Luca Guadagnino’s ‘Artificial’ Opens Pandora’s Box on Christmas Day

Neon put the first official teaser for Artificial in front of viewers this morning, and Andrew Garfield already looks settled into Sam Altman’s skin. Luca Guadagnino directed the 140-minute film from a screenplay by Simon Rich. It covers the five days in November 2023 when OpenAI’s board removed Altman as chief executive and then brought him back while the company sat at the center of a race to control the technology that would soon sit on every phone and laptop.

Garfield moves through a polished compound that opens onto a vault lined with guns behind blue-tinted glass. His voiceover does not hedge. “We’ve created a machine that will solve the world’s problems. We don’t teach it. It teaches itself. We’re gonna call it ChatGPT. We opened Pandora’s box together. The future is inevitable. Countries will fall. Industries are gonna collapse, and we get to be the ones to shepherd people into this new world. I’m so excited to see it.” The clip ends on a charged face-off with Ilya Sutskever.

Yura Borisov portrays Sutskever, the co-founder and head scientist who helped push the ouster. Monica Barbaro plays Mira Murati, while Cooper Hoffman is Greg Brockman. Ike Barinholtz faces Elon Musk, Mark Rylance plays Geoffrey Hinton, Jason Schwartzman, Zosia Mamet, Chris O’Dowd, Cooper Koch, and Billie Lourd round out the cast, which spent last summer filming in San Francisco and Turin. Damon Albarn wrote both the score and the original music. Malik Hassan Sayeed handled the camera. Marco Costa handled the editing. Stefano Baisi designed the rooms.


Amazon MGM Studios paid for the $40 million production and then stated in June that another company would release it, only weeks after the company revealed a significant investment in OpenAI. Neon purchased international rights and added the film to an awards calendar that now includes a New York Film Festival world premiere on October 5 at Alice Tully Hall, a London Film Festival gala on October 11, a restricted Christmas Day launch, and a wider release in January.


Early versions of Rich’s script centered the story on Sutskever, the idealistic technical genius who is ignored. Guadagnino’s cut became colder after additional photos. Garfield has said he has never met Altman. He told Esquire that anyone who is responsible for a technology capable of causing “a hell of a lot of damage to the spirit of humanity” must be able to detach himself from the repercussions. Artificial is now on Neon’s late-year schedule, ready for viewers to select how much of the five-day firestorm they want to watch on Christmas.