Artificial<\/a><\/em> made its way to Hollywood on Monday, as director Luca Guadagnino<\/a> and Andrew Garfield<\/a> held court at the first Los Angeles screening of the would-be awards contender before a packed house of voters and industry influencers at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures.<\/p>\n The film, which has been entered as a comedy at the Golden Globes<\/a>, tells the story of the founding of OpenAI, focusing on how brilliant young mathematician and computer scientist Ilya Sutskever (Yura Borisov<\/a>) and Silicon Valley operative Sam Altman (Garfield) teamed up to create the company that would launch ChatGPT. The film was originally produced by Amazon MGM, but the studio, whose parent company has ties to OpenAI, got cold feet, and the film was acquired by Neon<\/a>. It\u2019s set for release on Dec. 25.<\/p>\n <\/a><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n <\/a><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Following the screening, the director and star were joined by cast members Monica Barbaro<\/a> (who plays Mira Murati, OpenAI\u2019s chief technology officer) and Cooper Hoffman<\/a> (Greg Brockman, OpenAI\u2019s president and Altman\u2019s right-hand man), as well as screenwriter Simon Rich, for a lively discussion that touched on everything from the existential crisis of AI \u2014 prompting Garfield to drop a Spider-Man reference \u2014 to Guadagnino\u2019s reverence for John Hughes\u2019 teen comedies.<\/p>\n Here are the highlights.<\/p>\n Simon Rich:<\/strong> It\u2019s a very strange story. It started in 1989, when I was in kindergarten. I was by far the shortest kid in my class, too small to play sports out of fear of incidental contact. But I did have one friend, and his name was Danny Selsam. He was normal-sized, but he stood out for his freakish intelligence. <\/p>\n He started warning me about AI in 2008. At the time, I thought he had had a schizophrenic break because the stuff he was saying was so delusional to my ears. It seemed like he needed to be medicated, perhaps institutionalized. My friends and I discussed having an intervention.<\/p>\n We started to take him a little more seriously when he joined this new nonprofit called OpenAI and showed us some of the stuff they were working on. It was sufficiently terrifying that I felt like I had a moral responsibility to warn people. But when I tried to tell journalists, they literally thought I was making it up. They thought it was a hoax, probably because I used to write for SNL<\/em>. <\/p>\n So, in desperation, I wrote a piece for The New Yorker<\/em>. I wrote something for Time<\/em> magazine. I published an audiobook that Werner Herzog narrated. None of this had any impact whatsoever on the culture. So, as a kind of long-shot Hail Mary, I wrote this script to try to convince people that the technology was real and as scary and powerful as my friend Dan had claimed. <\/p>\n Luca Guadagnino:<\/strong> I received the script that Simon wrote, and it reminded me how much I, as a citizen \u2014 as someone who tries to be informed \u2014 was confused and interested in understanding more about the culture behind, beyond, the companies, and, in that specific case, this company and the elusive figure of Sam Altman. I also discovered more people that I didn\u2019t know because they were not on the front pages, right? Like Ilya Sutskever. To me, the idea of trying to tell the story of how a seismic shift in our way of living, and possibly in our future, is happening \u2014 and to show that it\u2019s happening through decisions made by a few people, and these few people are kind of morphing our lives \u2014 was too huge an opportunity not to try to tell the story.<\/p>\n Guadagnino:<\/strong> At the beginning, my initial instinct was to think of the great John Hughes and his amazing teen comedies that I grew up with. But then I realized that John Hughes was full of hope, so<\/strong> the difference became that we had to try to see the polarization between these two characters, Ilya and Sam, and try to be with them instead of judging them. We had to try to understand them, even though understanding them can be tough at a certain point, particularly when understanding Sam. Garfield:<\/strong> It\u2019s a film about human beings \u2014 the human beings who are ushering all of us, the kids who are ushering all of us in the John Hughes way, the adolescents taking us with them to see some shaman, when they don\u2019t even know what the shaman\u2019s going to do. But it\u2019s like, “It\u2019s going to be great. It\u2019s going to be cool.” It\u2019s terrifying, but I don\u2019t know. I feel like if enough artists and enough people who have power can regulate, can be part of a conversation to make sure that we aren\u2019t just giving our future away and losing all of our autonomy, I think we\u2019ll maybe be OK.<\/p>\n Garfield:<\/strong> The journey is so authentic to me. Weirdly, as the person playing Sam, I can tell you there is no deception in the character. It\u2019s a strange thing from the inside of the character: No moment feels like deception. Every moment feels like the truth.<\/p>\n From being the best camp counselor for a tech startup in Silicon Valley, incubating incredible talent, looking at people who I want to change the world with, thinking that we\u2019re going to revolutionize how people work \u2014 or don\u2019t work \u2014 or have more free time, you know, the magical ability of this incredible, insane technological discovery. It\u2019s like opening a chest and finding something ancient and archaeological, far away \u2014 like finding Atlantis and going, “Oh my, the technology was more advanced.” It\u2019s that kind of thing. And, of course, with that kind of power comes\u2026 fill in the blank. I won\u2019t say it.<\/p>\n \n![\"Denis](\"https:\/\/www.goldderby.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/Denis-Zendaya-Dune-3.jpg?w=300&h=168&crop=1\")
<\/div>\n![\"Andrew](\"https:\/\/www.goldderby.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Andrew-Garfield-as-Sam-Altman-and-Yura-Borisov-as-Ilya-Sutskever-in-ARTIFICIAL.Courtesy-of-NEON.-.jpg\")
The Artificial<\/em> origin story<\/h3>\n
![\"Andrew](\"https:\/\/www.goldderby.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/11\/P108O9DN.jpg?w=650\")
A John Hughes romance<\/h3>\n
I\u2019m interested in telling stories of people, and I think that, paradoxically, this is a very human story. It deals with all the frailties of being human and being driven by personal emotions that can be ugly or inspiring, and that can eventually lead us to an unraveling. <\/p>\n![\"Andrew](\"https:\/\/www.goldderby.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/11\/Artificial-Yura-Garfield.jpg\")
‘With great power’: Garfield on Altman<\/h3>\n