Fielder and Oppenheim, who have been working on this A24 film in secret for three years, unveiled it at the Telluride Film Festival, where it was met
Fielder and Oppenheim, who have been working on this A24 film in secret for three years, unveiled it at the Telluride Film Festival, where it was met with shock at both the access the filmmakers were given and the revelations it made about Holmes and her husband’s influence over her life.
Holmes says in the project that she feels she’s been made into a caricature by the way she’s been portrayed in the media, especially the popular Hulu series The Dropout, starring Amanda Seyfried. It seems as if she and her husband, Billy Evans, thought that by recruiting Fielder and Oppenheim to tell their story, they might be able to right the narrative. But Fielder’s attempts to understand Holmes left him baffled. “Truly, to this day, I don’t quite know what I went through,” Fielder said onstage at the Telluride Film Festival. “But what we really tried to do with the project is convey our experience and really try to make it reflect how it felt to be there at every moment without telling you what to think.”
In the case of Artificial, there was a time when it seemed like the movie might never see the lightweight of day. Guadagnino’s gloomy drama was originally set up at Amazon MGM. Then, in February, Amazon and Altman’s OpenAI announced a multibillion-dollar partnership. In June, the company dropped the nearly finished film, saying that it would “be better served if it were released by a different studio.”
For a moment, it seemed like Hollywood’s increasingly tangled relationships with tech companies would block Artificial from finding a novel home. But Neon eventually bought the film, which will premiere at the New York Film Festival in October before a Christmas release. Altman himself hasn’t made any public comments about the movie yet, but after the first trailer dropped, his brother Jack Altman did write on social media that “the only thing they got right is the walk.” That trailer reveals Garfield’s Altman in a high-tech bunker, which is stocked with guns, as a voice-over says: “We opened Pandora’s box together. The future’s inevitable—countries will fall, industries are gonna collapse.” Now that’s a classic piece of villain dialogue.
