Martin Scorsese becomes advisor to Black Forest Labs and tests FLUX

Martin Scorsese joins Black Forest Labs as an advisor to test its FLUX image generation models for pre-production storyboarding on his upcoming film.

Filmmaker Martin Scorsese joins Black Forest Labs, the German studio behind the FLUX image generation models, as an advisor.

To mark the occasion, the company released a video of a storyboarding session filmed in its New York office, where the filmmaker uses the tool on a scene from his upcoming film. His use is limited to pre-production: quickly generating visuals of what he has in mind, then sharing them with his creative team, from the production designer to the director of photography, to iterate faster. Scorsese specifies that it's not about replacing actors, production designers, or technicians, but about enriching a process where humans, their taste, and their judgment remain central. He links this experimentation to other technical turning points in his career, from 3D on Hugo to the digital de-aging in The Irishman, recalling that he has been drawing his own storyboards for decades.

Being able to immediately visualize and convey an intention would prove, according to him, to be a valuable time-saver in pre-production, without sacrificing quality or craftsmanship. Founded in 2024 by former Stable Diffusion researchers, Black Forest Labs is developing a family of models dedicated to what it calls visual intelligence. The connection reportedly came through Michael Ovitz, an investor in the studio, and The New York Times reads it as a sign of Hollywood opening up more to AI after months of tensions.