Director Eli Roth has admitted that his new horror film Ice Cream Man features a sprinkling of generative AI, mere days after claiming otherwise.
On Monday (3 August), the Hostel filmmaker and Inglourious Basterds actor, 54, took credit for the movie’s animation sequences, denying that the scenes used AI. He told Polygon: “I have an animation background, and I drew it.”
However, it has since been highlighted that the film’s credits namecheck AI visual effects company Dark Half – and when approached for comment, Roth said he “misspoke”, adding: “AI was used in a very small portion of a few scenes in the film.”
“It was an opportunity where technology and creativity came together to help bring my vision for the film to life,” Roth said.
The director originally told the outlet: “I worked with an animation team and I wanted it to look and feel like – there’s an old Mickey Mouse cartoon where he goes to a haunted house and there’s brooms and dancing skeletons and this kind of flowing dancing stuff and the jittery style of the animation. So I drew the loop cycles and the styles. Then I had some animators help kind of make it a little more fluid, and I worked with an artist to give it a bit of an old-timey jittery feel. But I sat there and I drew out the frames that I wanted.”
The Independent has contacted Roth for comment.
Ice Cream Man follows a suburban town whose children are turned into homicidal killers when a deranged ice cream man (Ari Millen) serves them sweet treats. The film has been maligned by critics, with some branding it the worst release of the year.
It currently has a 30 per cent score on review aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes – a marked improvement on the 10 per cent his previous film, sci-fi action Borderlands, mustered.
The star-studded movie – an adaptation of the popular video game – followed bounty hunter Lilith (played by two-time Oscar winner Cate Blanchett) as she teams up with a ragtag group of misfits to find a missing girl on her home planet. The Independent’s Clarisse Loughrey called the film “a total disaster.”
Roth shot to fame with low-budget horror film Cabin Fever in 2002. His other credits include Hostel and Hostel: Part II (2005 and 2007), The Green Inferno (2013) and fantasy film The House with a Clock in Its Walls (2018).
He also appeared in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, playing Donny “The Bear Jew” opposite Brad Pitt.
