I looked inside an AI generated movie, and the best parts were all human

August 13, 2026 | Source: The Verge AI

Tags: Higgsfield AI, AI film, Cully Hill Boys, AI video generation, likeness licensing, generative media

Higgsfield published both its AI-generated film Cully Hill Boys and most of the prompts used to make it, revealing that the movie's style was directed by naming Edgar Wright and Guy Ritchie in prompts — with a human-written script as its foundation.

Details

Higgsfield AI released Cully Hill Boys, an AI-generated feature film about three struggling London rappers who accidentally steal a crime lord's money. The project stands out among AI-generated films for relative polish, but Higgsfield also published its production prompts — an unusual act of transparency that reveals exactly how much human creative labor underlies the output. The prompts directly name Edgar Wright and Guy Ritchie as stylistic references. The script was written by screenwriter Tim Planagan and had appeared on the Black List before Higgsfield acquired AI production rights (Planagan retains traditional production rights). Three real people — streamer Mikyle 'N3on' Rafiq, basketball creator Matt Kiatipis, and UFC fighter Israel Adesanya — signed likeness licensing agreements to appear as AI-generated characters without shooting any scenes. The author's conclusion: the published prompts make clear that AI video generation is an amplifier of human creative direction, not a replacement for it. The film's personality comes from named human directors' styles being baked into model outputs, not from any AI aesthetic sensibility. This is also a commercial model case study: separate AI production rights versus traditional rights is a template others may follow, and Higgsfield used the viral film format to demonstrate its model-access platform.