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The new film follows the conquest of the Aztec Empire through Hernán Cortés and Marina, with AI-assisted production helping bring an enormous historical world to the screen.
View FilmAntonio Banderas will star as Hernán Cortés in a new historical epic written by Nicholas Kazan and directed by Paul Mignot. After more than three decades of trying to make the film, Kazan has found a production team using AI-assisted tools to help realize its ambitious scale.
For more than 30 years, screenwriter Nicholas Kazan wanted to make a film about the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire. The story was simply too large and expensive to bring to the screen.
Now Cortés is in production, with Antonio Banderas playing the Spanish conquistador at the center of the 1519 expedition.
The film follows Cortés as he arrives in what is now Mexico and meets Marina, an enslaved Indigenous woman whose skill with languages becomes essential to his campaign. As his ambitions grow, the story explores the alliances, beliefs and betrayals surrounding one of history's most consequential encounters.
Directed by Paul Mignot, the feature is being produced by Utopai Studios and Ex Machina Studios, with a planned 2027 release.
Historical epics are enormously demanding productions. Recreating cities, armies, architecture and landscapes from another century can require extraordinary resources.
For Kazan, those demands kept this particular story out of reach for decades.
The interesting opportunity here is not simply producing more spectacle for less money. It's giving a writer and director the ability to approach a story at a scale closer to what they originally imagined, while relying on actors and filmmakers to give it human weight.
Kazan describes the challenge in unusually personal terms:
Nicholas Kazan, whose credits include Reversal of Fortune, has pursued the project for more than three decades.
Antonio Banderas takes the lead as Cortés, anchoring the historical drama in a major live-action performance.
Paul Mignot directs, with Utopai and Ex Machina sharing production and financing responsibilities.
AI-enabled production tools are intended to help realize large historical environments and scenes that previously made the film prohibitively expensive. The exact shot-level workflow has not been disclosed.
“I have been trying to tell this story for more than 30 years.”
Nicholas Kazan, Utopai Studios
There's a difference between making a film because AI technology exists and using new technology to make a film someone has wanted to create for decades.
Cortés belongs to the second conversation.
The promise is a large, complicated historical story, shaped by an established screenwriter, director and cast. The real test will be how convincingly the production brings its people and world together when audiences finally see it.
AI-enabled production tools are intended to help realize large historical environments and scenes that previously made the film prohibitively expensive. The exact shot-level workflow has not been disclosed.
