While platforms, studios, and major consultancies debate aloud the future of artificial intelligence in cinema, the real decisions are being made in silence — at small tables, between people who have understood something important: in this change of era, listening well is worth more than speaking quickly.
There is a quiet paradox in the way the film industry is approaching the moment of artificial intelligence. While everyone has an opinion, almost no one is listening. The pages of the specialised press fill each week with columns, panels, and statements. Festivals programme roundtables with increasingly bold titles. Consultancies publish reports with increasingly precise figures. And, in the middle of all that activity, the real decisions — the ones that will one day be remembered as the ones that changed the industry — are being made, almost always, in private conversations that no one covers.
That observation is not new. But it is, possibly, the first editorial discipline that Croisette Conversations wants to reclaim.
In the current rhythm of the cultural industry, speaking quickly has become a form of existence. Those who do not voice an opinion do not appear. Those who do not appear do not count. Those who do not count do not influence. The known consequence of that logic is an inflation of statements: many speak, few say, and almost no one listens. Artificial intelligence applied to cinema has been, over the past eighteen months, the most visible example of that phenomenon.
But there is another way of operating, older and, in some ways, more radical. It is the editorial discipline of listening before speaking. Of reading slowly, observing what happens at the margins, identifying the people who are thinking about something important before it has become a headline, and giving them the floor without the pressure of the moment.
That is, not by accident, the way of operating that distinguishes the international publications that end up being remembered. It is what Monocle does. It is what — in its best pieces — Vanity Fair still does. It is what The New Yorker did for decades, and what it still does when it allows itself to. It is what these pages propose to do as well.
There is a conversation, about cinema and artificial intelligence, that the industry has not yet known how to have. It is not the conversation about whether AI will replace the screenwriter. Nor the conversation about how many jobs will be lost. Those conversations are legitimate, but they are saturating the public space and, above all, they are exhausting the reader.
The conversation we have not had yet is another. It is the conversation about what kind of cinema becomes possible when technical costs collapse. About the stories that have been sleeping in drawers for decades because no one could finance them. About the authors who have spent years searching for the way to tell what they carry inside, and who now, for the first time, have the means to do so. About what could appear, not about what could disappear.
It is a longer conversation, calmer, and probably much more important.
Croisette Conversations exists, in part, to sustain that other kind of conversation. To take the time. To grant the reader and the interviewee the luxury — increasingly rare — of an exchange that does not seek a trending topic, but an idea worth thinking about slowly.
In the pages that follow, some of those conversations will appear over the coming season. Some will come signed by names already known within the ecosystem. Others, by voices still discreet. What will unite them will not be their degree of public notoriety, but something more demanding: the quality of what they are thinking, even before it has become evident to the rest.
As always in this craft, listening well is still worth more than speaking quickly.
That, too, is La Croisette.
— The Editors
La Croisette · May 14, 2026