Andrew Garfield’s Sam Altman Opens Pandora’s Box In First Teaser for Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial

Is any movie this year more compelling than the frayed story of Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial? The star-studded, $40 million Sam Altman biopic (or exposé or spoof or something altogether different) was dropped by Amazon MGM Studios just before a likely fall-festival run after their Amazon overlords secured a $50 billion deal with Altman’s OpenAI. Amidst (apparent) scaredy-cat reactions from potential new distributors, Neon acquired the film and have set a fall release, with a New York Film Festival premiere occurring October 5. Altman is, to put it lightly, a fascinating figure, and the consternation just one movie can engender is great fun to witness. Now let’s see if Guadagnino, Andrew Garfield, his supporting cast—Yura Borisov, Mark Rylance, Monica Barbaro, Cooper Hoffman, Ike Barinholtz (as Elon Musk!), Jason Schwartzman, and Chris O’Dowd—and composer Damon Albarn have actually worked up something worthwhile.

Here’s NYFF’s synopsis: “The stakes couldn’t be higher in Luca Guadagnino’s thrilling, funny, and very human Artificial, a drama of immense moral urgency that propels the viewer through the two decades of machine learning research and technocratic recklessness that have brought us to our current AI crisis point. In 2003, Soviet-born computer scientist Ilya Sutskever (Yura Borisov) began studying artificial neural networks under University of Toronto professor Geoffrey ‘Godfather of AI’ Hinton (Mark Rylance). A decade later, while employed by Google, Sutskever fatefully crosses paths with a young entrepreneur named Sam Altman (Andrew Garfield), the eventual co-founder and CEO of OpenAI. Among our boldest auteurs, Guadagnino (previously at NYFF with Call Me by Your Name, Bones and All,Queer, and After the Hunt) takes his biggest swing yet for this headlong plunge into our doomsday moment, with a script by Simon Rich that probes the increasing gray areas between human and machine, truth and lie. Anchored by brilliant, fully inhabited lead performances by Garfield and Borisov; a remarkable supporting cast, including Rylance, Monica Barbaro, Cooper Hoffman, Ike Barinholtz, Jason Schwartzman, and Chris O’Dowd; and original songs and score by Damon Albarn, Guadagnino’s film moves like a machine in unstoppable, constant motion—a history being written as we’re watching it. A NEON release.”

Watch the preview below: