Andrew Garfield says he prepared “day in and day out” for months to play Sam Altman, “listening and watching footage of him … trying to find my version of that character.”
Where he landed on the co-founder and CEO of OpenAI wasn’t complimentary – calculating, manipulative and nihilistic.
“There’s such a heavy responsibility … playing a live person,” he told a packed Alice Tully Hall at the New York Film Festival’s world premiere of Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial Monday night. “I feel a tremendous amount of compassion for what that must [be] like” on the receiving end.
“But at the same time, the deeper responsibility, maybe, that I think we all felt is to shine [a light] to try and do some interrogation of who we are giving all of our autonomy, power, and data to. That felt like the greater the service.”
“There’s a lot of research, there’s a lot of footage, there’s a lot of information, [on Altman] which is all grist for the mill, and then there’s your own imagination. I remember seeing Sam testifying to Congress for the first time, way back when, and I was like, “This guy seems f-cking great. I was like, ‘He’s clear-eyed, he’s honest, he’s transparent, he’s talking about regulation … We need more of these people in in control, in power, and he’s incredibly charming, charismatic. And then I, you know, like all of us, we learn more about a person.”
The film, from Neon, explores the lead up and launch of the ChatGPT parent by Altman, Ilya Sutskever (played by Yura Borisov), Elon Musk (Ike Barinholtz), Greg Brockman (Cooper Hoffman) and others as a nonprofit in 2015.
Sutskever is the moral center of the film and grows increasingly uncomfortable as Altman forges ahead with complicated AI models that have learned how to lie, willfully ignoring risks. Sutskeyer leads a short-lived and highly public boardroom coup that ousts Altman as CEO. But he was reinstated after Microsoft offered him a perch and hundreds of OpenAI employees threatened to quit and follow him.
Scribe Simon Rich said he wrote the movie as a “last ditch effort to warn mankind … and I hope to God that a couple of people pay attention.”
He traced the film back to grade school in New York City and a mate of “freakish intelligence” who started studying AI some years later. “My friends and I were so shocked by his predictions that we actually discussed potentially doing an intervention to get him … perhaps institutionalized. We thought he’d lost his mind. We took him a little bit more seriously when he joined this new nonprofit called OpenAI. About a year before ChatGPT was released, he showed us stuff on his computer that was so terrifying that I felt the urge to warn people.”
Elon Musk – himself the subject of a current documentary by Alex Gibney – strides in and out of scenes. Barinholtz said at the Q&A that he told Guadagnino early on he had “very complicated opinions” about Musk and the helmer told him, “’It’s not about you loving Elon, but finding what Elon loves about himself.’” The actor reminded the audience that “this is not Musk at the RNC with a chainsaw. This is him in 2014, when a lot of people were like, ‘This guy’s gonna save us.”
They funny on stage, and the film has a healthy dose of comedy.
“I really think there’s a pretty thin line between comedy and horror, Rich said. “There are so many Simpsons episodes that are based on Twilight episodes, and Luca does a wonderful job of really straddling that line. And there are moments where you don’t really know whether to laugh or cry, and that’s often my favorite kind of art.”
Neon — which boarded the film after a controversial decision by producer Amazon MGM to bail — is releasing it theatrically on Dec. 25