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 of a project, dropped by Amazon, and today it has finally revealed its first footage.
In this first teaser, Andrew Garfield is unrecognisable as the boss of OpenAI. Unrecognisable because he seems to have been de-aged, though did he really need it? After coming down the stairs of a lavish home, Sam Altman reaches 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 keen to go beyond a simple retelling of the crisis that shook OpenAI in 2023. At the time, Sam Altman was abruptly dismissed by the board before being reinstated five days later. The decision caused a genuine earthquake within the company, with close to 700 employees threatening to resign if their boss wasn't brought back.
ChatGPT, Pandora's box
The first footage suggests that film-maker Luca Guadagnino (the man behind Challengers and Call Me by Your Name, the film that made Timothée Chalamet a star) wants to tell a far bigger story than those few days of chaos. The film will look back at the birth of ChatGPT and at the way artificial intelligence gradually took over our lives, at how it went mainstream. Andrew Garfield will share the screen with Yura Borisov as Ilya Sutskever, co-founder of OpenAI, and Ike Barinholtz, who plays Elon Musk. Monica Barbaro and Cooper Hoffman also play close colleagues 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 also worked on Wonka, and inevitably, with a subject so rooted in the here and now, the film could hardly dodge the debates currently swirling around artificial intelligence. Andrew Garfield recently said he had never met Sam Altman, while suggesting that anyone capable of shouldering such responsibility for a technology that could profoundly upend humanity must possess “a certain capacity for dissociation”.
A film dropped by Amazon, then rescued by Neon
Behind this less than reassuring portrait lies 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 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 eventually dropped 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.
The project finally 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 screen 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 are pouring money into the entertainment industry isn't short on irony.
Artificial will premiere at the New York Film Festival in October, ahead of a US release set for 25 December 2026. And judging by this first teaser, the film could be far more than a simple Sam Altman biopic: it also looks like a deep dive into a technological revolution whose consequences we are still a long way from fully grasping.
