REBEL WITH A CAUSE - creative collaboration with AI tools Or a diary of an overworked academic who desperately wants to keep making films.

This chapter explores the potential of fiction filmmaking as research, while acknowledging the rarely discussed practical challenges to stand up to the task in the current academic contexts. Initially aimed at the analysis of creative collaboration through directing actors, it evolves into tackling the impossibility of doing so and ends up applying the collaborative principles with generative AI – not as a replacement, but as a catalyst to achieve the original goal. Crucially, it explores failure, in any potential ontological embodiment, as a creative force to foster a ‘love affair’ between research and fiction film.
Drawing on the body of work that specifically connects fiction and research (Leavy, 2013; Tipper and Gilman, 2024), creativity (Csikszentmihalyi, 1996 and 2018), challenges of modern academia (Fleming, 2021), and creative industries (Deuze, 2025) it turns to the ‘enemy’ – GenAI - to provide an alternative that consolidates the creative urges with challenges (and impossibilities) of the logistic of a contemporary academic jobs. It does so by exploring the elements that drive fiction filmmaking in academia: creativity, time, and problem-solving, focusing specifically on directing, evolving definitions of creativity, and collaboration. Paradoxically, what this chapter proposes is an optimistic quest for survival and resistance, one that embraces the challenges and turns them into new opportunities.