Shawn Levy believes AI will become an "essential" filmmaking tool in the future.

The Star Wars: Starfighter director believes movie makers should "embrace" artificial intelligence, rather than "fear" it, but he is yet to use AI "in any meaningful way" during his storytelling career.

He told Variety: "To date, I've not incorporated AI in any meaningful way in any phase of my storytelling process, but I have no doubt that in the course of my career we will see its integration.

"To the point that many smarter people than I have made, it's about integrating these technologies responsibly and with still the primacy of the creative voice and not a potential replacement for that voice because I think that what you get from creative voice and vision is singular and irreplicable, but if we can use these emerging AI capacities to support storytelling in still a kind of creative and human first workflow then I think it's something to embrace, not fear.

"I spend a part of everyday trying to increase my fluency around the regulatory options surrounding [AI].

"I think it's going to be essential, but I think to hide our heads in the sand and pretend that it's not going to be not just an emergent but an essential part of our lives, not just filmmaking lives, [but] lives lives, I think that would be naive and foolish."

Levy will release space opera movie Star Wars: Starfighter - which features Ryan Gosling, Matt Smith, Mia Goth, Amy Adams and Aaron Pierre - on May 28, 2027, and he is enjoying not having to rush the editing process with just over a year to go until release.

He added: "I'm in the beautiful sanctity of the edit room.

"We don't come out until next year, and so it's a rare movie where I don't have a release date looming. So I'm in the dark quiet of the edit room finding the best possible shape for the film."

In January, Levy told how he wants Star Wars: Starfighter to be "epic and intimate", like Stranger Things.

Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, the Deadpool and Wolverine director said: "If I've learned anything on Stranger Things, it's that you can get intimidated by the scale of franchise expectation. But you will lose your way if that's your focus.

"I've learned the need to stay rooted in character, and themes and relationships on screen.

"Yes, there's spectacle and scale, just like Stranger Things. And of course, Star Wars and Starfighter has spectacle and scale and adventure at a level I've never done in my whole career. But like Stranger Things, it's also very much anchored in a human scale, character-sized story.

"I think that if I can balance the epic and the intimate the way [show creators Matt and Ross Duffer] have with Stranger Things, I'll make a movie and an original and new Star Wars adventure that can be really satisfying to fans and audiences."