Just days after Paul Schrader revealed that he plans to make his long-gestating crime noir “Three Guns At Dawn” entirely with AI-generated performers, the filmmaker has explained why he abandoned human actors in the first place. According to Schrader, Black actors rejected the original version because all three of its Black protagonists were criminals. His solution? Make the movie without them.

Schrader has spent the past week gradually clarifying his plans for “Three Guns At Dawn.” As The Playlist previously reported, the filmmaker originally conceived the South Central Los Angeles noir around three Black brothers—a corrupt cop, a drug trafficker, and a third criminal—with Antoine Fuqua attached to produce. Schrader later said Fuqua left the project and that he began reconfiguring the film around AI.

Schrader subsequently told The Hollywood Reporter that he plans to go considerably further than using AI for visual effects or isolated sequences. He intends to populate the entire movie with “AI-generated human prototypes” rather than recognizable actors. “Those jobs are gone, babe,” Schrader said while discussing Hollywood’s resistance to generative AI. “You can scream ‘Stop AI’ all you want, but you can’t stop it.”

But speaking this weekend with The Playlist in Venice following the premiere of “The Basics of Philosophy,” Schrader offered a much more revealing explanation for how “Three Guns At Dawn” reached that point.

“I had originally written it about three Black brothers, all of whom are bad guys: a corrupt cop, a drug dealer, and a sexual criminal,” Schrader explained. “And they were all trying to kill each other. And Antoine Fuqua was going to produce it.”

According to Schrader, he and Fuqua then approached actors with the project and ran into a fundamental problem.

“We sent it out to actors, and no Black actors wanted to play in a movie where there are no good Black people,” he said. “And it sort of died. But then AI came along, and I didn’t need Black actors.”

Asked if that meant he would create the actors himself, Schrader replied, “We’re making them!” He also confirmed that AI will generate everything in the film.

Schrader didn’t seem conflicted about the larger consequences of that decision. While he acknowledges why artists fear generative AI, he considers the technology’s disruption inevitable.

“Some people say it’s coming. Some people say it’s here. People are upset about it, and I can understand why,” he said. “Musicians are getting hit first. Then actors.”

Schrader compared their predicament to portrait painters confronting the invention of photography in the 19th century. “It’s like portrait painters saying, ‘We have to stop photography, or we’re going to be out of a job,’” he said. “And the answer is, ‘You are out of a job.’”

That attitude has already turned “Three Guns At Dawn” into one of Hollywood’s more provocative experiments with generative AI. Schrader’s explanation for why he embraced the technology adds another dimension entirely. Black actors apparently looked at a screenplay in which every major Black character was a criminal and decided they didn’t want to participate. Rather than reconsider that objection—or apparently the material that prompted it—Schrader has apparently found technology that lets him proceed without them.

It’s not a particularly a good look or a flattering explanation, to be honest, especially since Schrader himself openly identifies the actors’ concern. But Schrader has rarely shown much interest in filtering provocative ideas through concerns about how they might land, and he doesn’t appear particularly troubled by the implications here either. For him, AI seems to solve a practical filmmaking problem. Of course, audiences will likely see that solution very differently, to say the least. At 80, Schrader often seems less concerned with avoiding controversy than simply making the films he wants to make. We’ll see how this one shakes out.

More from this interview soon. —Reporting by Luke Hicks.