How New York Film Festival Landed Movies Like Controversial OpenAI Biopic ‘Artificial’ and Toho’s ‘Godzilla Minus Zero’

The festival's artistic director walks IndieWire through this year's highlights and buzziest scoops, like the world premiere of Luca Guadagnino's "Artificial." Several titles are also seeking distribution out of NYFF, including Ira Sachs' AIDS-era New York City drama "The Man I Love."

This year’s New York Film Festival is bursting with some of the best and buzziest offerings in the 64-year-old festival’s recent history. World premieres include new films by Luca Guadagnino (“Artificial”), Tom McCarthy (“A Statement”), Ava DuVernay (“14th”), and Tony Gilroy (“Behemoth!”). NYFF audiences will also be the first to catch movies like James Gray’s opening nighter “Paper Tiger” (a North American premiere) and Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s Elizabeth Holmes doc “You Can See Everything” fresh from their respective Cannes and Telluride bows.

The film‘s international spectrum boasts a range of world premieres as well, from the Iranian documentary “I Deserve a Lover Whose Every Rise Sets Fiery Dooms Raging Across the Skies” to debate-stoking Mexican art filmmaker Carlos Reygadas’ authoritarianism sci-fi “Heil Jupiter!,” his first film in eight years. The NYFF once again promises a sophisticated event tailored to both highbrow cinephiles looking for a challenge (the five-and-change-hour documentary “Life of Jorge Luis Borges,” anyone?) and the more crowd-pleaser-inclined (like two A24 pictures, Chris Rock’s “Misty Green” and Jordan Firstman’s Cannes smash “Club Kid”).

“I do think that that’s what we think about, especially programming a festival for a city like New York, is to think about multiple potential audiences,” said NYFF artistic director Dennis Lim, whose programming team scouts film festivals big and small, year to year, looking to outfit its various noncompetitive sections. This year, the festival is showing 113 films, and from filmmakers like Jesse Eisenberg, Mike Leigh, Radu Jude, Lee Chang-dong, Eleanor Coppola, Werner Herzog, Pawel Pawlikowski, Pedro Almodóvar, and even Ken Russell, with a 35mm print of his recently restored, heretical 1971 shocker “The Devils.”

Takashi Yamazaki’s “Godzilla Minus Zero” also marks its world premiere at NYFF this weekend, a rare blockbuster bow for the festival. Releasing through its subsidiary GKIDS in the U.S., the Toho epic first-looks in New York even before its hometown Tokyo Film Festival screening. “Godzilla’s” positioning at NYFF feels closely linked to the premiere of Na Hong-jin’s VFX-heavy monster movie “Hope” in the Cannes competition. As more studios cower from showing their high-profile films at festivals to avoid terrible early reviews (possibly hence no “Digger” out of Venice from Warners), international tentpoles can fill the void.

“I think we create a great context for a film,” Lim said. “It’s New York, so there’s just a certain critical mass of press and industry, and I think people have a certain trust that the film is going to be received by a sophisticated cine-literate audience.” Meaning that just because it’s Godzilla doesn’t mean it won’t have the imprimatur of art.

When Guadagnino’s Sam Altman dramedy “Artificial,” said to be a biting critique of AI’s takeover of our planet, hot-potatoed from tech giant Amazon to much indier outfit Neon for predictable reasons, Lim and his team moved quickly. Most of the Italian director’s movies have screened here in New York, including the divisive “After the Hunt,” which opened last year’s festival ahead of the annual Tavern on the Green fete.

“Even though everybody knew about this film and knew it was completed, the situation with the studios was played out in public,” Lim said of the Andrew Garfield starrer. “We didn’t know whether this would even be a film for this year until fairly late in the process. Once it landed with Neon, we started having that conversation, and I saw it not long after Neon picked it up and was immediately convinced that this is a film that we should show and we should get behind.”

Lim said that Guadagnino, who just received a career prize at the Venice Film Festival where he premiered his seven-hour Bertolucci nonfiction deep dive “Joie de Vivre,” is “the kind of filmmaker who just never stays still. He’s always moving from one kind of film to another. I think this film, it’s gotten even more scarily topical since I saw it in July. I mean, if you look at the news this week, everything that’s happened in the AI space in the last two months…”

NYFF is also the first and most urgent stop domestically for the harrowing, must-see documentary “NAZA,” from the Israeli half of the Oscar-winning “No Other Land” collective, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor. The Guardian Films-produced documentary, which features interviews with IDF members about the inner workings of the war on Gaza, is being rushed into theatrical self-release at IFC Center mere days after its September 26, sold-out NYFF premiere. The stakes are high, as Israeli officials campaign against Abraham and Szor’s citizenship status, and atrocity in Gaza wages on. At the film’s press screening earlier this month, journalists had to submit their laptops and cellphones to festival PR to avoid leaks; IndieWire confirmed that won’t be the case for ticketed festivalgoers.

A completely different movie also demanded discretion: the Telluride smash “You Can See Everything.” “The plan all along was to keep that film [under wraps]. Even the existence of the film was supposed to be a secret, which was also the case with ‘NAZA,’ a very different film where confidentiality was needed for very different reasons,” Lim said.

Unlike many of its fall festival predecessors (including TIFF proper for the first time this year), NYFF doesn’t have a market per se. But it is an opportunity to put your movie in front of New York film industry players if it’s still seeking a buyer. Like Ira Sachs’ “The Man I Love,” an AIDS-era love triangle set in 1980s New York City and starring Rami Malek and Tom Sturridge. The “Passages” director, a longtime favorite of the New York Film Festival and a fixture of the NYC film scene, premiered the film to supportive reviews in the Cannes competition this past May. The drama still does not have domestic distribution despite playing Karlovy Vary and Telluride post-Cannes. Gay narratives are always a challenge for buyers, especially around AIDS, and the Andrew Scott Oscar-hopeful “Elsinore” is occupying a sizable chunk of that space right now. As is “La Bola Negra.” But NYFF will help platform “The Man I Love” to what should be an appreciative New York (and queer) audience.

“Obviously, we don’t have a formal market, but being in New York where a lot of the players are based, there’s certainly industry activity at the festival, industry presence,” Lim said. “We typically find that most films that are in the Main Slate end up with distribution of some form, even if it’s a smaller film with a smaller distributor. And I think Ira’s film is one of the most striking and one of the boldest American films of the year. I have no doubt he’ll get picked up. And if we can play some small part in that, I’m thrilled.”

As for nabbing “Paper Tiger’s” North American premiere ahead of Neon’s November release, Lim said those conversations started “very early” with James Gray, in the spring before Cannes.

“We were lucky to see that film early,” Lim said. “James is a filmmaker who means a lot to me, and who also has had a long relationship with us at the festival. And I think that this is like a pinnacle for him. I think it’s a remarkable film. I think it’s very difficult to make films like this today. This is a film that is unapologetically sincere. It’s like a classical film. It’s not gimmicky. It’s a James Gray film. It’s a New York film. And I think for us, we have the right audience to really appreciate what he’s accomplished with this film. I think it’s an incredible achievement, and we’re very proud to be opening with this film. I think it’s career-best, or close to career-best, work for all the actors there as well. It just shows what James can do and how he gets New York.”

The New York Film Festival runs September 25 through October 12 throughout all five boroughs of New York City.