Andrew Garfield admits he was influenced by Sam Altman before portraying OpenAI’s controversial CEO in director Luca Guadagnino’s new film “Artificial.”
“I remember seeing Sam testify in Congress for the first time, way back when,” Garfield said Monday night at the film’s world premiere at the New York Film Festival. “I thought: ‘This guy seems great. He’s honest. He’s transparent. He talks about regulations and has no stake in OpenAI. We need more of these people in control. He’s incredibly charming and charismatic.’ And then you learn more about a person.
Garfield, who listened to Altman and watched his footage for “two to three months” while preparing to portray him, said he felt a moral responsibility to take part in a film like “Artificial.” Garfield recalls that during filming, “the news was coming out every day” about the dangers of artificial intelligence.
“I kind of wish we could have given him more teeth,” Garfield said. “We must shine as bright a light as possible into the nooks and crannies of the people to whom we give all our autonomy and power.”
At Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall, Garfield was joined by Guadagnino, writer Simon Rich, and actors Yura Borisov (as OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever), Ike Barinholtz (as Elon Musk), and Cooper Hoffman (as OpenAI chairman Greg Brockman). Monica Barbaro, who plays OpenAI’s chief technology officer Mira Murati, did not attend the meeting. The film chronicles the evolution of OpenAI and dramatizes the tumultuous period when Altman was controversially fired and then rehired by the AI giant.
Garfield has portrayed many real people on the big screen, including Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin in “The Social Network” and composer Jonathan Larson in “Tick, Tick… Boom.” It’s a responsibility the actor doesn’t take lightly.
Garfield said of Altman: “I feel a tremendous compassion for what it feels like to say, ‘This isn’t me’ inside your soul.” “I imagine it would feel confrontational. That’s how I would feel, too. I’m projecting.”
In any case, the real Altman seems to shrug his shoulders at the “Artificial” that he does not see. “So, they’re trying to make a good movie, and maybe it’ll be good,” Altman said in a wide-ranging interview with Vanity Fair, adding: “It’s not going to be good as an accurate portrayal.”
Borisov, who was recently nominated for an Oscar for “Anora,” admits he was worried about what the real-life Sutskever and the public would think of the film.
“I can’t answer as nicely as Andrew. That’s why he plays Sam,” Borisov joked. “I was nervous watching this. It was our first time. [I have] There’s a lot of emotion about this now. “It’s like you’re a newborn child and you’re waiting for it to start breathing.”
Barinholtz, meanwhile, doesn’t seem too worried about Musk’s reaction.
“When you play like Elon, as someone who is universally loved, admired by everyone, is a good person and walks normally…” Barinholtz snapped. “When I first met Luca, I said, ‘I have very complicated ideas about Elon.’ And Luca said, ‘It’s not about what You I feel Elon. It’s about finding out what you are HE ‘He loves himself.’
Barinholtz found it “interesting” to portray Musk at a particular moment in time. “The chainsaw is not at the RNC. This is back in 2014 when a lot of people were like, ‘This guy is great. He’s going to save you.'”
Rich, a humorist who worked on “Saturday Night Live” and wrote the 2020 satire “An American Pickle,” was unintentionally motivated to write “Artificial” by his childhood friend Danny Selsam.
“He started warning me about artificial intelligence in 2008. My friends and I were so shocked by his predictions that we discussed a possible intervention to medicate him or perhaps hospitalize him. We thought he was losing his mind,” Rich said. “When he joined this new nonprofit called OpenAI, we took him a little more seriously.”
A year before ChatGPT was released by OpenAI, Rich says, “Danny started showing us such scary things on his computer that I felt the urge to warn people. When I told journalists what I saw, they thought it was a hoax. They thought I was trying to prank them.”
Rich tried to express his concerns by writing about the dangers in columns in publications such as Time magazine. However, the public could not take this into consideration.
“I quickly realized that there was a limit to what I could do as someone who wasn’t famous and wasn’t particularly charismatic or good-looking,” Rich said. “So this is kind of a last-ditch effort to warn humanity. I wrote this movie and
“I hope to God a few people pay attention.”
A late addition to the NYFF slate, “Artificial” became one of the most talked-about films of the year after Amazon MGM pulled the nearly completed film and said the film would be “better presented if released by a different studio.” This comes after Amazon signed a massive $50 billion partnership with OpenAI. Altman is also close to Amazon chief Jeff Bezos, who attended his wedding to Lauren Sanchez in Venice in 2025.
Neon eventually acquired “Artificial” and plans to release the film in theaters on December 25.
Making the world premiere of “Artificial” was a coup for NYFF artistic director Dennis Lim, who described the film’s festival plans as “really up in the air.” Lim noted that Guadagnino has a long history at the New York Film Festival, having premiered films such as “Call Me by Your Name,” “Bones and All,” “Queer” and “After the Hunt” in previous editions.
“I thought we would be a great launching pad for the film,” Lim said. Diversity before the premiere. “This is a film that deals with a very urgent situation. Artificial intelligence is in the news almost every day. The film outlines the trajectory we’re on with alarming clarity. And it does so in the form of an incredibly entertaining film. It has a very dark humor, and it’s definitely a valid way to approach our dystopian present.”