Goodfellas Says AI Cut a Battlefield Scene in Hazanavicius' The Third Hand From 10 Days to 2

TL;DR

On September 22, at the San Sebastián-CAA Media Finance Creative Investors' Conference, Goodfellas CEO Vincent Maraval said AI cut the opening battlefield sequence of Michel Hazanavicius' World War I film The Third Hand from ten shooting days to two. Nobody on the record has named a tool or said what the AI produced, though Deadline reports Maraval said it was used "extensively." Hazanavicius was not in the room and has not commented. The online reaction went straight to the eight days of wages that were never paid. The film, a 14.2 million euro silent film in color, wrapped this month and is due in 2027, which puts it on a collision course with the AI rules the Academy and Cannes have spent two years writing.

What Maraval said, and what he did not

Maraval runs Goodfellas, the Paris sales company that was Wild Bunch International until a 2023 rename, and Goodfellas is selling The Third Hand internationally. His session at the fifth edition of the conference was billed as "Insights From Goodfellas," and the insight Variety led with was a number:

"[The film] starts on the battlefield in the First World War. Without AI, it's ten days of shooting. With it, it's two days."

Asked about the jobs those eight days represented, he answered "it's the director's choice," and argued that "if we use AI to open our creativity and imagination, it will help," adding that it could make films "more profitable." Deadline's account of the same panel goes further: Maraval said AI was used "extensively" on the film, and that with ten more days of production it "very well might not have been made." He also said the Goodfellas back office now runs largely on AI, because "it helps us to have better organization and not lose time on things we don't enjoy."

What none of the coverage contains is the part a VFX supervisor would ask about first. Neither Variety nor Deadline names a vendor, a model, or a technique. "AI" here could mean generated background plates, crowd fill, set extension that used to take a matte department a week, AI-assisted rotoscoping, or something nobody has thought of. The AV Club notes that Hazanavicius "wasn't present at the event," so the only account of how the director used AI on his own film comes from the man selling it.

The film

The Third Hand (La Troisième Main) adapts Arthur Dreyfus's 2023 novel of the same name, published by P.O.L. Hazanavicius co-wrote it with Thomas Cailley, the director of The Animal Kingdom. Per Deadline, it is a "fantastique" silent film in color, Hazanavicius' second silent feature after The Artist, the film that won him the Best Director Oscar at the 2012 ceremony. The story: a young French soldier is wounded at Verdun in 1916, wakes in the laboratory of a mad scientist, and finds a German hand grafted onto his abdomen. Hazanavicius, quoted by Allociné in July, calls it "written like a tragedy disguised as a fantastical film, a bit in the manner of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde."

The production numbers are public in a way American productions rarely are. Allociné puts the budget at 14.2 million euros, with shooting starting June 8, 2026. It is produced by Les Compagnons du Cinéma with Studiocanal, which also distributes in France, and it received a CNC advance on receipts, the French state's repayable-from-box-office production loan, according to Cineuropa. The cast is François Civil, Bérénice Bejo, Rebecca Marder, and Michel Fau, with David Chambille shooting. Écran Large reported the wrap on September 4 and reads the vague "2027" date as a Cannes play, which is where Hazanavicius usually premieres.

What eight days costs, read from the bottom of the call sheet

The backlash was fast and specific. ComingSoon collected the replies on X: "'Eight days of production' mostly means people not getting paid for those 8 days," wrote one user; another summarized the pitch as "it's all about saving money"; a third asked for the Oscar back. None of them are wrong about the arithmetic, and the production's own casting calls let you do it.

A figurants.com listing posted June 30 sought men aged 18 to 50 with one or more amputated limbs to play 1914-18 war wounded, shooting August 3 and 4 in the Paris suburbs with July 31 held as a weather backup. The rate: 108.33 euros gross per day, fittings paid separately, no travel or lodging. Multiply that by the eight days Maraval says disappeared and you get roughly 867 euros gross per extra who was never called, before you count the crew, armorers, stunt performers, horses, smoke, and the person whose entire job is the smoke. That listing is for a different sequence, and we do not know how many people the battlefield would have needed. But it is the rate card the "director's choice" was made against.

The rulebooks it walks into

The disclosure matters because this film is built for festivals and awards, and both have written AI policy since The Brutalist's 2024 season. The Academy's April 2025 rules say generative AI and other digital tools "neither help nor harm the chances of achieving a nomination," and that each branch will judge "the degree to which a human was at the heart of the creative authorship." The May 2026 update for the 99th ceremony tightened two edges: screenplays must be human-authored, and only roles "demonstrably performed by humans with their consent" qualify. The Academy also reserves the right to ask a filmmaking team what the AI did. AI-built backgrounds behind human actors sit comfortably inside those rules. Eight days of AI work that nobody will describe is the kind of thing the Academy says it may ask about.

Cannes has no written rule, but it has a mood. As the 2026 festival opened, Thierry Frémaux said, per France 24, that "here in Cannes, we stand with the artists, we stand with the screenwriters and we stand with everyone in these professions, with actors and voice actors alike," and floated a future label: "we will say 'this film has been made without artificial intelligence.'" That was the same festival that signed a multi-year sponsorship with Meta and programmed a Steven Soderbergh Lennon documentary containing AI-generated video of Lennon and Ono, so the mood has exceptions. Thousands of French actors and filmmakers had signed an open letter in February warning that AI tools were "plundering" the industry. The Third Hand is a French film, with French extras, aiming at that room.

The Flow problem with Maraval's argument

Maraval's case for AI was the standard one: it "could give young filmmakers the ability to push the boundaries of what they do," and the example he reached for was Flow, Gints Zilbalodis's animated feature that won Best Animated Feature at the 2025 Oscars on a 3.5 million euro budget. Flow is the industry's favorite proof that cheap tools change who gets to make films. The tool was Blender. It is free, open source, and has been rendering things since before anyone had shipped a text prompt. The example argues for accessible software, which nobody in San Sebastián was against, and says nothing about an AI-assisted battlefield.

The stronger version of Maraval's point is the one Deadline quotes, that the film "very well might not have been made" without the savings. If that is literally true, it moves the debate from "AI took eight days of work" to "AI is the reason the other fifty-odd days of work exist." Whether it is literally true is unknowable from outside, and it is the sort of claim a sales agent makes about every film he is selling. Deadline also observed, dryly, that there "wasn't as much discussion about Artificial intelligence as one might expect" at the conference. The one exchange there was is now the story.

Why builders should care

This is the clearest public schedule number yet for generative AI on a prestige, live-action, union-crewed European feature: not a startup's demo reel and not a Netflix pipeline test, but an Oscar-winning director's opening sequence. Ten days to two, if it holds, is the difference between a set piece that fits a 14.2 million euro budget and one that gets cut in prep. That is the economic argument every AI video vendor has been making in decks, finally stated by someone who signs the checks.

It also shows how disclosure actually happens in this industry. Not through a credits block or a festival form, but through a producer answering a question on a panel while the director is somewhere else, with the tool left unnamed. If you are building for film, that is your integration surface: the pressure for auditable, describable AI use is coming from the Academy's "we may ask" clause and from the crew on X, not from the buyers. A generated plate that can be described in one sentence is a feature. One that cannot is a Cannes problem.

Caveats

• The ten-to-two figure is Maraval's estimate, spoken on a panel. No one has audited it, and "ten days" is a counterfactual schedule that was never shot.
• No tool, vendor, or technique has been named. Deadline reports Maraval said AI was used "extensively" on the film; Variety's account covers only the battlefield sequence. Treat "what the AI did" as unknown.
• Hazanavicius has not commented. The AV Club confirms he was not at the event.
• The 108.33 euro day rate is from a casting call for a different sequence. It illustrates the wage scale, not the battlefield's actual headcount or cost.
• The film is unreleased and unseen. Whether the sequence looks like a compromise or an upgrade is a 2027 question.

Key Takeaways

• Goodfellas CEO Vincent Maraval said on September 22 that AI cut the WWI battlefield opening of Michel Hazanavicius' The Third Hand from ten shooting days to two.
• No tool or technique was named, though Deadline reports Maraval said AI was used "extensively"; the director, who was not at the conference, has not commented.
• The film is a 14.2 million euro silent film in color from Les Compagnons du Cinéma and Studiocanal, shot from June 8, wrapped in early September, and due in 2027.
• Production casting calls paid war-wounded extras 108.33 euros gross per day, the wage scale behind the "eight days" the online backlash focused on.
• The Academy's rules say AI tools "neither help nor harm" but that it may ask what they did; Cannes' Thierry Frémaux says the festival stands "with the artists" and has floated a "made without AI" label.
• Maraval's defense that the film "very well might not have been made" otherwise is the argument to watch; his Flow example does not help it, since Flow was made in Blender.

Sources: Variety (Maraval at San Sebastián), Deadline (conference day one), Variety (conference program), Deadline (wrap and sales), The AV Club, ComingSoon, Allociné (budget, shoot start), Écran Large, figurants.com casting call, Academy rules (April 2025), Euronews (May 2026 rules), France 24 (Cannes and AI), Flow (Wikipedia), P.O.L (the novel)