“‘Artificial’ took on a big tech giant”. Hollywood wasn’t ready

At six o’clock on a Wednesday morning in June in Century City, a group of Neon executives gathered at CAA headquarters for a secret screening. They didn’t know what they were going to watch. It had been made clear that the surprise would be worth it. The lights went out, and there in front of them was ArtificialLuca Guadagnino’s provocative new film about the birth of OpenAI and two of its founders, Sam Altman and Ilya Sutskever. Amazon MGM Studios had just decided, despite the development of the project, not to publish it; one of the hottest and most controversial titles of the year was suddenly put up for sale.

Neon was immediately interested. The independent studio led by Tom Quinn was the first to screen it, before competitors like Netflix, Searchlight and A24 jumped in. Their reactions varied, but were very positive; all except Neon and Mubi were eventually adopted. Speculation grew as to why: Was the film not good? Too expensive, with its budget of 40 million dollars? Or were some companies reluctant to take on this incendiary film because of their increasingly direct ties to Big Tech? (Amazon, for its part, had announced a planned investment of $50 billion in OpenAI a few months before deciding to sell Artificial.)

These questions remained unanswered all summer. The first, at least, is about to be answered, with Artificial is set to bow Monday night at the New York Film Festival. Neon, who ultimately acquired the film in a one-time deal in which they paid nothing up front but committed to spending $15 million on marketing, will then release it theatrically on Christmas Day. The other rumors remain persistent – ​​even if the filmmakers are not without opinions on them.

“The concept of conflict of interest is, let’s say, a very important elephant in the room here,” Guadagnino says. The Hollywood Reporter of his screening experience Artificial for various studios. “Once you understand the nature of each company’s business, despite and beyond their love of cinema, you realize that some decisions are not ones they would have made in a vacuum. …. When the studio landscape transforms and the studios are dealing with Silicon Valley interests – say moguls – that’s something that makes the idea of ​​art, the idea of ​​representation, very slippery. Orson Welles’ famous example: a film like Citizen Kane it probably couldn’t be done in the current climate.

Andrew Garfield, who gives a haunting and transformative performance in the film as Altman, is unaware of any specific internal conversations between the defunct companies. Artificial – but echoes Guadagnino’s broader point: “The fight is on to make sure that we are allowed to create things freely. The centralization of power that we are seeing can have a very, very chilling effect on the way art is allowed to live.”

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In recent weeks, executives at OpenAI and other companies in the industry have been sounding the alarm about the acceleration of generative AI, about the need to slow down their own work to keep it safe. ArtificialThe news in this regard is striking, even worrying. The film traces decades in Ilya’s life (AnoraYura Borisov) and Sam (Garfield), men from completely different worlds who bond and plot to change the world for the better in the sunny glow of Obama-era technological optimism, then find themselves at odds as the enormous – possibly dangerous – capabilities of their technology are revealed in the Trump and Biden years. Several scenes and conversations in the film, set years ago, speak eerily to last month’s headlines.

Artificial is written by a comedian and Saturday evening live former Simon Rich, and was developed at Amazon before Guadagnino was hired to run it. The shapeshifting director, whose credits range from the Oscar-winning romance Call me by your name to the horror remake Suspiriahad worked regularly with the company, on commercial successes (Challengers) and failures (After the hunt) The same. “They are family to me,” Guadagnino says of Amazon. He reiterates that this remains the case.

Sources say Rich’s script was more broadly comedic than Guadagnino’s darkly funny last film. (Though you still have Ike Barinholtz’s Elon Musk, often reduced here to little more than an obscenely rich punchline.) Artificial is presented as Ilya’s story before Sam took over the narrative; as a result, the tone becomes almost sinister, with Ilya and eventual OpenAI CTO Mira Murati (Monica Barbaro) watching in helpless horror.

Guadagnino and his general manager Malik Hassan Sayeed give Artificial a true analog feel, shot in 35mm with a playful liveliness in the camerawork that contrasts with the glossy, faithfully recreated Big Tech office spaces that house much of the drama. The director approached the material as a Medusa’s Touch“You start as a person, and then you get hit with something that corrupts you from the ground up – and those corruptions start to spread and create a landscape of destruction everywhere,” he says.

“Ilya seems to have a purity that Yura definitely accesses in a very beautiful and deep way, a kind of almost childlike respect,” Garfield adds. “And with Sam, I thought, ‘What does it take to not only run one of these companies, but to make decisions that are going to hurt people no matter how you slice them, as long as you’re determined to win the race and be the one with the Holy Grail in your hand? What does it take to sleep at night?’

Guadagnino saw his actor, who also starred in After the huntgo for it from the first moment: “We tested it with prosthetics – fake noses, fake cheeks – and we filmed it and we thought it was totally ridiculous,” he says. “Then he played Altman’s movements, Altman’s neck, Altman’s walk, and we filmed that – and it was strange, with simple, strategic use of makeup in terms of light and shadow. At that point, I was like, ‘Wow, we’re on to something with him here.’

The filmmakers hired an outside lawyer to ensure Artificial remained legally ironclad, while pulling no punches in its portrayal. (After production, key moments dramatized in the film were supported by Ronan Farrow’s sprawling and damning profile of Altman in The New Yorker.) “Everything we say in the movie is completely fact-checked and could be proven and doubly proven,” says Oscar-nominated producer Jennifer Fox (Michael Clayton). “Without that, Amazon would not have allowed us to make the film.”

The settings changed as filming progressed. Garfield controlled certain scenes after legal services flagged them as “hyperbolic”; others have been added and expanded based on new public information. They also had primary sources on set for color and accuracy. (Fox politely declines to name names.)

“I hope we’ve managed to push the boundaries as far as we can without risking being sued,” Garfield says. “And I hope we’re talking about something universal and deeper about the anxiety we all feel about the future. Maybe this is as far as we can push our obsession with not being human before we start to honor the body again, to honor a descent rather than a constant ascent. I feel it in myself. I feel it in my own soul. I want to be in the mud, in the mud.”

Garfield also viewed Artificial like the closing of a chapter in another way, returning in turn in The social network as Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin – there, portraying Ilya more than Sam. Initially, this wasn’t supposed to be the case. “I was auditioning for Mark (Zuckerberg) and I was kind of told the role was as good as mine,” Garfield explains. Then Jesse Eisenberg auditioned and proved undeniable for director David Fincher. “So it kind of scratched that itch. There was still a lingering itch that I wanted to dive into, really walk and explore and leave no stone unturned.”

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“Zero AI” was used in the creation of ArtificialGuadagnino said. This actually goes for all of his films. “I’m an old-fashioned guy. I’m analog. I shoot 35. I believe in good old performance,” he says. “Jean Renoir said: ‘You have to leave the door open to reality on a film set.’ And what if you’re sending prompts to a computer? » This philosophy, of course, extends to the very heart of the film – to what it has to say and why it may have scared off some companies: “It’s not just that AI can wipe humanity from planet Earth in four years – we’re destroying the environment and we’re doing it without thinking, and someone is getting more and more power in their hands while others are just scanning questions at ChatGPT. »

Artificial draws its power from its franchise — and so, in the months leading up to Amazon’s decision to sell the film, filmmakers’ opinions varied about its stance. “I can say that once I saw the development of transactions and business relationships between Amazon and OpenAI, it was an interesting moment for me,” says Guadagnino.

Once news of the sale broke, Garfield adds, “I was really impressed with Amazon because they were doing it in the first place, so I wasn’t incredibly surprised that they said,…