Thirty seconds. That's how much of Danny Boyle's new film INK is touched by AI, by the director's own count, and he's not being cagey about it.

Boyle, 69, sat down with Vanity Fair after INK premiered at the Venice Film Festival and travelled with him to Telluride, where the conversation turned to the industry's favourite anxiety of the moment. His answer wasn't a dodge. It was a fairly precise breakdown.

"My opinion of it is that it's a very useful tool in many ways, provided you use it respectfully and provided you pay actors," Boyle said, according to Vanity Fair. "If you're going to replace them with some kind of AI embodiments or something like that. So just like with any animation project or just as part of the VFX toolbox."

That's the framing he's sticking with. Not a threat to actors, a line item in the effects budget.

So where does the AI actually show up? Old photographs, mostly. "There's about 30 seconds of it in our movie, where we animate a couple of old photographs, which you'll have seen online the way that it does that — that you can bring old photographs to life. And that's the kind of way we use it," he told the outlet.

And then there are the mice.

"There's some mice. It's very good for animals," Boyle said, before circling back to a much older headache. He got into trouble with PETA over live chimps used at the start of 28 Days Later, he said, and the organisation wrote to him afterward with a clear message: never again. He hasn't. Since then it's been CG animals on his sets, and on INK, AI-generated ones. "We got some mice in this one that run around The Sun newsroom," he said.

That newsroom detail lines up with what INK is actually about. Written by James Graham, the film follows a group of visionaries and misfits chasing an idea for a new kind of news, one built to give readers exactly what they want and, in the process, reshape the world around them. Given Graham's history of writing about British institutions under pressure, a newsroom overrun by AI-generated mice reads less like a gag and more like a punchline the film knows it's telling.

Guy Pearce, Claire Foy and Jack O'Connell lead the cast. The film had its bow at Venice this past week before Boyle carried the press tour to Telluride, and it's booked for theatres on December 11 ahead of a Netflix streaming debut on January 8, 2027, in the US and Latin America.

Whether 30 seconds is a footnote or a preview of how directors will quietly talk about AI going forward is the more interesting question here. Boyle's answer suggests he'd rather it be treated as a tool with rules attached than a headline in itself. The industry, mid-strike-hangover as it still is, may not let him have it that quiet.