Luca Guadagnino's Artificial, Starring Andrew Garfield, To Premiere At New York Film Festival

Luca Guadagnino‘s Artificial, centred on OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, will celebrate its world premiere at the New York Film Festival on Oct. 5. Guadagnino and the cast, including Andrew Garfield, Monica Barbaro, Yura Borisov, Ike Barinholtz, Cooper Hoffman, Jason Schwartzman and Chris O’Dowd, are expected to attend. Artificial is chosen for the festival's prestigious Main Slate.

The surprising news arrives after a spate of reports claimed the movie would be skipping the festival circuit. Artificial is the fifth time Guadagnino has screened one of his films at NYFF, following Call Me by Your Name, Bones and All, Queer and After the Hunt which opened last year’s festival.

Neon Acquired Artificial After Amazon Ditched It

Amazon MGM Studios — which developed and financed the project — dropped it in June. Amazon released a statement saying the film would “be better served if it were released by a different studio". The studio’s move was widely criticized, especially given that it was done just a few months after Amazon signed a $50 billion partnership deal with Altman’s OpenAI in February.

Artificial was later acquired by Neon (after Netflix, A24 and Focus Features reportedly passed), which plans to release the film sometime later this year in order to push for this year’s Oscar race.

“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,” said NYFF artistic director Dennis Lim.

The NYFF stated, “The stakes couldn’t be higher in Luca Guadagnino’s thrilling, funny, and very human ‘Artificial,’ a drama of immense moral urgency that propels the viewer through the two decades of machine learning research and technocratic recklessness that have brought us to our current AI crisis point.

Artificial will also receive a Gala screening at London Film Festival on Oct. 11.

Garfield spoke to Esquire just last week about essaying Altman, “I don’t know this person, to be clear. I don’t know Sam Altman. I’ve never met him. I was going off of the script and court transcripts and interviews and research, and we were telling a story. But I think anyone who takes on that level of responsibility for a company or a technology that you know is going to do a hell of a lot of damage to the soul of humanity [must have] a certain ability to dissociate.”

The 64th edition of the New York Film Festival takes place from September 25 through October 12.