Natasha Lyonne Co-Founds Ethical AI Film Studio Asteria

Natasha Lyonne has co-founded Asteria, a generative AI film and animation studio built around a single constraint: every model it uses is trained on licensed content only. Her feature directorial debut, Uncanny Valley, will be the studio's first major production, using Moonvalley's Marey foundational model and a script she wrote with Brit Marling.

Asteria and Marey

Lyonne co-founded Asteria with filmmaker and entrepreneur Bryn Mooser. The studio partners with Moonvalley, whose Marey AI video model is built on licensed datasets rather than content scraped from the web without creator consent.

That licensing model is Asteria's defining position. Lyonne has been direct about the distinction: she wants to demonstrate that AI film production can work without taking creators' material without permission or payment.

Uncanny Valley

Uncanny Valley follows Mila, a teenage girl who becomes unmoored by a wildly popular augmented reality video game set in a parallel present. Lyonne and Brit Marling wrote the script together and both will star in the film.

The project includes an open world video game component co-created with VR pioneer Jaron Lanier. Lyonne described the film as something that only makes sense to attempt now, when the tools to build it at this scale actually exist.

The Case for Licensed Training Data

Lyonne's "ethical AI" framing targets the central dispute running through every guild negotiation and legal challenge in Hollywood right now: who controls how a creator's work is used to train models, and who gets paid when it is.

The approach Asteria takes, building on Marey's licensed foundation, is Lyonne's answer to that question in practice rather than in principle. Most generative AI video models on the market were trained on material gathered without licensing agreements. Marey was not, and Asteria's productions are built to stay within that boundary.

Baby Rambo

Lyonne has described Baby Rambo as the next feature she is writing and directing, named as a priority for 2026 in a Hollywood Reporter interview. The project is separate from Uncanny Valley and from the Asteria AI workflow. She is approaching it as a more conventional production.

Part of a Broader Industry Push

Lyonne is also a founding member of the Creators Coalition on AI, the 500 member industry group launched in December 2025 with Oscar winners Daniel Kwan and Sian Heder. The coalition's demands, particularly around compensation when creators' work trains AI models, align directly with what Asteria's licensing model attempts to resolve in production.

Where the Frankenstein VFX controversy showed how AI can enter a production pipeline without a director's knowledge, Lyonne's approach goes in the opposite direction: building a studio where the sourcing of every model in the chain is the founding principle. Steven Soderbergh has described AI used for enhancement as "just another tool" in his current production workflow. Lyonne is making the same argument about generative AI, with the added requirement that the tool has to be built on a foundation the industry can accept.

Filmmakers exploring what AI generation looks like in practice can access generation and enhancement tools through the AI FILMS Studio video workspace.

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Sources

The Hollywood Reporter | Variety | Rolling Stone | NME | AV Club