Asked on Italian television why his film was seen as dangerous, Luca Guadagnino gave a short answer. “Unfortunately, I can’t say much because we are right in the middle of this situation.”
The question came from Lilli Gruber, host of “Otto e Mezzo” on La7 Attualità, on a Friday. The film is “Artificial,” with Andrew Garfield as OpenAI’s Sam Altman, and Amazon MGM had walked away from it. The exit came several months after Amazon struck a significant partnership with OpenAI. That deal was set to expand OpenAI’s use of Amazon Web Services and develop custom AI models, and it included a $50 billion investment from Amazon.
Guadagnino did not link the two. He did say this sort of pressure is old. He pointed to an article he had read the day before about 2003, when CBS cancelled a major drama series on the Reagans after pressure from Republicans. “It was actually cancelled, though it later aired on a smaller channel,” he said.
Who else has passed
Mubi is among the distributors still circling the project. Variety reported that Netflix, A24 and Focus Features had turned it down after Amazon dropped it. The film is reported to carry a $40 million budget, and Ike Barinholtz co-stars as Elon Musk.
“A technological gadget”
On the wider AI debate, the director said the technology itself is not what concerns him. “To me, the issue isn’t artificial intelligence itself,” he said, meaning the tool used to produce research papers, videos or images. “From one perspective, it’s a technological gadget, and not a particularly sophisticated one, at that, full of flaws, though it will likely improve over time.”
He allowed that the scientists behind artificial general intelligence think it may one day become sentient, even though for now it mostly amounts to processing scraped data and using vast amounts of energy and water.
What interests him is the effect on people. They are changing “the very face of the identity of a place like the United States and the entire world,” he said. He tied that to San Francisco, where part of the film was shot. It is a city of great beauty and great despair, he said, with many homeless people and many living under the influence of fentanyl, “while these wonderful, silent, self-driving cars glided past them.”
“That, to me, is the perfect image to illustrate the theme,” Guadagnino said. “It is a disturbing image, more than just disturbing.”
The film itself
The Guardian’s reviewer, who saw the film at its premiere, called it a stylish and blunt satire in which Altman is portrayed as an amoral manipulator. The review found it closer to an op-ed than a movie, and said the script, by New Yorker essayist Simon Rich, is sometimes savage and sometimes frustratingly broad. “Artificial” screens at the New York film festival and opens in the US on Dec. 25, in Australia on Jan. 21 and in the UK on Jan. 27.
Sources
- Artificial review – Luca Guadagnino takes on OpenAI in muddled tech satire
- Luca Guadagnino Says He Can’t Discuss Amazon Dropping ‘Artificial’ Because ‘We Are Right in the Middle of This Situation,’ But AI Is ‘Changing the Identity of the World’
