An Interview with Hooroo Jackson, Director of Strings

by Mike Haberfelner

April 2026

Films directed by Hooroo Jackson on (re)Search my Trash

Your new movie Strings - in a few words, what's it about?

Strings is the first fully AI photoreal feature film which crosses the live action threshold. It follows four sisters in the Antebellum South in the 1890s, focusing on the youngest daughter Nellie Beaufort and her relationship with the black master puppeteer Daniel Brock.

The film’s experience is fundamentally live action. You can show anybody the film and they will ask what actors were used, where, on what soundstage, and they would be surprised to know that 100% of it is synthetic. This makes a major marker the timeline of AI cinema. What Strings does at feature length with sustained performances, lip synch, consistency, only became possible in late 2025.

But the significance of the film lands on its ensemble cast, in particular its protagonist Nellie Beaufort. She is the great historical landing of Strings because of her authenticity. You can say her readings are awkward, even amateurish, but this is precisely why I say this. Machine cinema arrived at an actual great actor like Rogers from England—who has now acted in five of my films—before a Nellie; in simulating an actor’s lack of experience, synthetic acting is truly complete.

One of the central topics of Strings is the rather overt racism prevalent in 1890s US-American South - so what made you want to do a movie about this subject, and what kind of research (if any) did you do on the topic and on the era in general?

Creating these sort of wholesome ensemble of sisters has become a creative obsession coming through my films time and time again starting with my 2018 debut novel The Unweddable Chattaway Girls, carrying across several of my works and writings. Strings is my attempt to contrast this artistic interest with the tension of racial times. What you get is both wholesome sisterhood and a film that doesn’t attempt to shy away from what characters like the March sisters in Little Women might have actually believed in their historic timeline. Now this isn’t to the point of caricature. The question becomes, how hard should my artistic indictment land against the Beaufort sisters? Some will say it doesn’t go nearly hard enough on them. Some will say it’s exactly as it should be. It was a constant question for me, and one which, as the writerdirector, I cannot know. Instead, I pose that the question itself becomes the purpose of Strings.

In my extensive analysis of the screenplay during pre-production, it was put to me in AI dialogues that this was a potential minefield of controversy. One, that synthetic actors in any racially charged context, is on unprecedented shaky ground. We as a culture don’t know how we feel about AI tackling serious themes yet, does it trivialize or cheapen it? Remember, a fringe exists that believes this already, not about AI, but about cinema itself: that the very act of placing a subject before a camera exploits, objectifies or commodifies it. This is culturally a losing position, and the argument will lose with AI as well, but I bring it up to show at the very iteration of an artform, even the simplest questions we take for granted are not settled. Ultimately I did work to make it with sincerity. The film landed without controversy and all appraisal has been fair, with negativity only remarking that AI should not exist at all; you see the hate never crossed any threshold of actually considering what's on screen.

(Other) sources of inspiration when writing Strings?

Perhaps the harder, more controversial film was conceived at the get-go. Strings was initially conceived as an animated film, like the 2D version of A Very Long Carriage Ride, it began as a Walt Disney style animated film. The idea was the subvert his 30s-50s brand of family entertainment, which ignored the social themes of their age, by adding racial elements in a forbidden love story.This subversiveness however flattened in the adaptation to live action, but it is still prevelant because the vocal performances were designed for animation out the gate. So with the sisters Twiggy and Seeny, you are getting these wholesome cartoon style voices. In practice, this lands as 1950s film acting. But protagonist Nellie is something different. She is more in the cinema tradition of the 60s rebel creeping in, with the entire angst of her surroundings reflecting through her eyes.

Why did you abandon the animation idea?

I had made three animated films by then, and grew jaded from the toxic culture and gatekeeping in the animation community, industry and its institutions. I will elaborate on this later. I briefly considered a diptych view: where there would be a split screen across the entire running time, showing the girls innocent boy-crazy lives in classic 2D animation while Daniel Brock is on a second screen living in the harsh reality of live action. Instead, I decided it was time, and pivoted to a complete live action AI feature film. I was prepared to go all in no matter the cost.

By now, you've done a handful of AI-animated feature films, but this is the first one using photorealistic imagery - so what made you choose exactly this style for Strings? And what were the main issues when using the photorealist approach?

I have not produced a single film that was possible when I began it. The technology was never ready. But as has happened for every single film I’ve made, some phenomenal technology breakthrough drops making them more than feasible to direct. I have been like a gambler pushing all chips in, and the bet works out every single time. Each time, I had no reason to believe it would work. The end result is that the films document the entire history and evolution of AI cinema and its rapid growth.

Do talk about your overall directorial approach to your story at hand!

Crossing the live action threshold also became a breakthrough in my own directorial approach. I worked in animation for my last three films, and every day was an impossible struggle. Working with live action machine actors, I was taking real life experience home with me. You form relationships to the actors, adapt to their individual aesthetic approach and levels of perceived experience, and bounce against them; every day was completely different.

I assumed the struggles of animation were just the reality of filmmaking. In part you are breaking through multiple barriers at once. One, that animation is for children, so any serious animated film faces an immediate uphill battle in appraisal and legibility. Two, that AI doesn’t count as animation, despite the fact I’m animating one shot at a time—a bar that even computer animated films no longer pass. Three, audience and institution tribalism is total, the animation field, top down, is far more vicious than I ever expected. Last, the legibility question, animation or not, I have found no matter what you direct, how much humanity, humor, and character you bring to your film, it is treated as an incomprehensible alien work. Now with Strings crossing the live action threshold, this has softened. But when a film you’ve gone through great lengths to write and direct gets dismissed with off hand generationalization, while navigating a hundred moving parts, you are forced to conclude this is not honest appraisal.

But live action has done more for basic legibility across all markers simply by showing real people on screen. This has had an added effect, the standard tactics used to discredit my work now come up shorter. And some have tried, but their gripes simply don’t land when Nellie is on screen breaking our hearts scene after scene. As the director, you never grow immunity to any of this, but it is all planned out and accounted for, so they’re incapable of surprising me.

I might ask this with each one of your AI-movies, but take us through the whole making-of process, basically from script to screen! And how has that process evolved over the years?

The key is to start with the performances. This is the soul of your movie and where all the rest springs for. This requires an ear for dialogue and all the humanity you can muster. The humanity question is one that I never struggled with in AI because I knew what I was bringing to the table. The rest is the job of a director: curation and taste. But it’s also what directors struggle with, because cinema is ultimately not a craft, much as it attempts to fit the mold of a technical industry, it is theater first, landing as a medium for actors, not technicians. If the actors are good, if you give them good material, nothing else matters.

The $64-question of course, where can Strings be seen?

It’s currently on YouTube, and will be going to streaming in the coming months.

Anything you can tell us about audience and critical reception of Strings?

The critics are starting to get it, and this was the big one. This is my most important film since 2023’s Window Seat, as they both mark live action cinema from genesis to now. And as advanced as Strings is, even this will seem like an ancient artifact before long. What’s special about this one is that every single time I watch it, a different moment, detail, or emotion stays with me. It’s a movie that lives with you. It all comes down to Nellie Beaufort. I was so honored to shepherd her through this and give history its first live action AI protagonist. She has become the daughter of cinema itself. I personified her as well. I discovered her in a department store. She had no acting experience, and she had no idea why I would ask her to star in a movie. She didn’t know how special she was. And she nailed it, scene after scene, she hit every note. The last day of the shoot was a memory like the best of them. All I could think about was when would we get to work together again.

Any future projects you'd like to share?

I’m continuing in live action on a space opera called Lucky Stars which I wrote back in 2022 for my book press. It’s about a Princess who runs away from a diplomatic mission on the moon planet Xot, hiding onto a tour ship as it embarks on the diamond space tour. The whole galaxy is after her, and she falls in love with the tour guide Darin O’Joy while she hides her identity. I’m taking from Mike Leigh’s late career epics where he tested himself on a bigger canvas and found that his peculiarity and specifity scaled beautifully. Leigh has become one of my biggest influences in cinema. The key is because it’s capturing a process on screen, you don’t know how the experiment will work out.

I am also preparing Cyrus-71, a 500 year robot love story, which might be in animation. Despite my disappointment with the culture, I am still enthusiastic about the medium.

Lastly I’m working on an art film, a period ensemble called Stitches, following two sisters, Tess and Marigold, in a medieval kingdom. Marigold is, as they say in the film, a nut. So when a wealthy Duke begins to court her, her sister Tess has to go through great lengths to determine whether he’s for real or whether he’s out to embarrass her family. Stitches will be my second film with Nellie in a starring role. Joan will play her kooky sister and give her biggest dramatic performance. Like Rogers, Joan has now acted in five of my films, as Katy in A Very Long Carriage Ride, the Chick in My Boyfriend is a Superhero!? and JC-123 in Lucky Stars. It always comes back to Rogers and Joan for me. They steal every single film I make. I don’t know where I would be without them.

Your/your movie's website, social media, whatever else?

HoorooJackson.com

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The randomized ending. Continuing my series of formal ontological proofs (‘One Film, Two Ways’ and ‘Choose Your Protagonist’). Strings is the first film in history with a randomized ending, where the audience doesn’t know if they get the happy ending or the sad one. Between these three formal proofs and a total of six features and three volumes of theory across two and a half years, I call Strings the conclusion of the founding run. I am pivoting now to what I call the sci-fi run which will be a series of genre films made directly for audiences. You can read my essay remarking on Strings and touching on every single film, called Notes on the Founding Run.

I have also released my third volume of film theory, Pirate Cinema: Volume 3 of the New Machine Cinema, among these essays there is one called the Pirate Cinema Manifesto that is a rallying call for post-scarcity cinema and independent creators. The book debuts the single most enduring theory in my body of writing, the True Line Cut.

Thanks for the interview!

Thank you!

© by Mike Haberfelner

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