First AI-Directed Movie "The Sweet Idleness" Announced Amid AI Actress Tilly Norwood Controversy

In the week in which an AI actress has got the industry talking, Italian producer Andrea Iervolino, whose credits include Michael Mann’s “Ferrari,” is launching a new AI label and has announced “The Sweet Idleness” which he touts as “the first film directed by a virtual director.”

The film is overseen by FellinAI, an artificial intelligence director conceived to “celebrate the poetic and dreamlike language of great European cinema.”

FellinAI is housed at Andrea Iervolino Company AI, an artificial intelligence arm of The Andrea Iervolino Company, with Iervolino acting as its “human-in-the-loop,” a supervisor and producer who guides and monitors the technology.

“The Sweet Idleness” depicts “a tomorrow in which only 1% of humanity still works, transforming labor into a symbolic ritual, while the rest of the population lives in the freedom and leisure provided by machines,” the synopsis reads. “Amid cathedral-factories, mechanical clowns, and surreal processions, the ‘last workers’ become the final masks of a humanity that resists the insolence of labor.”

The announcement from Iervolino, who is embroiled in financial litigation having recently parted ways with business partner Monika Bakardi, comes as AI actress Tilly Norwood has sparked backlash from the acting community and SAG-AFTRA.

“For the first time, the traditional roles of the film industry are being redefined,” Iervolino said in the statement.

“Andrea Iervolino takes on the new role of Human-on-the-Loop — the human supervisor and producer who guides, monitors, and ensures the creative and production consistency of the AI process,” he added.

Andrea Biglione, director of Italian films “Almeno tu nell’universo,” “N.E.E.T.,” “Drony” and producer of the film “Diario di un maniaco perbene,” “is the system’s developer as well as Human-in-the-Loop, a bridge between algorithmic intuition and human artistic sensitivity,” according to the statement.

The cast is provided by Actor+, an in-house agency of The Andrea Iervolino Company, that works with real people. Performers lend their faces, physicality, and personality to bring to life new digital actors and characters, the company noted.

“These digital actors, born from the union of human presence and generative technology, will not exist only on screen: they will continue to live beyond the film, through social media, opinions, interactions, and personal content. The Andrea Iervolino Company defines this new dimension as Digital Human’s Existency — the ‘social and narrative existence’ of the digital actor in the real and online world,” the statement added.

Below is a full statement from Andrea Iervolino about this project

“With ‘The Sweet Idleness’ we celebrate the beginning of a new chapter in the history of cinema. Our vision is simple and at the same time revolutionary: to unite human sensitivity with the creative power of artificial intelligence in order to tell stories that no one has ever imagined before. FellinAI is a director who never sleeps, while Actor+ is a company of actors who live beyond the screen. It is the future, but also a return to the original poetry of cinema.

I want to clarify that this new production approach — led by an AI Agent as director, involving digital actors created from real people, and applied to this project — is not intended to replace traditional cinema. Rather, it is an alternative method of creation.”