Alt Bright Official Blog

I rarely watch sci-fi films now, because I have absolutely no interest in those “products.” People seem to have lost the original purpose of making sci-fi films, as if their thinking has become rigid. They only know how to revolve around “space” and “aliens,” or pile up a bunch of obscure physics terminology to pretend they’ve built a world that looks grand on the surface but is hollow inside.

I think sci-fi should be like this: for example, films from a long time ago (such as 2001: A Space Odyssey). Back then, imagining what was then considered the distant future from an even more distant past was itself filled with humanity’s great courage and desire to explore. That thirst for knowledge and bravery in the face of the unknown made humanity shine. And there were no computer-generated special effects at the time, so making films like that required even more courage, which is why sci-fi films from that era always had such texture and substance. Of course, this example belongs to relatively “hard” sci-fi, meaning there may be a lot of science-fiction and physics elements in it, but I think sci-fi should not be limited to that alone. One of the better sci-fi works in recent years in my opinion is Cyberpunk 2077. Its world still takes place on Earth (though there are a few endings involving space), but the dystopian society it portrays, the class conflicts, and the most sci-fi aspect of all — adding functional mechanical devices to the human body, brain-computer interfaces — all of that is sci-fi too. Even just a unique love story set against a sci-fi background is still sci-fi.

So if you want to make a good sci-fi film in this era, the first thing you need to figure out is this issue: you cannot immediately think only of space and aliens whenever sci-fi is mentioned and consider everything else invalid. Honestly, that kind of rigid thinking is already outdated. Since sci-fi is fundamentally imaginative work, if your thinking is already so rigid at the level of subject matter, the work itself won’t turn out well either.

Next, I’m going to talk about two aspects: “budget” and “production logic.”

**1. Budget **
First of all, how much budget do you think a sci-fi film needs? One to two hundred million dollars?

Looking at it today, if I were the director, then with my own style of “small budget, small scale, but ruthless and precise,” I would absolutely never choose a budget like that. A budget measured in hundreds of millions is simply too uncontrollable. The structure becomes unclear, and when there’s too much money, problems naturally appear, because the more money involved, the more people get involved. Everyone suddenly feels entitled to interfere in the work under the excuse of “giving suggestions.” Creatively, the investors would immediately crush and distort the project, and the auteur quality would inevitably be heavily diluted. I’m someone with an extremely strong desire for control who cares deeply about initiative and autonomy, so I hate being constrained by others. Once investors see a massive budget, there’s absolutely no way they’ll allow the director to rely purely on auteur-driven vision. In the end, it just turns into something that isn’t sharp enough, has no auteur identity, yet still costs an enormous amount of money. That’s the most infuriating kind of failure.

If I were the producer, I wouldn’t propose a budget like that either, because it’s too large and too outdated.

What I mean is that maybe this kind of massive budget made sense at a certain stage in the past, but today it can very easily collapse, because the problem now is not “do you dare spend this much money making it,” but rather “how does every dollar you spend actually appear on screen, and can the box office make the money back in the end?” In this situation, the most dangerous naive idea is “only massive investment can achieve great things” and “big spectacle requires burning huge amounts of money.” Budgets are inflating too quickly now. Sci-fi and medieval films are already extremely expensive by nature, and if you still cling to old large-scale industrial production logic, things can spiral out of control very easily. You can literally go bankrupt, and it becomes completely not worth it. On top of that, the current public-opinion environment is unstable, and film happens to be the most restricted art form. Music can rely on Spotify and concerts; people don’t randomly go listen to pirated music. But there are endless pirated movie websites. If something happens — a film gets blocked by theaters, removed from streaming platforms, or people deliberately watch pirated versions just to disgust the director — there’s basically no solution. Then the production cost becomes even harder to recover, because cinema itself is fundamentally constrained by investment.

Regarding this issue, I’m sure many directors will try to use experiences that succeeded in the past as references for today’s landscape, but that is also the easiest place to fail, because the production logic no longer matches. To put it more bluntly, in the 1990s people had very few forms of entertainment. Back then, if a film was about to be released, it would become a focal point everyone cared about, so the number of people going to theaters was definitely much larger than it is today. But now things are completely different. Phones, computers, and PlayStations have entirely fragmented people’s attention. More accurately, nothing today can dominate the majority of people’s attention for a period of time the way films once did — not games, not music either (unless they’re deliberately hyped, but even then the lifespan is too short). So under these circumstances, not being naive about budgets is extremely important.

And the source of large budgets is also a key issue. As someone making European films, American capital is currently relatively conservative, and the probability of receiving huge investments is not high (after all, they already have Hollywood — those commercial films may lack artistry, but they make money). The source of funding cannot necessarily be secured entirely within Europe, so the only options left are Asia or the Middle East. I generally don’t watch Asian films, because they are purely empty commercial products and celebrity-marketing vehicles. In that situation, if that kind of capital gets involved in your project, then just like I said above, you become extremely passive, and the final product won’t retain much auteur identity or artistry either.

**2. Production Logic **
Films today are always polarized: either completely practical shooting or entirely special effects. Looking at it now, I don’t encourage either approach.

A film made entirely with visual effects is, in my opinion, just a product, because it relies on showing off effects to conceal the fact that “this is actually a terrible movie.” Whatever aspect is weakest will always be deliberately covered up by something else.

Completely practical shooting, meanwhile, feels extremely not worth it today. I’m not saying it’s impossible — it’s just not worth it. As a producer, you need to help the director balance this issue properly. The reason has already been explained in the budget section.

Now that computers exist, the production method should be virtual production combined with practical shooting. Practical shooting best expresses auteur identity and that cinematic texture hidden within film itself, but whenever people think of sci-fi films, directors seem to only think about visual effects.

I’ll use a sci-fi film whose title I don’t want to reveal as an example. That film was basically entirely virtual production. Completely — almost entirely! The only real thing might have been the actors themselves. As a result, the visuals looked extremely greasy, cheap, and plastic-like, because you couldn’t see the director’s hand in it at all, nor any sense of real air or physical texture. If you want to go fully down the virtual-production route, I think the best approach is CG, such as the incredibly refined promotional cinematic for Cyberpunk 2077, or Gantz: O from ten years ago. Because fully virtual production is essentially compositing people into a completely virtual environment, and inherently it already looks fake — the characters end up looking pasted into a video game scene. At least in CG, the characters’ style still resembles actual humans. I strongly oppose the practice of actors performing an entire film in front of green screens.

If you want to make a truly auteur-driven sci-fi film, virtual production can absolutely be used, but it must be combined with real-world sets and locations. This is not just to save money, but also to preserve auteur identity and directorial presence. The truly effective approach is not burning money uncontrollably on entirely real sets, nor building every prop physically by hand. Instead, the key shots, environments, emotional performances, lighting, and spatial atmosphere should exist in the real world, while the most expensive, hardest-to-control, yet absolutely necessary elements should be handled by virtual production. Because weather and lighting in practical shooting are uncontrollable. If several shots are ruined, the cost of reshoots becomes enormous.

I believe the purpose of virtual production is not to replace practical shooting, but simply to help directors reduce costs and improve visual results. However, many people today seem to have completely confused the hierarchy between the two.

Finally, I want to emphasize several ideas that filmmaking today absolutely should not carry.
First: only massive investment can accomplish great things.
Second: big spectacle requires burning huge amounts of money, and every prop must be physically built in the real world.
Third: technological worship.
Fourth: believing that auteur identity and gigantic industrial scale can both be fully achieved simultaneously (this is a mistake I’ve made myself as well).