Tom Cruise earned spontaneous applause at a BAFTA event in London after spending more than six minutes eulogizing about the power of art over AI.
Speaking at a BAFTA: Life in Pictures event, during which Cruise reflected on his screen career, host Edith Bowman posed what she described as the “AI question” about how the technology will disrupt the medium Cruise loves.
The Top Gun and Mission: Impossible actor embarked on a monologue about human craft in filmmaking and the potency of the theatrical experience. His answer re-trod plenty of familiar Cruise messages, but his passion prompted an outbreak of applause from an otherwise low-key audience.
“There is nothing like human,” Cruise responded, before traversing through an answer that touched on camera lens technology and cinemas vs. streaming. Although he did not speak about the downsides of AI directly, he said a blockbuster summer at movie theaters — including engagement from young audiences — shows that “people want human experience.”
“What you put attention on, you give life,” Cruise told the audience of BAFTA members, adding that he does not want to lose the craftspeople who dedicate their careers to creating movies. “People wanna see real things,” he added.
Cruise has previously spoken about artificial intelligence during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA negotiations, during which the actor pushed for protections concerning the technology. He has repeatedly emphasized the importance of people in filmmaking.
During the BAFTA event, which was staged to mark his upcoming movie Digger, Cruise spoke about how he got Alejandro González Iñárritu to read him the script over two nights before he committed. The Jerry Maguire actor described the film as “one of the most original and moving” movies he has ever worked on.
The pic is gearing up for its October 2 theatrical release. It stars Cruise as an oil baron named Digger Rockwell who is charged with saving the day to avert an environmental catastrophe that he caused in the first place.