Visionary

We're pausing our usual format over the summer to bring you Future Vision — a special series exploring the changing film and television industry. Over the coming weeks, we'll examine everything from visual effects and production design to the rise of the creator economy.We begin with Supergirl. Not the version currently in cinemas, but the original 1984 film that first brought Superman's cousin to the big screen.Helen Slater was just eighteen when she landed the title role, fresh out of drama school. She was flown to Pinewood Studios to train in trampolining, sword fighting and horse riding before joining a cast that included Faye Dunaway, Peter O'Toole and Peter Cook.Recorded before the release of the 2026 reboot, Slater reflects on a film that has since become a cult classic. She recalls the technical challenge of its ambitious flying sequences, the script rewrites that reshaped the production and the experience of carrying a major studio franchise at such a young age. She also offers a candid assessment of why Supergirl failed to match the success of its Superman predecessors, and what that says about Hollywood's long struggle to build enduring female-led superhero franchises.With the new Supergirl also filmed in the UK, the conversation offers a timely perspective on how blockbuster filmmaking has evolved — and on the pressures that still accompany launching a superhero franchise.

For centuries, buildings were designed with a single purpose in mind. Theatres staged plays, factories manufactured goods and railway stations moved passengers. Many have since found new lives through adaptation, but today's most successful spaces are increasingly conceived to do far more from the outset.Georgina Godwin speaks with Alex Wills, co-founder of Interval, about why flexibility has become one of architecture's most valuable assets. Drawing on a career spanning live events, immersive technology and spatial design, Wills argues that the next generation of buildings will succeed not because they can be repurposed decades later, but because they are designed from day one to accommodate changing audiences, technologies and uses.From the engineering behind the Las Vegas Sphere to the evolving campuses of Canary Wharf, 180 Strand and Here East, the conversation explores how developers are rethinking the relationship between space and experience. For Wills, the most important question is no longer what a building looks like, but how it will be used – not just on opening night, but for years to come.

Britain has three of the world's top ten universities and the third largest tech sector outside America and China. So why does it often feel like we're stuck? Jeremy Hunt left office after bringing inflation down and steering the economy out of recession. Now, with a new book and a new Prime Minister about to enter Downing Street, he has some blunt things to say about what it will take to finally unlock the country's potential — and what happens if the moment is wasted.In this episode, presented in partnership with CapX the Centre for Policy Studies, Marc Sidwell speaks with the former Chancellor about his book Can We Be Rich Again?, which sets out both a diagnosis of Britain's economic inertia and a prescription for breaking it. Hunt is direct about the central challenge facing Andy Burnham: welfare reform is the defining test, and ducking it — as Keir Starmer discovered — doesn't make the problem go away, it simply hands a veto to the backbenches. He argues that political capital drains away like an egg timer, and that the only leaders who leave office proud are those who act boldly in their first weeks, not their last.

One in two women will experience violence over their lifetime. In the time it takes to listen to this episode, around 200 incidents will be reported to police. And that is a fraction of what actually happens.In this special live event, presented by Here East and Plexal, we ask a pressing question: can technology — the same technology that has amplified and enabled so much of this harm — become the most powerful weapon against it?Host Lou-Davina Stouffs, Director of Advisory Services at Plexal, chairs a conversation with Laura Suggitt, founder of The Meritocracy and architect of the UK's end-to-end rape review; Eleanor Kaye, Chief of Staff at Augur, whose AI behaviour-detection technology is making CCTV on transport networks genuinely intelligent for the first time; and Jamie Hodsdon of Waymo, whose driverless ride-hailing service is arriving in London this year with safety by design at its core.Together they explore what it means to build technology that prevents harm rather than just responding to it, why data governance is inseparable from survivor safety, and why the £6 billion flowing into UK AI investment each year contains within it a profound, largely untapped opportunity — if the builders are willing to ask the right questions before they ship.

Twenty years ago, making a feature film cost millions of dollars a day. Today, the two biggest films at the box office – Obsession and Backrooms – were made by YouTube creators. Could AI be making the process of creativity more accessible? Recorded live at Here East during SXSW London, this special edition of Visionary asks whether the tools now reshaping film, music, design and motion capture are genuinely opening the creative world to more people — or simply generating an overwhelming amount of noise. London sits at the centre of this transformation, home to 78% of the UK's AI and data-driven creative technology companies. But having the tools and knowing what to do with them are very different things.Georgina Godwin chairs a conversation with Justin Diener, co-founder of Synapse Virtual Production, whose LED wall studios are rewriting the economics of film and immersive media; Usha Raghavachari, Lab Director for Ford's Human Centred Design team, who still uses cardboard, clay and ethnographic observation alongside oceans of connected vehicle data; and Allan Rankin, co-founder of Target 3D, whose motion capture technology is being transformed by AI tools that can animate multiple characters in hours rather than weeks.Together they make a compelling case that the creative breakthrough AI enables is real, but that domain expertise, human taste and the mysterious alchemy of lightbulb moments in the shower still matter more than any prompt. The deeper worry, they agree, isn't the tools themselves. It's who owns the platforms those tools run on, and what happens when access becomes something only some people can afford.

How does creativity shape urban design and placemaking? Not just the look and feel of a neighbourhood, but the kind of energy that draws major institutions to a place. Recorded live at Here East, this week's special edition of Visionary features Georgina Godwin in conversation with three people at the forefront of that question: Gus Casely-Hayford, Director of V&A East, fresh from the museum's triumphant opening in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park; Tamsin Ace, Director of East Bank, the organisation coordinating one of Europe's most ambitious cultural districts; and Richard Broom of Jason Bruges Studio, whose immersive public installations — from Wembley underpasses to international stages — turn data and code into experiences that stop people in their tracks.Over the next few weeks, Visionary will be sharing conversations from Here East's It All Starts Here event. Subscribe to the podcast now and discover the stories of business leaders, investors, and experts who are building our future.

It took four days for a forged letter to bring down a government in 1924. Today, the same thing could happen before breakfast.The Zinoviev Letter — a fabricated document purportedly inciting British communists to revolution — was fake. But by the time that became clear, the election was over and the damage was done. A century later, the mechanics of political manipulation have changed beyond recognition. Anyone with a laptop and freely available AI tools can now put any words into any politician's mouth, with their face, their voice and their mannerisms, and have it in front of millions of people within minutes.The question is whether the law — much of which dates to the nineteenth century — has any hope of keeping up.Georgina Godwin speaks with writer and policy thinker Frances Lasok, whose recent report on AI deepfakes and elections is one of the clearest-eyed assessments of this rapidly evolving threat. Lasok sets out the four categories of deepfake misuse now emerging — intimate image abuse, fraud, election misinformation and the monetisation of someone's face or voice without consent — and explains why existing legislation, however well-intentioned in its principles, was simply never written for this world.

NABA – the Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti – has been shaping Italy's creative talent since 1980, first in Milan, then Rome. Now it has arrived at Here East in London, and the choice of location is anything but accidental. For Diego Mattiolo, Head of Education at NABA, London's density of cultures, institutions and creative energy made it the only logical first step for the school's international expansion.Georgina Godwin speaks with Diego about what the great creative cities of the world actually have in common – and what they risk losing. He reflects on growing up in Milan surrounded by design weeks and fashion shows, taking it all for granted until distance gave him perspective, and on what NABA's particular philosophy – that combination of rigorous thinking and hands-on making – produces in students that more conventional institutions do not. The goal, he explains, is not to teach students what to think, but to help them find their voice.The conversation ranges from the deep cultural roots of Italian style to the question of whether cities like Milan and London are in danger of becoming victims of their own polish – and why Diego thinks the next genuinely surprising creative hub is more likely to be found in Tokyo, Singapore or India.

When Shanta Thake became Chief Artistic Officer at New York's Lincoln Center — home to the Metropolitan Opera, the New York Philharmonic and the New York City Ballet — she inherited one of the most storied platforms in global culture. But she also inherited its assumptions: about which art forms deserve the grandest stages, which audiences are welcome and where the boundaries of a great institution should end.Georgina Godwin speaks with Shanta about the art and politics of curation at scale — and why the most urgent question facing the Lincoln Center right now isn't what to programme, but how to ensure that the work stays genuinely ahead of the world rather than just responsive to it. Shanta argues that artists are always ten steps ahead of the rest of us, and that a curator's job is less to follow the news than to trust the artists who are already living in tomorrow.The conversation ranges from the collision of salsa and symphony to the Lincoln Center's Collider programme — a remarkable cohort of artists working at the frontier of technology and performance, from 4D sound compositions to art that generates new forms when two people hold hands and complete a human circuit. And it ends with a question we're all asking: in an age of AI and humanoid machines, what is it that makes art uniquely human — and how do we hold onto it?