about both the future and history. And how do we deal with all the things that threaten us in our lives or seem dangerous, and how do we put them in perspective?

This is definitely a pessimistic thought, but when humans have often not worked in our own best interests. So you wonder, like if if we’re heading towards, towards danger, towards our own self destruction? You mentioned the the boiling the frog sort of thing. Maybe our species deserves to be self eradicated. 

Ascher: Everyone always uses that cliche of frogs and boiling water that they, they will stay until they die. Which I think it’s funny because I think if you put a frog in water at all, it will probably hop out anyway. But, just that sense that we don’t see what’s really going on.

There are a lot of things that have been going on and continue to go on that are very dangerous. And people want to go about their lives or they they don’t really think about that. On the other hand, part of the message of the film as you go through is – that’s not a way you can live. Being in constant fear. There has to be another way to kind of integrate this into your life. And I don’t want to kind of give away the arc of the film too much. But it’s not a film without hope or without a sense of how to package some of those threats and fears into something that makes sense within a person’s life.

You said that you don’t want to give away the arc of the film. I would argue that this is impossible to give away because it’s a stream of consciousness (experience). (Looking Forward) is so dense – what was the writing process?

Ascher: It’s interesting. One of the things I’m really loving in the people that have seen the film – almost everybody says ‘I had to watch it twice or more than twice,’ or ‘I keep coming back to it.’ That’s incredibly wonderful. There’s a lot to unpack in the film.

It’s broken into chapters. An important chapter also is my own family’s history. My grandfather was born in Ukraine, and they had to escape pogroms. Fortunately my family got out alive. Everybody else in his town died either in the pogrom or in the Holocaust.

So my family’s story was another one of those chapters. I would write things and narrate them and create imagery to support that. And I worked on it for four months or so, pretty much in isolation. Not sure if it was a film or not, and kind of feeling like maybe it wouldn’t make sense to other people.

Then I brought it to my wife, Jeanne, who’s also my film partner, and said, ‘you know, do you think this is a thing?’ And she found it very moving and deep. That was an incredible encouragement to me to keep going and refining. It isn’t a stream of consciousness in the sense that it all came out at the same time. It’s lots of iterations and hearing what you know, showing it to a few trusted friends and seeing what made sense or what didn’t.

Another thing that’s been really interesting to me is that these images are meant to be very . . . I use the word expressionistic, but full of stimulating you in different ways. Some people find them really disturbing. (Others) find them really fascinating sometimes in combination.

So kind of working with those and creating new images because if anybody has ever tried using AI, generative AI, it’s a very back and forth iterative process. You put in a prompt, you tell it (what) you want it to look like a certain way. You get an image, and then you say, okay, don’t do this. Change the date, change what they’re wearing, change their position, and you go back and forth. So it often takes many, many iterations to get the image that you like. 

***Listen to this week’s episode of CinemAddicts for reviews of The Disappearance of Shere Hite and The Stones and Brian Jones:

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At the beginning of Looking Forward you asked the AI a question about the future and then it answers it. And then that seems to be the kind of where the where the short goes. Is there a version of this where the AI just says there’s flying unicorns and everything’s made out of peanut butter and it’s like, oh, this is going to be a very strange short?

Ascher: Well, I was already thinking about those very issues. So when I asked the AI, what are the things we had to worry about? And it came back with exactly the things I was thinking about. I knew I was on to something. It not only came back with the threats of climate change and threats to democracy and technology, including AI. I love that it just it decided to finish off its list of threats, which was even longer than that. And then it said, but stay optimistic! As advised to me, like, you know, yes, it looks like the world is going to hell, but, don’t worry about it too much! (laughs)

I think the concept of this is really neat, of just using the way you use AI. Asking a question, and then just kind of leaning into that and just going, like, I could see this as like a YouTube series. They have these great CGI images and they’re mostly like asking questions about the universe and using that. Like, I can see like a YouTube sort of thing like this just going forward.

Ascher: Interesting. There are certainly are ways to expand it. I think one of the things that works in this film is it’s short. It’s densely packed. I kind of also thought about the narration, not so much as straight ahead narration. But almost as kind of prose poetry or song lyrics that it’s very distilled and kind of suggestive, and it leaves it to the viewer to see how it works in their lives.

People have really responded strongly that it resonates for how they’re feeling about their own life. So yes it could go further. One of the things that’s interesting about the AI image generation algorithm is it’s gotten better in the sense that it’s more realistic. There’s also this concept of the uncanny valley where when things get pretty realistic but just not quite right, they just make you uncomfortable. The more recent stuff I’ve tried with the newer algorithms, it just it it looks more like real people, but it’s also not. It’s like a kind of flat animation. Not interesting. 

We have a what’s in the box segment on CinemAddicts where we ask filmmakers for personal movie picks. Do you have one?

Ascher: A short that I absolutely love is a film called Undressing My Mother, which I believe is now available on Vimeo. Ken Wardrop did it, and it’s a film with his mother that is just incredibly sensitive and lyrical and you would think couldn’t be done because it’s partly about his mom taking a bath without her clothes on. But it’s a really lovely film.

Where can people find Looking Forward?

Ascher: If you go to our website (lookingforwardfilm.com) – that will take you to links to where you can watch it online. And as we go forward it will be available in other platforms. And that’s where you’ll be able to find it.  

One thing that has been great is when we send it to people and almost always they come back with, ‘can I send it to some other people?’ So it’s it’s taking on its own kind of virality. People want to share it with other people and talk about it. And see how they feel about it. So that’s been really, really lovely.

Well, it was a really great short and definitely got me thinking. And thank you for joining me today and look forward to look forward to seeing what else you have and I’ll check that out in the future as well. 

Ascher: Terrific. Alright take care!

***Full video interview with Steven Asher: