Martin Scorsese Joins Black Forest Labs as AI Adviser, Uses Generative AI for Film Storyboarding

By Hector Herrera | June 4, 2026

Martin Scorsese has joined German AI image-generation startup Black Forest Labs as an adviser — and has been using the company's tools to storyboard his films during pre-production. The news, confirmed by Variety, has immediately divided the film industry: Scorsese called the tools "creatively freeing," while director Boots Riley publicly condemned the endorsement. The announcement lands weeks after Cannes spent its most contentious festival season in memory debating AI authorship — and signals that the industry's most respected directors are not uniformly opposed to the technology.

Who Black Forest Labs Is

Black Forest Labs is a German AI startup best known for developing Flux, one of the leading open-weight image generation models in the industry. Open-weight models — models whose parameters are publicly released, allowing anyone to run or fine-tune them — have proliferated rapidly as an alternative to proprietary closed systems from Midjourney and OpenAI's DALL-E.

Flux competes directly in the high-quality image generation space, and Black Forest Labs has attracted significant venture attention. Scorsese was introduced to the company through his manager Rick Yorn, who is a co-founder of investor BroadLight Capital — one of Black Forest Labs' backers, according to Variety's reporting.

What Scorsese Says He's Using It For

Scorsese's use case is specific and worth examining closely: storyboarding during pre-production. Storyboards are visual sketches — sequential drawings or images that map out scene composition, camera angles, actor blocking, and lighting before a single frame is shot. They are the bridge between a director's mental image and what a cinematographer and crew can actually execute.

In Scorsese's telling, AI image tools help him communicate that mental image more precisely. His direct quote: the tools helped him "share what I'm visualizing more clearly and efficiently" with his creative team, calling the experience "creatively freeing."

That framing is careful and important. Scorsese is not describing AI as a creative partner or a co-author. He is describing it as a communication tool — a faster, higher-fidelity way to transmit his vision to human collaborators who then execute it. The director remains the creative authority; the AI accelerates the translation of that authority into shared understanding.

Black Forest Labs CEO Robin Rombach described Scorsese's use as "proof the technology works for professional filmmakers" — a validation claim the company will likely use extensively in its marketing going forward.

The Industry Reaction

Not everyone is satisfied with Scorsese's framing.

Director Boots Riley — best known for Sorry to Bother You — publicly condemned the endorsement. Riley's objection reflects a concern widespread among working directors, writers, and crew members: that any normalization of AI tools by marquee directors makes it harder to resist AI adoption in contexts where it genuinely displaces human workers rather than augmenting a director's communication.

The distinction Scorsese draws — AI for storyboarding vs. AI for replacing human storyboard artists — is precisely the line that critics argue is being erased in practice. AI image generation already does what professional storyboard artists do, faster and at lower cost. A director using AI to storyboard is, in effect, choosing not to hire a human storyboard artist, regardless of how "creatively freeing" the experience feels.

The institutional response from unions has not yet materialized for this specific announcement, but the SAG-AFTRA and WGA agreements negotiated in 2023 explicitly address AI use in production — and pre-production AI use involving human likenesses or narrative content is an evolving area of union policy.

Why Scorsese's Name Matters

Martin Scorsese is not a peripheral figure. He is arguably the most critically respected American director working today, with a career spanning Taxi Driver, Goodfellas, The Departed, and The Irishman. His 2023 essay attacking Marvel superhero films as "theme parks, not cinema" was treated as a definitive cultural statement by mainstream press. He has credibility with exactly the audience most resistant to AI adoption in creative work.

When Scorsese says AI tools are "creatively freeing," it carries weight that the same statement from a commercial director or a tech entrepreneur would not. Black Forest Labs is getting something money alone cannot buy: a signal to the film industry that AI image tools are compatible with serious artistic work, from someone whose artistic seriousness is beyond dispute.

That signal will be used — by AI companies, by studios exploring AI-assisted pre-production workflows, and by productions looking to reduce pre-production costs — in ways that extend well beyond Scorsese's specific, limited use case.

What to Watch

The most important near-term question is how film unions respond to high-profile pre-production AI use. SAG-AFTRA's contract covers on-screen performance and likeness; storyboard-phase AI sits in a different part of the production workflow and may not be clearly addressed by existing agreements. If unions begin pushing for pre-production AI provisions in the next contract cycle — which opens in 2026 — Scorsese's advisory role will almost certainly be cited in those negotiations.

Watch also whether other prominent directors publicly align with Scorsese's position. A cluster of top-tier director endorsements would mark a genuine tipping point in industry acceptance of AI pre-production tools.