She's shorter than I thought. Compact, restless, mostly unable to sit still throughout this interview, Heather Ferreira enters a Sherman Oaks Thai restaurant wearing fitted black that looks a little like some kind of Silicon Valley customer service rep uniform: a bit “Apple” – solid black polyester, no features, no frills, simple – and orders meekrob then sits with me, continually watching what happens outside our sidewalk side window. She is a talkative, even garrulous, friendly personality who reminds me a bit of Ralph Bakshi. “I know him,” she informs me. “Ralph hired me in 2016 to produce a wonderful animated musical feature for him. It didn't work out because he yelled at me, and I still feel sad about that. He's a visionary despite the yelling. Everything Tarantino is praised for Ralph did first, in 1970, by hand.”
Gesticulatory, bright-eyed (her eyes are almond-shaped and she says it's due to partial Asian heritage), Ferreira is pensive, a little sad and depressed looking on surface, but seething with constant ideas: ideas to create male robot companions for intelligent straight females at her upcoming Tesla-style company Kubrick, ideas for the return of Saturday morning cartoons she’s producing, ideas for how she can make original Sesame Street and her childhood favorite TV show The Electric Company return. A little autistic in aspect and somber, the mixed-race film director has won multiple cinema awards but remains largely unknown because she “hates” social media and publicity and is intensely private.
“I'm a bit Aspergers or something,” she tells me as her meal finally arrives: late. “I don't like attention, I hate crowds, and I don't even like tight-fitting clothing or exposing myself. To become famous in the 2020s you've got to instead really love these things or at least adapt to them. I refuse to because I can't. You're lucky to get this [interview] out of me. I'm doing it because of Atlantis (her current production). I hate being heard and seen. I just want to create. I've been stalked and I keep being stalked both by weird, mentally nuts guys and nuts gay women. So I hide. This may why nobody knows about me.”
Her meal was late and prepared wrong. “I used to be a waitress,” she confessed to me at the end of this interview. She tipped the waiter a $100. Aren't you encouraging him, I ask her? “It wasn't his fault,” she replies, “and he's on his feet all day. This is the least I can do. Give him a break.”
Ferreira directed The Fragrance of Petrichor, the first completed full-length motion picture (at 90 minutes) in November of 2024 using solely AI...
It immediately won the Honorable Mention Award from the 2024 AI International Film Festival, but the world doesn't know because an amateur actor she cast for a single day's work on her 2021 film The Fisherman targeted and stalked her during its premiere, swerving her publicity team's attention from the premiere to instead resolving him.
She achieved a permanent restraining order immediately against the actor (reportedly even the judge, a San Diego County veteran judge, was terrified by the actor’s obsession with Ferreira) but the damage was already done, “And this,” Ferreira assures, “happens like clockwork on every production of mine. I achieve something notable and a mentally ill guy or lesbian appears immediately, posting things online about me that are false, and threatening and stalking me, and the film winds up subsumed because I have to put more intention into my preserving safety into the picture. This pattern goes back to 1997 and I don't know how I attracted it or why. But it ruined (The Fragrance of) Petrichor. Had [the most recent stalker actor] not inflicted what he did and disrupted our publicity as he did, I'd probably be the most famous film director in the world right now,” says Ferreira. “Petrichor was the first completely AI feature length film, but let's talk about Atlantis. That's, I think, where the future will have to be.”
Set in 13,611 B.C., Atlantis: The Motion Picture depicts the infamous sunken island as a teeming, wealthy technological superpower much like America of today but with cooler gadgets, against a slick backdrop of Greek temples, Dorian columns and Roman statues all using electricity. Generated entirely with AI at Ferreira's human directorial command, the film is already attracting strong response becoming similar to the way the 1977 world audience reacted to the first Star Wars. Ferreira thinks it’s no coincidence:
“America and the world have been crying out for a nonpolitical science-fiction fantasy blockbuster with a broad vision, compelling characters, special effects and a good story, and it's my hope and conviction Atlantis will deliver it. It has name recognition, meaning everyone, and every language and culture and race in the world, knows what 'Atlantis' is and recognizes its name instantly, so it's its own brand while simultaneously public domain, which in 2025 is becoming important. I've noticed everybody has an opinion on Atlantis, even people who don't believe it existed. Their disbelief it existed is an opinion: theirs; and they expressed it. Everyone else knows of course the place existed and most cultures refer at least vaguely to it having done so. Everyone knows something caused, about around 13,600 B.C., an epic worldwide flood that changed demographics, technology, religion, pretty much everything. Everyone knows Ancient Egypt suddenly developed or was exposed to technology of a paradigm shift-level sort somehow for some reason. You say to people the word Atlantis and their eyes start to glitter. Even taxi drivers in Mexico reacted fabulously to it. The Mexicans call it Atlante, with an E on the end. The name Aztlan derives from it, so something happened. Mine just happens to be the first ever film that not only says yes it existed, and yes it sank, but here, this is possibly why: and it's all generated by AI with me at the helm, and features all-artificial stars, which is also important.”
Atlantis: The Motion Picture indeed boasts an impressive raft of completely artificial but unsettlingly real seeming stars...
All of which kind of remind you of this or that name star from history but you somehow can’t quite place your finger on, and some fairly startlingly strong special effects. Its story is common and relatable, and you find yourself rooting for exactly the right characters just the right way. Again, as she has implied, it has a distinct and eerie feel of 1977 George Lucas. But it’s also an anachronism feast for the eyes: Atlantis the country has atomic weapons, fighter jets, and smartphones.
The screener so far shows a fairly compelling science-fiction movie: Atlantis is depicted as an intriguing cross of 1950's Cecil B. DeMille Bible pic and futuristic technopolis teeming with lasers, crystal pyramids and torpedos. There are numerous allusions to America in the movie: a leisurely wealthy populace used to good things is suddenly confronted by catastrophe, brought by determined foreign military enemies. The villain is formidable with a strong reason for his actions, one you almost could agree with. But the protagonist, The Emperor of Atlantis, Adelphi I, has arguably equal reasons for defending his nation and is played – if I can call an AI actor’s performance that – by without doubt probably the most photogenic and likeable male star pixels have ever put together. If you can cast politics aside Atlantis has everything in place to be, yes, possibly, the next 1977 Star Wars. But it’s completely AI, which she has made work exceptionally well visually. Will it work the rest of the way, and in Peoria?
Ferreira hoped to complete the film by May 2025 but says “September is probably more feasible. May 25th of 2026 is absolutely if distribution works out. I'm at Warner Bros, so I am under legal obligation to screen it for them first: first look first refusal. But if they pass, 20th Century Fox feels the most natural and logical. We’ll have to see. But,” the director promises, “the real seller here is controversy. Human actors in this film have been replaced entirely by some very competent artificial ones. How will it come across to audiences? I’m more concerned what SAG-AFTRA will do. They’re going to hate both this picture and me. But the hour has come. The technology is here. And there is no more deserving union.”
Atlantis: The Motion Picture is in production in Los Angeles and San Diego and is expected to premiere worldwide by Christmas of 2025 or Summer of 2026. Says the director to me over her very wrong Thai meal, forgivingly, “It all depends upon both luck and distribution.”
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Farzan Farhad
