Inside Cully Hill Boys: The AI film that needed human writers to work

The latest feature from AI filmmaking platform Higgsfield is a London-set action comedy about three bumbling rappers who accidentally steal a crime lord’s money. That premise sounds like something Edgar Wright or Guy Ritchie might direct. And that’s not an accident. Higgsfield published the prompts used to make Cully Hill Boys, and several of them name Wright and Ritchie directly. The visual DNA of two of Britain’s most stylistically distinctive directors is baked into nearly every frame.

But the most interesting thing about Cully Hill Boys isn’t the AI. It’s what the AI couldn’t do. The script came from Tim Planagan, a human screenwriter whose work landed on the Black List before Higgsfield acquired the AI production rights. Planagan has said he doesn’t use AI tools in his writing process. The film is codirected by Adilet Abish and Aitore Zholdaskali, who led a team of nine other directors. The ‘stars’ are real people too — streamer Mikyle ‘N3on’ Rafiq, basketball content creator Matt Kiatipis, and UFC fighter Israel Adesanya — who licensed their likenesses but never shot a single scene.

What makes Cully Hill Boys stand out from other AI films is pacing. Higgsfield’s new Seedance 2.5 functionality generates clips around 30 seconds long, far longer than most video models. That means fewer jarring cuts where short generations have been stitched together. Scenes flow with a smoothness that’s rare in AI filmmaking, and the plot’s coherence clearly traces back to Planagan’s script rather than the model’s improvisation.

Higgsfield isn’t trying to put this in theaters. The entire film, along with most of its prompts, is free online as a showcase for the company’s Cinema Studio tools. It’s a giant ad dressed up as a movie. That’s been true of AI films before, but Cully Hill Boys makes a sharper argument than most: the technology is improving fast, but the best results still come when humans handle the storytelling and AI handles the rendering.