Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival Interview: Director Franklin Ritch on The Artifice Girl

The Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival runs in person in Bucheon, South Korea from June 29 to July 9. The Boston Hassle’s Joshua Polanski interviewed director, actor, and writer Franklin Ritch on his film The Artifice Girl as part of his multi-outlet coverage of the festival. Be sure to check out his website for updates on additional coverage.

Ritch’s The Artifice Girl focuses on Gareth (Ritch), a special effects artist turned hunter of pedophiles. Using his special effects skills and tools, Gareth creates an unmodeled, completely original little girl that can be rendered in real-time to lure in and subsequently report would-be predators to the authorities. The girl, Cherry (Tatum Matthews), evolves into something beyond Gareth’s power through machine learning. She becomes a new being, one whose prime directive is to keep kids safe from exploitation.

The following interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

BOSTON HASSLE: Can you walk me through the origin of the film’s concept? Where did you get the idea for it?

FRANKLIN RITCH: I read some articles about how AI and technology were being used to hunt down predators and criminals online. And I thought that was such a cool idea. What a great way to use technology for something good. So that sort of nugget of an idea happened, but it didn’t really feel like there was a story there until around the spring of 2020, when everybody was in lockdown initially. And I was trying to figure out if there was something I could do during the pandemic.

And then there was this kind of epiphany moment where I felt like maybe there could be a thematic parallel between the budding adolescence of AI and childhood trauma. And once that line was drawn in my mind, it was like, “Okay, this is a story I have to tell.” In the spring of 2020, I didn’t know anything about AI. I’m not a tech-savvy person. So, I did around two weeks of just pure research where I took an online course in machine learning. More importantly, I had lots and lots of conversations and Zoom calls with professionals in those fields.

Talking to people who were actually doing the jobs that I was writing about and getting a sense of the technical shorthand was great, but [I was also] getting a good sense of the people and the personalities behind those programs and technologies and what it’s like as a human being to do that—what kind of mental psychology is that, and what is the toll it takes?

I wrote the first draft in a really short period of time. It was like 48 hours that I just kind of dumped it on a page. I know it sounds impressive or glamorous—you’re picturing Jude Law with a typewriter—but no, it was very disgusting. With the lockdown and all, I’m just sitting on my bed in pajamas surrounded by GrubHub bags. I looked like a gremlin. That first draft just felt like it was writing itself in a weird way.

Continue reading at the Boston Hassle.