Oh, and I thought we were told Luca Guadagnino’s controversial OpenAI/Sam Altman film Artificial wasn’t going to do any festivals? Turns out that’s not true at all, as it was just added to the New York Film Festival lineup as a world premiere. This news arrives after Amazon MGM dropped the hot-button project (Bezos doesn’t want to piss off any of his pals in Big Tech!), and it was acquired by NEON for practically pennies on the dollar.
As part of the news, we have our first look at Andrew Garfield as OpenAI founder Sam Altman, alongside Anora co-star Yura Borisov as co-founder Ilya Sutskever. Artificial will center on Altman’s firing by Sutskever and the OpenAI board due to a lack of confidence, only for him to be reinstated days later.
Also in the cast are Mark Rylance, Monica Barbaro, Ike Barinholtz, Jason Schartzman, Zosia Mamet, Cooper Hoffman, and Chris O’Dowd. Guadagnino directs from a script by Simon Rich that is said to be unflinching in its look inside tech bro culture.
Per NYFF’s statement, “The stakes couldn’t be higher in Luca Guadagnino’s thrilling, funny, and very human ‘Artificial,’ a drama of immense moral urgency that propels the viewer through the two decades of machine learning research and technocratic recklessness that have brought us to our current AI crisis point. In 2003, Soviet-born computer scientist Ilya Sutskever (Yura Borisov) began studying artificial neural networks under University of Toronto professor Geoffrey ‘Godfather of AI’ Hinton (Mark Rylance). A decade later, while employed by Google, Sutskever fatefully crosses paths with a young entrepreneur named Sam Altman (Andrew Garfield), the eventual co-founder and CEO of OpenAI.”
Artificial has yet to be given a release date, but expect that to change once NEON gauges reactions from NYFF.
