Sixteen years after starring in The Social Network, the story behind the creation of Facebook, Andrew Garfield is back behind the scenes in Silicon Valley. This time the destination is OpenAI and the world of artificial intelligence, with Artificial, Luca Guadagnino's new film about Sam Altman, the creator of ChatGPT who was sacked after just a few days. It's been a bumpy ride for the project, dropped by Amazon, and today it has unveiled its first footage.
In this first teaser, Andrew Garfield is unrecognisable as the OpenAI boss. Unrecognisable because he seems to have been de-aged, though did he really need it? After coming down the staircase of a luxurious mansion, Sam Altman heads into a basement filled with dozens of machine guns. A deliberately unsettling scene, backed by menacing electronic music, before the character declares: “The future is inevitable. Countries will fall, industries will collapse. And it's up to us to guide people into this new world.” That sets the tone.
Even though Artificial is built around one very specific event, it looks set to go beyond a straightforward retelling of the crisis that shook OpenAI in 2023. At the time, Sam Altman was abruptly dismissed by the board before getting his job back five days later. The decision caused a genuine earthquake within the company, with nearly 700 employees threatening to resign if their boss wasn't reinstated.
ChatGPT, Pandora's box
The first footage does indeed suggest that filmmaker Luca Guadagnino (the man behind Challengers and Call Me by Your Name, the film that made Timothée Chalamet a star) wants to tell a much bigger story than those few days of chaos. The film will look back at the birth of ChatGPT and at how artificial intelligence gradually took hold in our lives, at how it went mainstream. Andrew Garfield will share the screen with Yura Borisov as Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI co-founder, as well as Ike Barinholtz, who plays Elon Musk. Monica Barbaro and Cooper Hoffman also play close collaborators of Sam Altman. Jason Schwartzman, Chris O'Dowd, Zosia Mamet, Cooper Koch and Billie Lourd round out the cast.
The screenplay comes from Simon Rich, who previously worked on Wonka, and inevitably, with a subject so rooted in the present day, the film couldn't avoid the debates currently swirling around artificial intelligence. Andrew Garfield recently said he had never met Sam Altman, while suggesting that anyone able to shoulder such responsibility for a technology capable of profoundly upending humanity must possess “a certain capacity to dissociate”.
A film dropped by Amazon, then rescued by Neon
Behind this less than reassuring portrait lies, above all, the turbulent story of OpenAI and its boss. Artificial revisits Sam Altman's brutal ousting in November 2023, then his return a few days later, against a backdrop of internal warfare over the control and the future of artificial intelligence. The film's own journey has been almost as eventful as the one it depicts. Initially picked up by Amazon MGM Studios, Artificial was ultimately abandoned by the studio last June, at the very moment Amazon was announcing an investment of up to $35 billion in OpenAI, following an initial $15 billion investment.
The project eventually found a home at Neon, which announced its acquisition on 30 June and now plans to push it into the awards race. The film will be shown at the New York Film Festival in October, ahead of a US release scheduled for 25 December 2026. The whole affair inevitably adds another layer to the film: telling Sam Altman's story in Hollywood just as the tech giants pour money into the entertainment industry is not without its irony.
Artificial will premiere at the New York Film Festival in October, ahead of a US release scheduled for 25 December 2026. And judging by this first teaser, the film could turn out to be far more than a simple Sam Altman biopic: it's also a plunge into a technological revolution whose consequences we are still nowhere near understanding.
