The doc about Renzo Rosso, founder of the Diesel fashion brand, is among the first AI features to launch from a top-tier film festival. New York-based Italian director Francesco Carrozzini is heading to the Venice Film Festival with “Be Brave” an 85-minute portrait of Renzo Rosso, founder of the Diesel fashion brand. The groundbreaking doc uses AI in a way that “can still live within a space of emotion and storytelling,” he says.
Carrozzini did not shoot a single frame of his protagonist, instead recreating Rosso at different stages of his life using AI. Carrozzini was first in Venice with “Franca: Chaos and Creation,” the doc he made about his mother, the late, influential editor of Italian Vogue. The director was subsequently on the Lido in 2022 with his first feature “The Hanging Sun.” In the year-and-a-half that Carrozzini spent making “Be Brave” “AI has changed to a point where what we were doing in the beginning had to be redone,” he says.
But “Working with a medium that is transforming at this pace is also really exciting,” he notes. Carrozzini speaks to Variety ahead of Venice about the challenges of making “Be Brave” and his thoughts on how AI can best be utilized in the filmmaking space. Why did you decide to use AI for this project?
Lorenzo Mieli approached me with the idea of making a film about Renzo Rosso. Initially, I was a bit reluctant because I had sort of taken a step back from the world of fashion that I grew up in to throw myself into narrative film and TV. But Lorenzo insisted, and when he wants to sell you an idea he’s pretty effective.
The idea was to create something a bit innovative and to experiment with AI, though it wasn’t quite clear what we were going to do. So we started testing the idea. In the very beginning, it was really about necessity.
There is a lot of archival like TV stuff of Renzo Rosso, but there’s no good interviews. There are no really good intimate moments in his archives. So the idea became: first of all, we can recreate those from scratch; though we were worried about them not being believable.
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