Inside an AI-generated movie: the best parts were all human

Higgsfield's latest project, Cully Hill Boys, is an AI-generated feature film that aims to look and feel like a traditionally produced movie. The film tells the story of three struggling East London rappers who accidentally steal a crime lord's money, and it was codirected by Adilet Abish and Aitore Zholdaskali, based on a script originally written by Tim Planagan. The actors—Mikyle 'N3on' Rafiq, Matt Kiatipis, and Israel Adesanya—signed licensing agreements for their likenesses but did not shoot any scenes. Higgsfield used a combination of AI models: Anthropic's Claude generated the prompts, Seedance 2.5 created video and speech, and ByteDance's Seedream and Google's Nano Banana handled image and video editing. The creative team split their workflow across different models because the rules of one job poison another. Many prompts explicitly referenced the styles of directors Edgar Wright and Guy Ritchie, underlining how the most impressive parts of the film are derived from human artists' work. The film is available online, along with its prompts, serving as a demonstration of Higgsfield's Cinema Studio suite and the new Seedance 2.5 functionality. While it stands out among AI movies, it still feels like a polished proof of concept rather than a mainstream-ready feature, with issues like incomprehensible text and a lack of chemistry between characters.