Artificial, Luca Guadagnino’s drama about the rise of OpenAI, will have its world premiere on October 5 in the Main Slate of the 64th New York Film Festival, which runs September 25 through October 12 at Alice Tully Hall.
What the Film Is About
The film traces roughly two decades of machine learning research to explain how the industry arrived at what NYFF’s program describes as today’s AI crisis. It follows Soviet-born computer scientist Ilya Sutskever from his early study of artificial neural networks under Geoffrey Hinton at the University of Toronto in 2003, through his time at Google, up to his consequential meeting with Sam Altman, who becomes OpenAI’s co-founder and CEO. The film reportedly draws on the 2023 saga in which Altman was fired and rehired as OpenAI’s chief executive within days, and is billed as examining what the festival calls the increasing gray areas between human and machine, and between truth and lie.
A Stacked Cast Behind the Real Names
Andrew Garfield plays Altman, Yura Borisov plays Sutskever, and Mark Rylance plays Hinton. The rest of the cast includes Monica Barbaro, Cooper Hoffman, Ike Barinholtz, Jason Schwartzman and Chris O’Dowd, though their specific roles haven’t been detailed publicly. Simon Rich wrote the screenplay, and Damon Albarn composed the score and original songs.
A Film That Almost Didn’t Get a Distributor
Artificial nearly didn’t make it to a festival at all. Amazon MGM originally had the film, reportedly investing around $40 million, before dropping distribution entirely, not long after announcing its own roughly $50 billion strategic partnership and hardware commitment with OpenAI. Amazon’s public explanation was that the film would be better served by a different studio, an explanation widely read as sidestepping the obvious conflict of interest in distributing an unflattering portrait of a company it had just tied itself to financially. Netflix, A24 and Focus Features were all reported to have passed on picking it up afterward, before NEON closed a deal to distribute it.
Premiere Details
The NYFF premiere lands about a month before Artificial is expected to reach wider audiences, giving festival audiences the first real look at how Guadagnino handles a true story that several major studios apparently wanted no part of.
Source: Film at Lincoln Center, The A.V. Club
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