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Romance, fairy tales, and gothic horror don’t seem like they belong together, but filmmaker Guillermo del Toro skillfully weaves them into stories unlike anything audiences have seen before. The legendary director has applied his magic touch to a new Netflix adaptation of Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein. The film is an international hit for the streaming network, debuting as the top English-language film in more than 70 countries.
The secret ingredient behind del Toro’s success is an approach to storytelling that AI can’t replace. If you build a business presentation the way del Toro constructs a film, your audience will lean in and become emotionally invested in the journey you’re taking them on.
Use technology to complement your story
You might not be developing an epic two-hour film for the screen, but every pitch or presentation is still, at its core, a story. Your audience doesn’t just want to hear information. They want to feel something. Since AI lacks emotions, feelings, goals, and aspirations, it can’t motivate people to act—only you can.
When an NPR reporter asked del Toro for his stance on using generative AI for filmmaking, del Toro said, “I’d rather die.”
Del Toro has a strong opinion on AI because he believes that digital tools—especially generative AI—should be used only to enhance a story, not to replace a human’s authentic voice. “Otherwise, why not buy a printer, print the Mona Lisa, and say you made it,” del Toro added.
I share a similar message with business communicators: AI-based writing and design tools should complement the story, but the story comes first. Your ideas are the star.
Plan presentations in analog
When I wrote the first book on how Steve Jobs created and delivered his awe-inspiring presentations, I devoted a chapter to “planning in analog.” Jobs built cutting-edge technology but talked about it like a storyteller. For example, Jobs didn’t begin presentations by opening a slide deck. Instead, he and the team brainstormed ideas, took notes, gathered stories, built props, and sketched scenes on a whiteboard.
Del Toro, too, is an advocate of starting in analog. In a video titled “Anatomy of a Scene” for The New York Times, del Toro walks the viewer through a pivotal scene when Dr. Victor Frankenstein, played by Oscar Isaac, is defending his experiments at the Royal College of Medicine. He pulls the drape off a corpse that terrifyingly comes to life.
“That’s completely done in analog,” del Toro explained. “There’s no CGI. It’s a puppet, with puppeteers pulling the strings.”
The puppeteers are later bluescreened out of the scene—that’s where technology comes into play. However, the technology is used in the service of the story, which must be as authentic as possible in del Toro’s world.
Steve Jobs liked to pull drapes off things, too. In January 1984, Jobs kept the audience in suspense as he talked about Apple’s first Macintosh. He started talking about the product without showing it. Then came the big reveal. Jobs walked to the center of the stage, where the Macintosh was sitting on a small table, hidden beneath a black cloth. Like a magician, he lifted the cloth with a flourish, revealing the beige box that would change computing forever.
Jobs played the role of storyteller whenever he stepped on stage.
It’s hard to imagine that ChatGPT would have come up with the idea for a product launch as theatrical as Jobs did. AI is a tool, not a source for original creative ideas. It doesn’t have a unique personality, experiences, perspectives, or worldviews. Those belong exclusively to you, not to an algorithm.
Write the script before building slides
A great presentation has engaging visuals, graphics, photos, and animations, but those embellishments should serve the story. Writing down your ideas is a good starting point. Del Toro fills notebooks with sketches and words before he picks up a camera. He once advised content creators to write the stories they want to tell and put them on paper.
“I write a biography for the characters that is eight pages long,” he explained. “It has everything about them: what they like, what they eat, what they read, what they listen to, what they don’t like, etc.”
Once del Toro has a fully baked idea of who the characters are, he gives the idea to the design department so they can “articulate the biography with visuals and sound.” Once again, technology complements the story, but the story comes first.
AI can take what already exists and reproduce, analyze, and remix it. However, that’s not creation. Creation begins with your voice, your imagination, and your unique lived experience that no algorithm can replace.
If you want your presentations to stand out and keep your audience glued to their seats, don’t think like a presenter. Think like a movie director. Shape the story you want to tell and let technology play a supporting role.
The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.
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Carmine Gallo
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