Andrew Garfield admits he was initially charmed by Sam Altman before he portrayed the controversial CEO of OpenAI in director Luca Guadagnino’s new film “Artificial.” “I remember seeing Sam testifying to Congress for the first time, way back when,” Garfield recalled on Monday night at the movie’s world premiere at the New York Film Festival. He’s talking about regulation, and he 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 spent “two to three months” listening and watching footage of Altman while preparing to play him, described feeling a moral responsibility to participate in a movie like “Artificial.” “We need to shine the light as bright as possible at the nooks and crannies of people we’re giving all of our autonomy and power to,” Garfield said. Garfield was joined at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall 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 president Greg Brockman). Monica Barbaro, who portrays OpenAI’s chief technology officer Mira Murati, wasn’t in attendance.
The movie charts the evolution of OpenAI and dramatizes the tumultuous time when Altman was controversially fired and then rehired by the AI giant. Garfield has portrayed many real people on 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. I’m projecting.” In any case, the real Altman seems to be shrugging off “Artificial,” which he hasn’t seen.
That’s why he’s playing Sam,” Borisov joked. It was our first time. [I have] so much feeling now about this. It’s like a child just being born, and you’re waiting for it to start breathing.” Barinholtz, meanwhile, doesn’t seem too concerned about Musk’s reaction.
It’s about finding what he loves about himself.’ Barinholtz found it “interesting” to play Musk at this particular moment in time. This is him in 2014 when a lot of people were like, ‘This guy is amazing. He’s going to save you.'” Rich, a humorist who worked at “Saturday Night Live” and penned the 2020 satire “An American Pickle,” was inadvertently motivated to write “Artificial” by his childhood friend, Danny Selsam.
My friends and I were so shocked by his predictions that we actually discussed potentially doing an intervention to get them medicated, or perhaps institutionalized. We thought he lost his mind,” Rich said. When I told journalists what I had seen, they thought it was a hoax.
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