{"id":100155,"date":"2025-10-03T00:52:09","date_gmt":"2025-10-03T00:52:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/100155\/"},"modified":"2025-10-03T00:52:09","modified_gmt":"2025-10-03T00:52:09","slug":"fuck-my-son-movie-ai-controversy-todd-rohal-interview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/100155\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Fuck My Son’ Movie AI Controversy: Todd Rohal Interview"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you\u2019re worried about AI taking over the entertainment industry<\/a>, close your eyes for a moment and imagine your worst case scenario.<\/p>\n

What kind of villains do you picture? Soulless corporate executives gleefully watching their bottom lines go up while they slash thousands of human jobs? Insufferable tech bros hi-fiving each other at the notion that their lack of creative talent no longer prevents them from flooding the internet with anti-woke \u201cStar Wars\u201d rip-offs generated by typing a few lazy prompts into an app? Unshowered right-wing nationalists producing dangerous deepfakes while sulking in their basements? <\/p>\n

Whatever pro-AI<\/a> bogeymen haunt your particular nightmares, they probably don\u2019t look like Todd Rohal<\/a>. A seasoned veteran of the American indie film<\/a> scene, his offbeat comedies have been popping up in places like Sundance, SXSW, and Adult Swim for the better part of three decades. He cut his teeth shooting 35mm films before digital editing was invented. He self distributed his early movies by cold-calling theaters under fake names and convincing them to screen his single 35mm print until he had to drive it to another venue. When he was tired of screening his first feature \u201cThe Guatemalan Handshake,\u201d he buried his personal print in the desert<\/a> and ceremonially burned all of his remaining DVD copies.<\/p>\n

\"NEW<\/a> \"1984,<\/a> <\/p>\n

He\u2019s had the kind of idiosyncratic career that the independent film ecosystem theoretically exists to elevate and promote. So why is he getting death threats over a comic book adaptation about an old lady forcing Tipper Newton to fuck her son at gunpoint?<\/p>\n

\"TORONTO,Todd Rohal attending the TIFF premiere of \u201cFuck My Son<\/a>\u201d Getty Images<\/p>\n

If you\u2019ve attended a genre film festival this fall, Rohal\u2019s new film \u201cFuck My Son!\u201d has probably popped up on your radar. Adapted from legendary underground comic artist Johnny Ryan\u2019s graphic novel of the same name, the film is a throwback to the kind of old-school midnight movie that prioritizes shock value above all else. Robert Longstreet dons a dress and a thick layer of prosthetics to play an old lady whose sex positive ethos takes a dark turn when she kidnaps a woman (played by Tipper Newton) and forces her to \u2014 you guessed it \u2014 fuck her horrifically deformed son.<\/p>\n

The film is a feast of practical effects and unapologetic bad taste, designed to be enjoyed with rowdy crowds in packed theaters in the wee hours of the morning. The shock value should be recognizable to anyone who can remember reading Ryan\u2019s comics in the back pages of VICE magazine. During a recent conversation with IndieWire at a Silver Lake sidewalk cafe hours before the film screened at Beyond Fest, Rohal explained that he was drawn to those comics because they reflected the kind of progressive, anti-censorship worldview that he hoped to promote with his own work.<\/p>\n

\u201cI saw his stuff as offensive, but in a way I understood that was exciting and funny and made me react,\u201d Rohal said of Ryan\u2019s work. \u201cNot knowing his politics I was basically like \u2018We are very aligned politically, I\u2019m guessing, because I\u2019m a very liberal-thinking person, rights for everyone, very against censorship. And that\u2019s everything Johnny is about.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rohal\u2019s adaptation begins with a fake pre-show that might exist at a nightmarish MAGA version of AMC Theaters. In the world of the film, a fictional religious movie studio is distributing \u201cFuck My Son!,\u201d but wants its audience to be able to enjoy the film without offending their Christian sensibilities. It offers the film in a format called Perv-O-Vision, which allows prudish viewers to put on a pair of glasses that makes any nude scene appear as if the actors are fully clothed.<\/p>\n

The pre-show includes a demonstration of Perv-O-Vision that\u2019s complete with full frontal male nudity and an audience of theatergoers that are very clearly generated with AI. It\u2019s not a sophisticated attempt at replacing human actors \u2014 it\u2019s slop in every sense of the word, intended as a satire of the kinds of right-wing corporations who would sincerely use bad AI to cut video production costs.<\/p>\n

\u201cI liked the idea that \u2018Fuck My Son\u2019 would be presented as a corporate product,\u201d Rohal said with a laugh. \u201cThe beginning of the movie is supposed to feel like you\u2019re in a corporate environment. So I thought \u2018What would corporations use when portraying this?,\u2019 which led me to say \u2018I want to use AI.\u2019 Thinking that would be very clear in its messaging! I\u2019m learning that it\u2019s not clear, that for any AI usage, the context and intent has no bearing for a lot of people.\u201d<\/p>\n

In addition to the pre-show, a character in the film is visited by the Meatie Mates, a fake Christian cartoon about singing meat that is presented as a much more hateful version of \u201cVeggie Tales.\u201d The characters were designed by human animator Cable Hardin in a 2D sequence, but Rohal used a mix of AI tools to make them look worse and worse as they reappear throughout the film. The effect feels like watching the deterioration of a media company in real time, as it\u2019s easy to imagine a Christian TV producer commissioning the original human-drawn characters before switching to cheap AI a decade later.<\/p>\n

\u201cFuck My Son!\u201d premiered in the Midnight Madness section<\/a> of the Toronto International Film Festival, where the section\u2019s famously rowdy crowds embraced the film wholeheartedly. Rohal thought the AI jokes all landed, so he was shocked to wake up the next day and find that the film was being bombarded with negative Letterboxd reviews. (A large plurality of the film\u2019s reviews are either half a star or one star, and the three most \u201cliked\u201d reviews are devoted to criticizing its use of AI.) Rohal was blindsided by the controversy in part because the online reaction was completely different than the enthusiasm he saw in the theater.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Toronto screening was crazy. Through the roof! And then the next day, I didn\u2019t look online but [my publicist] told me \u2018It\u2019s pretty rough,’\u201d Rohal said. \u201cThe online response is pretty strong. I read it and I was looking through some things, and I had to stop. There were hundreds of comments and I was like \u2018This just doesn\u2019t make any sense.\u2019 The difference between what I experienced last night and this\u2026 There was no way that much hatred was in the room. Because they would have vocalized that! It would have lessened the cheering and laughter.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The phenomenon only became more curious when the film experienced similar reactions at Fantastic Fest and Beyond Fest \u2014 joy during the actual screenings and hatred online. The disparate reactions suggest that not everyone criticizing the film has seen it. Rohal pointed to his openness about the film\u2019s use of AI in its writeup on the TIFF website, in which Midnight Madness programmer Peter Kuplowsky wrote (with Rohal\u2019s permission) that the pre-show \u201csatirizes the corporatization of theatrical moviegoing, complete with freakish deployments of AI slop\u201d as a possible spark that lit the fire. The online hatred snowballed, with people accusing Rohal and his team of using AI in other parts of the film that were shot entirely practically. The prevailing narrative online became that \u201cFuck My Son!\u201d is an AI-generated movie, rather than a movie that satirically uses AI in a few carefully chosen shots. <\/p>\n

\u201cPeople saw [the writeup], there must have been some kind of Slack channel and people must have been like \u2018We\u2019re gonna blast this with horrible reviews because we\u2019re these patriots of anti-AI.\u2019 Because a lot of things people were saying were inaccurate. People said \u2018Fifty percent of this movie is AI.\u2019 That\u2019s not true! The technology isn\u2019t even there to do what I was accused of doing, which is fascinating.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rohal continues to tour the film to ravenous festival audiences (next up he\u2019s heading to France for the Strasbourg European Fantastic Film Festival and Spain for the Sitges Film Festival), and he\u2019s self-distributing the movie, with a series of 35mm screenings in theaters across America booked through early 2026. But he can\u2019t help but laugh at the surreal experience of having to defend his film online every day to angry cinephiles spreading blatant misinformation about it. Case in point: he recently posted the film\u2019s poster on Instagram, where he was slammed with complaints about the \u201cAI poster\u201d that was actually made by a human artist without any generative AI. <\/p>\n

Rohal is doing his best to keep a sense of humor about the ordeal, noting the parallels between the kinds of hate mail and death threats that Ryan received for his original comics with the ones that he\u2019s now getting for adapting them. <\/p>\n

\u201cI responded to some people online, and they just won\u2019t engage in conversation about it,\u201d Rohal said. \u201cPeople threatened to kill me on Letterboxd. Someone said there should be drone strikes against me until not an atom of my body exists. And Johnny\u2019s gotten death threats his whole life for doing his comics\u2026 It\u2019s extreme.\u201d<\/p>\n

As an outside observer, it\u2019s hard not to chuckle at the notion that this particular film has become the lightning rod for such impassioned debate about what we want the future of the film industry to look like. We\u2019re talking about a movie in which Tipper Newton is forced to remove a monster\u2019s dirty diaper and look for his genitalia, only to grab what she thinks is his penis but is actually a loose hotdog that he misplaced. In a saner world, this film probably wouldn\u2019t be discussed as anything other than the shocking diversion from everyday life that it offers. But it also makes sense that the midnight movie audience, a group that thrives on its willingness to treat lowbrow films as serious works of art, would react so strongly to AI making its way into their world.<\/p>\n

On one hand, it\u2019s easy to empathize with the position that a section of pop culture known for embracing outsiders who lack the resources of corporate filmmakers would object to seeing indie artists use the very tools that corporations use to cut costs and make soul-crushingly bad content. But Rohal makes the opposite argument \u2014 if AI is here to stay, why should we cede all the power to the very corporations we\u2019re already mad at? <\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s like beating up a hobo for stealing your jobs, and he\u2019s just collecting cans, goddamnit! He\u2019s just doing whatever he can, and you\u2019re gonna beat him up? You\u2019ve got to understand that the jobs you\u2019re trying to save are a corporation that\u2019s holding onto something and they\u2019ve got control over our entire culture. And I\u2019m like, that\u2019s really what we should be pushing back against. And I don\u2019t see that,\u201d Rohal said. \u201cThe way things are going terrifies me, because we\u2019re essentially handing this technology over to evil people to do evil things, when we should be learning it ourselves.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rohal is a bit more optimistic about AI being used in indie films than I am, but it should go without saying that any serious discussion of a piece of art should at least consider the artist\u2019s intentions. How is telling an independent filmmaker that he can\u2019t use a bit of AI to satirize the people who use AI maliciously any different from telling artists that they can\u2019t depict any words or actions that they wouldn\u2019t condone in their own personal lives?<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s crazy to me that there is a large majority of people that can\u2019t separate that, that can\u2019t see the context of things or question why it\u2019s being used,\u201d Rohal said. \u201cIt\u2019s just blind hatred and a desire to ban something completely. I think there\u2019s an innate human desire to hate and destroy other humans. It just happens, whatever side of the political spectrum you\u2019re on. I remember being a kid and seeing ads for \u2018The Last Temptation of Christ.\u2019 I was growing up in Ohio and churches were protesting it. And now we think \u2018Oh that\u2019s so cool, you were protested by the Catholic Church!\u2019 But at the time, that was probably not cool to Martin Scorsese when he was like \u2018I want people to see this movie! I care about it!\u2019 And that\u2019s how I feel now. It\u2019s so weird that it\u2019s about technology now, but maybe that is just the time we live in. Technology is this weird religion where we have sects.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYou can use Photoshop, you can use After Effects and green screens and CGI and you can farm things out to India, but you cannot use this software on your computer at home,\u201d he continued. \u201cEven if you\u2019ve learned the whole process. The effects in the movie took me months to do, and people tell me it\u2019s lazy and I\u2019m like, \u2018I was up every freaking night until four in the morning working on this by myself. It was not lazy. I absolutely could have asked someone else to do this for me, but I wanted to do it myself because I wanted to learn it myself. I know how film works, from how negative emulsion works to this. And I think that\u2019s what a filmmaker should do. I\u2019m fascinated by film, I\u2019m fascinated by all of this stuff, and the fact that people are mad about it is really confusing to me.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Rohal never expected a movie called \u201cFuck My Son!\u201d would give him so many P.R. headaches, but he also never expected the experience to be so life affirming. The film was born out of his commitment to free artistic expression, a tribute to a comic artist who spent his career battling mobs of people trying to tell him what he could and couldn\u2019t say. It feels like destiny that Rohal ended up fending off a mob of his own, but he still doesn\u2019t have any regrets about making his little movie about a twisted mom who just wants someone to fuck her hideous son. <\/p>\n

\u201cMaking \u2018Fuck My Son!,\u2019 as crazy as that sounds, has been the biggest thing in my life that helped me figure out what\u2019s important to me,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd I know that\u2019s crazy, and you won\u2019t see that in the movie, but following certain instincts and staying away from other things that would have prevented the movie from being what it is, and just allowing it to be itself, has really been life changing for me. And I credit that to the creative freedom that I had, and there\u2019s an aspect of AI that fits into that that\u2019s on the positive side of it. So if people want to assassinate me or drone bomb me for that, so be it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Announced theatrical engagements for \u201cFuck My Son!\u201d can be found below, with starred dates indicating 35mm screenings.<\/p>\n

10\/16-23 \u2013 New York, NY \u2013\u00a0<\/strong>IFC Center<\/p>\n

10\/23-30 \u2013 Los Angeles, CA \u2013\u00a0Alamo Drafthouse Los Angeles<\/p>\n

10\/31 \u2013 11\/04 \u2013 Austin, TX \u2013\u00a0Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar<\/p>\n

10\/31 \u2013 11\/01 \u2013 Brooklyn, NY \u2013 Nitehawk Cinema \u2013 Williamsburg* <\/p>\n

11\/05-08 \u2013 San Francisco, CA \u2013\u00a0Alamo Drafthouse New Mission*\u00a0<\/p>\n

11\/14-15 \u2013 Chicago, IL \u2013\u00a0Music Box Theatre*<\/p>\n

11\/28-29 \u2013 Dallas, TX \u2013\u00a0Texas Theatre*\u00a0<\/p>\n

12\/05-06 \u2013 Seattle, WA \u2013\u00a0Grand Illusion Cinema at SIFF Film Center*\u00a0<\/p>\n

12\/19 \u2013 Toronto, ON \u2013\u00a0Revue Cinema<\/p>\n

12\/26-27 \u2013 Philadelphia, PA \u2013\u00a0PhilaMOCA<\/p>\n

01\/02-03\/26 \u2013 Omaha, NE \u2013 Film Streams\u2019 Dundee Theater* \u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If you\u2019re worried about AI taking over the entertainment industry, close your eyes for a moment and imagine…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":100156,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[261],"tags":[291,289,290,18,597,63588,19,2810,17,82,63589],"class_list":{"0":"post-100155","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-eire","12":"tag-film","13":"tag-fuck-my-son","14":"tag-ie","15":"tag-interviews","16":"tag-ireland","17":"tag-technology","18":"tag-todd-rohal"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100155","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=100155"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100155\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/100156"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=100155"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=100155"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=100155"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}