The first teaser for Artificial is out, and it is cut like horror. Andrew Garfield, playing Sam Altman, walks through a lavish mansion, goes down into the basement and finds dozens of machine guns stored there. Over anxious electronic music his Altman says the future is inevitable, that countries will fall and whole industries will collapse, and that it falls to them to lead people into a new world. The film is about Altman's abrupt firing and return as chief executive of OpenAI, and the fight at its centre is over who should control the technology. Neon is releasing it. Amazon, which owned it first, decided earlier this summer that the film would be better off at another studio.
Source: theguardian.com
Amazon's public framing was housekeeping: it said it was working with the filmmakers and looking for a new distributor. Neon announced the acquisition on June 30 and put Artificial straight into its seasonal list of awards contenders.
The cast is built around the people who were in the room. Yura Borisov plays Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI's co-founder. Ike Barinholtz plays Elon Musk. Monica Barbaro and Cooper Hoffman play other colleagues of Altman's at the company. Jason Schwartzman, Chris O'Dowd, Zosia Mamet, Cooper Koch and Billie Lourd round out the ensemble.
Garfield recently told Esquire that he does not know Altman and has never met him. His reading of the part, as he described it, is that a person who takes on that kind of responsibility for a company or a technology capable of doing serious damage to the human soul has to be able to hold himself at a distance from the consequences of what he does. That is an actor describing a character, not a verdict on a living executive, but it tells you which Altman the film is interested in.
Cooper Hoffman was blunter. On the red carpet, he told Variety that Amazon's decision to let the film go did not surprise him; what surprised him was that the studio bought the project at all. Once Artificial moved to Neon, he said, he was glad.
Neon has become one of the more reliable engines in the awards season, having carried Parasite, Anatomy of a Fall and Anora to Oscar success. Artificial joins a slate that includes Fjord, Cristian Mungiu's Palme d'Or winner, James Gray's drama Paper Tiger and Ryusuke Hamaguchi's All of a Sudden.
Here is the adjacency worth holding in view. Amazon's agreement with OpenAI provides for the Jeff Bezos company to invest up to $35 billion over the coming months, on top of the $15 billion it has already put in. Nobody involved has said the film and the investment are connected, and nothing in the reporting establishes that they are. What I would say is that the two facts describe a position rather than a conspiracy: a studio does not need a stated motive to find a drama about its largest counterparty's governance crisis awkward, and Amazon never had to explain itself, because "better at another studio" is a sentence no one can argue with.
The more interesting question is the one Hoffman stumbled into and nobody followed up. He was more surprised by the purchase than by the exit — which means the shape of the problem was visible on the day the deal was signed. Nothing reported since explains what changed between acquisition and handoff, whether it was the film, the relationship, or simply the size of the number that arrived in between. That gap is where the actual story sits, and it is the part of the announcement that stayed quiet.
Artificial is a film about a fight over who controls a technology. Before a ticket was sold, its distribution settled a smaller version of the same fight: the company with the most money in OpenAI does not have it, and the company that does sells statuettes rather than compute.