Luca Guadagnino is speaking out about his movie Artificial being dropped by Amazon MGM Studios.
The 54-year-old filmmaker’s upcoming film was nearly finished when it was recently released by the studio.
During an interview on Italian news show Otto e Mezzo on Friday (June 26), Luca addressed his movie being dropped.
“[I] can’t say too much because we are right in the middle of this situation,” he said, via TheWrap, when asked why “the subject of artificial intelligence in today’s America is considered dangerous.”
He adds that the central to the movie’s story is what he calls the tech oligarchy’s “truly radical control” of “the very identity of places like the United States and the entire world.”
Artificial has been described as a “comedic drama set in the world of artificial intelligence,” with Andrew Garfield starring as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
“What matters most to me is how people are completely changing the face of things — not just society in terms of consumption and how we interact with these tools, but the very identity of places like the United States and the entire world,” Luca shared. “And that is indeed what is happening. Indeed, this small oligarchy — which nonetheless exercises truly radical control — [is central to the story].”
“The film was shot partly in San Francisco — a wonderful city, one of the great, distinguished cities of the United States, known to everyone as the city of Alfred Hitchcock’s films,” Luca added. “The city presented extraordinary contrasts: a place of great beauty but also of deep despair, with so many homeless people — so many living under the influence of fentanyl — while these wonderful, silent, self-driving cars glided right past them. To me, that right there is the perfect image to describe the theme; it is the perfect image.”
Luca hopes that Artificial will find a new studio home and be seen by audiences, likening it to the 2003 cancellation of The Reagans by CBS.
“These are industrial-political issues — and not for the first time,” the filmmaker said. “I read a great article yesterday recalling how, back in 2003, CBS canceled a major drama about the Reagans due to pressure from Republicans — it was actually canceled, only to air later on a smaller channel.”
“To me, the issue isn’t artificial intelligence itself — that is, the application or tool used to generate ‘knowledge products’ or expressive content, like research, videos, or images,” Luca says. “From one perspective, it’s just a technological gadget — and not a particularly sophisticated one, at that; it’s full of flaws, though it will likely improve over time. Naturally, the scientists who developed artificial general intelligence believe that — even though it currently amounts to little more than computing data scraped from everywhere, consuming vast amounts of energy and water — it might one day become independently sentient.”
Find out who else is set to star in Artificial!
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