Martin Scorsese Joins Black Forest Labs as an AI Advisor

Martin Scorsese is now an advisor to Black Forest Labs, the AI imaging company behind the FLUX model. The Academy Award winning director announced the role on June 2, 2026, saying he has already used the technology to generate storyboards during pre production on a current project.

"How Do You Communicate What You See in Your Head"

Scorsese has been drawing his own storyboards for 70 years. He describes the persistent problem that drew him to the technology: "There's always been this problem of how do you communicate what you see in your head to your cast and crew. There are some things you have to see and feel".

Scorsese cited his use of 3D in Hugo and de aging technology in The Irishman as precedents for adopting tools that change the production process. "Now, with this tool, I can share what I'm visualizing more clearly and efficiently to my creative team, the production designer, art designer, and cinematographer, for them to build on to enrich cinematic intelligence", he said in a statement released by Black Forest Labs.

His case for remaining open rested on cinema's age. "Remember, cinema is a young medium, only around 125 years old, so we have to be open to how it can evolve". Black Forest Labs also released a video of Scorsese in a working session with FLUX. "If you have a tool like this, you could figure it out much much quicker and you could save production time, and also less wear and tear on the crew", he says in the footage.

About Black Forest Labs

Black Forest Labs was founded by researchers who built the original Stable Diffusion model and latent diffusion architecture, departing from Stability AI to start the lab. It operates from offices in Freiburg, Germany and San Francisco.

The company raised a $300 million Series B at a $3.25 billion post money valuation in December 2025. Investors include Andreessen Horowitz, NVIDIA, Salesforce Ventures, Temasek, Bain Capital Ventures, and General Catalyst. Adobe, Canva, Meta, and Microsoft have all built products on the FLUX API. The open weights FLUX models are the most downloaded image models on Hugging Face.

FLUX.2, the current flagship, supports up to 10 reference images simultaneously, enabling consistent character generation across scenes. Technical details on the model's production capabilities are covered in the FLUX.2 production features overview.

Storyboard Artists Push Back

The backlash from working artists was immediate. Concept artist and illustrator Karla Ortiz posted on X within hours of the announcement:

He throws every single storyboard artist he's ever worked with under the bus, as he demolishes their livelihoods with models that are likely trained on those story board artist's same works. To use his legacy and power for this is just so disgusting.

— Karla Ortiz (@kortizart) June 2, 2026

The post drew 255,400 views. Director and animator Sam Deats posted a sharper objection the same evening:

It takes literally seconds for me to storyboard a shot, there is absolutely no reason to need AI built on the stolen work of millions of artists to storyboard your vision, have some damn pride and respect your peers

— Samuel Deats (@SamuelDeats) June 2, 2026

That post drew 91,800 views. Both arguments center on the same concern: that models like FLUX were trained on the work of the same artists whose livelihoods they now threaten.

Where Scorsese Stands Among Directors

Scorsese frames the technology as a communication tool rather than a creative replacement. His statement describes using FLUX to share what he already sees in his head, bridging the gap between his internal vision and his production team, not generating ideas from nothing.

James Cameron made a comparable move last September when he joined the board of Stability AI, becoming a stakeholder in model development rather than a passive user. Paul Schrader, who wrote Taxi Driver and Raging Bull for Scorsese, has argued publicly for more than seven months that AI will produce the first box office protagonist built entirely from generated imagery.

The opposite position comes with equal force. Guillermo del Toro told The Hollywood Reporter: "I don't think anyone wants this". At Cannes last month, asked how he would feel if a team member suggested using AI to generate something from the outset, he said it would be "like spitting on God". The more than 500 signatories of the Creators Coalition formed by Oscar winners Daniel Kwan and Sian Heder, which counts del Toro, Cate Blanchett, and Aaron Sorkin among its members, represent the organized version of that resistance.

The broader picture of how Hollywood's director class has split over AI tools, with studios adopting them quietly while talent remained vocal in opposition, is mapped in the 2026 AI filmmaking in Hollywood overview.

Filmmakers looking to use AI image generation for pre production and storyboarding can access Midjourney 8.0 directly in AI FILMS Studio, which produces four cinematic images per prompt with direct controls over aesthetic style and compositional variation:

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Sources

The Hollywood Reporter | Black Forest Labs