Neon has booked a New York Film Festival (NYFF) world premiere slot for Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial starring Andrew Garfield as controversial O
Neon has booked a New York Film Festival (NYFF) world premiere slot for Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial starring Andrew Garfield as controversial OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman. Less than a week later the anticipated feature will screen at London Film Festival.
Artificial will screen on October 5 in NYFF’s Main Slate with Guadagnino and members of the cast scheduled to attend. It will travel to London Film Festival for a Gala screening on October 11, with talent again expected to attend.
Neon acquired worldwide rights to Artificial in tardy June after Amazon MGM Studios, which had greenlighted the film, dropped it several months after parent company Amazon closed a $50bn investment in OpenAI.
The feature chronicles the tardy 2023 firing and rehiring of Altman after a board coup. The festival described Guadagnino’s film as “thrilling, funny, and very human” and said it charts the fateful meeting between Altman and the Soviet-born computer scientist Ilya Sutskever, who would go on to play a key role in the development of machine learning, not to mention OpenAI boardroom intrigue.
Yura Borisov from Anora plays Sutskever and Mark Rylance is the influential AI scientist Geoffrey Hinton under whom Sutskever studied at University of Toronto. The cast includes Monica Barbaro, Cooper Hoffman, Ike Barinholtz, Jason Schwartzman, and Chris O’Dowd. Blur frontman Damon Albarn composed the score.
Guadagnino attended NYFF last year with After The Hunt, and has brought Call Me By Your Name, Bones And All, and Queer to the festival.
NYFF artistic director Dennis Lim said: “The most remarkable thing about Luca Guadagnino’s sly and sobering new film is that it finds the perfect tone to tell the story of how we arrived at the AI precipice. Artificial traces this trajectory with clear-eyed horror, dark humour, and a sense of existential urgency. If ever there was a movie for its moment, this is it.”
NYFF runs September 25-October 12.
