SXSW at 40: Spielberg, the AI question, and a room that felt alive.

SXSW turned forty this year and did it without a home: convention-center renovations pushed the whole festival into a shortened seven-day, spread-out downtown format. The obituaries were pre-written. The room didn't cooperate.

The Film & TV Festival ran 120 features — 90 of them world premieres — plus 52 shorts and 13 TV projects, and by the numbers organizers expected overall attendance to hold steady against last year. SXSW's chief commercial officer called the reinvention the most ambitious in the festival's forty years, per Adweek. Sixteen-plus Texas-connected films screened, including the world premiere of the Mark Duplass-written Their Town.

The Spielberg hour

The keynote was Steven Spielberg — his first SXSW appearance since 2018 — interviewed live by Sean Fennessey for The Ringer's Big Picture podcast on March 13. Two things from that hour travel well.

On AI, Spielberg was plain: “I've never used AI on any of my films yet,” he said, and then, of his writers' rooms: “We have a writer's room. All the seats are occupied.” The applause was immediate. He was careful with the second half of the thought — he is “not for AI if it replaces a creative individual,” while supporting the technology in other disciplines. Tool, not author.

On theaters, he made the case nobody makes better: “There is a collective impulse from a good story that hits all of us at the same time, in exactly the same way” — and that kind of community, he argued, happens in movie theaters, not living rooms.

And one line that matters to this state specifically: Spielberg said he has a Western in development — “There will be horses. There will be guns. There will be no tropes” — and per Gold Derby's reporting, he hopes to shoot it in Texas. We would like to formally volunteer the state.

AI, everywhere and finally out loud

The other story of the week was density: roughly two dozen sessions on the Tech & AI track, and film-program panels with names like “The Creative Renaissance: AI & The True Impact on Film Production” and “Scaling Film Productions with AI Workflows.” No Film School's festival wrap called 2026 the year film and AI “met as frenemies” — the end of a two-year stretch of being curious in private and cautious in public. The working consensus in the production-side rooms: the tools are entering editorial, sound, and pre-visualization, and the director's chair stays human. The skeptics got programming too — the Austin Chronicle noted the community-voted panels went well beyond “blithe optimism about LLMs.”

Alive and well, despite what you've heard

A festival that lost its building, two days, and — if you believed the winter takes — its reason to exist, instead delivered ninety world premieres, a packed keynote about the permanence of theatrical moviegoing, and a fresh argument about the most disruptive tool the industry has faced in decades, held mostly in good faith. The industry keeps being declared dead by people who weren't in the room. The room was full.

From the room... not an empty seat to be found. SS seemed as happy to be there as any of us to hear him talk movies for an hour. This was a magical day!