Guadagnino discusses what went into the making of his daring film about Sam Altman and OpenAI, and what led to Neon rescuing it after Amazon had decided not to release it.
As is known by now, Amazon MGM Studios decided, despite developing the project, that they would not release it. As a result, one of the year’s buzziest, most controversial titles was suddenly up for grabs.
Leaders of OpenAI and other companies have sounded the alarm on the acceleration of generative AI, on the need to slow down their own work to keep it safe.
In this respect, Artificial’s timely relevancy is striking. The movie traces decades in the lives of Ilya (Anora’s Yura Borisov) and Sam (Andrew Garfield), men from completely different worlds who bond and plot to change the world for the better during the Obama-era tech optimism. But then, they find themselves at odds as the enormous capabilities of their technology reveal themselves in the Trump and Biden years.
Artificial is written by humorist and Saturday Night Live alum Simon Rich, and was developed at Amazon before Guadagnino was hired to direct it. Several scenes in the film, though set years ago, speak directly and dangerously to the news headlines of the past months, weeks–and days.
Rich’s script was more broadly comic than Guadagnino’s darkly funny final film. Artificial is first introduced as Ilya’s story before Sam takes charge of the narrative. The tone turns more sinister, with Ilya and eventual OpenAI CTO Mira Murati (Monica Barbaro) in a state of growing anxiety, to say the least.
Guadagnino and his cinematographer Malik Hassan Sayeed give Artificial a true analog feel, shooting on 35mm with playful liveness in the camerawork that contrasts with the gleaming Big Tech office spaces.
The director uses Ilya’s character as a way into the increasingly complex narrative. “You start as a person, then you get touched by something that corrupts you inside — and these corruptions start to spread and create a landscape of destruction all over,” he says.
The filmmakers hired outside counsels to ensure Artificial stayed ironclad, while not pulling any punches in their portraits of the human persona. They also had primary sources on the set to insure greater accuracy, even in such details as the shape design of the set and wardrobe colors.
“Everything that we say in the film is completely vetted and could be proven and double-proven,” says the director. “Without that, Amazon corporately would not have allowed us to make the film.”
“Zero AI” was used in the making of Artificial, Guadagnino says: “I’m old-fashioned director, I’m analogic, I shoot on 35. I believe in good old performance. You have to leave the door open to reality on a movie set, and how do you do that if you are sending prompts to computers?”
This philosophy informs what the movie has to say, and why it must have scared some companies off: “It’s not just that AI can wipe off humanity from the planet earth in four years — we are destroying the environment and we are doing so mindlessly. Moreover, a very small group of men are getting more and more power into their hands, while many others are just digitizing questions to the ChatGPT.”
Artificial derives its impact from being boldly frank. “I can say that once I saw the development of dealmaking, and business-making, between Amazon and OpenAI, that was an interesting moment for me,” Guadagnino says.
Age of “post-truth” and pseudo-information
“We live in an age of “post-truth” and so anybody’s opinion, and pseudo-information, becomes information,” Guadagnino says. “I would never speculate on something that I don’t know the actual facts of. So for me, this is a little bit frustrating.”
That said, he is confident that Artificial has arrived at the right time, and at the right home, with an independent company (Neon) committed to the immense relevancy of the subject and the particular way it is told.
