At the Artificial Premiere, Andrew Garfield Casts Doubt on Sam Altman’s Memory of Watching Him Film

“If that happened, I must have blacked out,” Garfield told the NYFF crowd when asked about the alleged wave. While he confirmed that they filmed outside Altman’s house, Garfield claims that “we didn’t see him at all that day we were shooting.”

Garfield said he prepared for two to three months to become the billionaire tech CEO, watching “footage of him every day in, day out, every morning and trying to find my version of that character.” The result is a truly transformative performance, with Garfield nailing Altman’s slightly awkward gate—“he did walk like me,” Altman admitted to VF—as well as his vocal fry.

Surprisingly, when Garfield first came across Altman as he was testifying before Congress, the two-time Oscar nominee was initially really impressed by the tech phenom. “I was like, Dang, this guy’s great,” said Garfield. “I was like, He’s clear-eyed, he’s honest, he’s transparent, he’s talking about regulation. He has no stake in OpenAI. We need more of these people in control, in power, and he’s incredibly charming and charismatic. But then you learn more about a person…” He takes a long pause and a deep breath. “Here we are.”

Hours before, a line ran down 65th Street and around the block with fans trying to score a ticket to the world premiere at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall. Some had been waiting for four hours by the time I arrived—that’s about half as long as the diehards who waited in line for You Can See Everything, the other NYFF premiere about a ruthlessly ambitious Silicon Valley wunderkind with questionable ethics, Elizabeth Holmes. Still, the fervor to see Guadagnino’s latest feature film was palpable.

Once inside, actors like Dominic Sessa, Stavros Halkias, and Nico Parker, supporting her boyfriend Cooper Hoffman, who stars in the film as OpenAI president and Altman devotee Greg Brockman, took their seats. Soon, New York Film Festival director Dennis Lim introduced Guadagnino, who welcomed to the stage members of the cast including Garfield, Hoffman, The Studio’s Ike Barinholtz, who plays Elon Musk, and Anora breakout Yura Borisov, who stars as OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever.

Those expecting a run-of-the-mill biopic about Altman are in for a surprise—but, then again, we should have known: Guadagnino doesn’t do run-of-the-mill. Artificial is an unflinching, often darkly hilarious look at the evolution of OpenAI from a well-intentioned nonprofit tech start-up dedicated to ethically developing AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) to a for-profit tech behemoth leading an accelerating arms race to develop a technology that many believe has the potential to destroy our world as we know it.

Artificial screenwriter Simon Rich shared that he’d been obsessing over the dangers of AI for years, ever since his childhood friend Danny Selsam took a job with OpenAI. “About a year before ChatGPT was released, he showed us stuff on his computer that was so terrifying that I felt the urge to warn people. When I told journalists what I had seen, they thought it was a hoax. They thought I was trying to prank them,” Rich said during the Q&A. “So in my last-ditch effort to warn mankind I wrote this movie…and I hope to God that it helps people pay attention.”

They certainly should. Artificial is gobsmacking in its prescience and how directly it speaks to current anxieties regarding the acceleration of AI and the potential threat that it poses to humanity. Lim shared that since the last time he watched the film, Guadagnino had added a card at the end addressing concerns brought up by Jacob Coxon, a former Anthropic employee who resigned in 2026, saying that he believes that neither OpenAI nor Anthropic can develop AI responsibly and that the AI they are developing poses a serious threat to humanity.

“When we were on set there were news stories coming out every day while we were shooting,” Garfield said. “One of us would bring in a news story like, ‘Yo, how are we going to include this now?’” The film felt like “a living document” that was only confined by what they could legally include, Garfield said. “Now there’s obviously a shit-ton more on public record. I wish we could add some scenes or recut some or change some dialogue, and give even more teeth, in a way.”

Don’t worry, Artificial has plenty of bite. Altman isn’t the only big name who gets chewed up and spit out by Guadagnino’s dark satire. Many of AI’s biggest names appear in the film, including principled Anthropic cofounder Dario Amodei (Will Angus), former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati (Monica Barbaro), and the Nobel Prize–winning godfather of AI, professor Geoff Hinton, played with measured sincerity by Oscar winner Mark Rylance. The biggest name in tech, Elon Musk, gets the most outlandish performance from Ike Barinholtz, who plays the richest man in the world as a cartoonish buffoon who is arguably the only person in Silicon Valley more impatient than Altman. “When you’re playing someone as universally beloved as Elon, and who everyone admires and who is a good person and walks normally,” quipped Barinholtz, getting a big laugh from the audience. “This is not him at the RNC with the chainsaw. This is him in 2014 when a lot of people were like, ‘This guy’s going to save us. He’s amazing.’”

As for his personal feelings about AI, Guadagnino told THR that “zero AI” was used in the making of Artificial, and he doesn’t seem to shy away from his feelings in the film. Before AI becomes a semiconscious tool capable of lying and thinking for itself, Guadagnino traces the origins of AI back to Hinton’s fly-infested classroom at the University of Toronto, implying that something about AI has always been rotten to its core. Guadagnino elaborated on his feelings about AI during the Q&A. “The machine can get out of control, particularly if it’s a tool in the hands of the interests of very few. I think that’s really exactly the point for me.”

The influence of those very few was almost enough to keep the film from coming out. Although it was developed at Amazon MGM, Artificial was unceremoniously dropped by Amazon earlier this summer, leaving it with no distributor. (Coincidentally, Amazon had announced a planned $50 billion investment in OpenAI months before Artificial was discarded. Amazon said in a statement that Artificial would “be better served if it were released by a different studio.”) According to The Hollywood Reporter, after a series of screenings at CAA for studios including Netflix, Searchlight, and A24, Neon and Mubi put in offers for the $40 million film, with Neon closing a unique deal to acquire Artificial in which it paid nothing up front but committed $15 million to marketing the film ahead of its wide release on Christmas Day.

When Artificial does go wide, audiences may be most surprised to find out that the true lead of Artificial isn’t Garfield’s ambitious Altman but Borisov’s brilliant, sweet oddball Ilya Sutskever. An Oscar nominee for Anora, Borisov delivers another knockout performance as Sutskever, a Russian immigrant, computer science prodigy, and, eventually, the morally conflicted cofounder of OpenAI. A charming and wonderfully overwhelmed Borisov, late to the stage because he was in the bathroom, told the crowd at NYFF that he was quite nervous for the real-life Ilya to see the film. “I don’t know, so much feeling now about this,” he said. “It’s just like a child, just born. You’re waiting for it to start breathing,” said Borisov. In another shrewd move from Neon, the studio announced that when Oscar season rolls around, Borisov will be running in the lead-actor category and Garfield in supporting alongside Rylance and Barbaro.

One year after his misfire After the Hunt opened the New York Film Festival, Guadagnino is back at the top of his game. While a science-based, jargon-heavy film might seem outside the wheelhouse of a director most celebrated for his viscerally human films like Call Me by Your Name, Bones and All, and Challengers, Guadagnino is perfectly at home in Silicon Valley, tapping into the idiosyncrasies and personalities that have led us down this dangerous path. (Also in typical Guadagnino fashion, there is a subtle undercurrent of queer infatuation, if not romance between Altman and Sutskever, which has never been documented or reported. It may just be the filmmaker’s tendency to explore the homoerotic.)

“It’s a story that involves people,” said Guadagnino. “As much as AI belongs to a world of mathematics, computers, artificial intelligence, it’s still generated by people…. This is trying to be the most deep exploration of the interaction between people where there is a total lack of desire, but there is a complete desire to prevail.”

That desire to prevail is mirrored in the ever-changing relationship between Borisov’s Sutskever and Garfield’s Altman. Sutskever and Altman are presented as two sides of the same ambitious coin. They begin with the same goal—to see this new technology through to the other side, to build a bridge to a brave new world. But as they learn how dangerous this accelerated AGI might be, their goal splinters, the cracks begin to show. Somehow, Garfield’s Altman’s face gets younger and waxier as this happens. (Is it Botox? Is it makeup? Or is it world domination that keeps Altman looking and feeling as youthful as he does?) Conversely, Sutskever’s hair thins and balds as he grows older, making visually manifest the growing chasm between them.

By the time Sutskever begins to question the path they’ve gone down together, Altman is already on the other side of the bridge, now an almost messianic presence to his employees at OpenAI, surrounding himself with boys who laze about his mansion, as he enters a bunker complete with a garden and dozens of assault rifles. Altman told VF that he assumes the film will be inaccurate, and perhaps that’s true. That being said, there’s a moment when Altman’s publicist (Cooper Koch) attempts to pull the plug on an interview when confronted with a difficult question. Where have we seen that before?

Guadagnino might not know how the technological arms race will end, but with the blisteringly brilliant Artificial, he argues that it certainly doesn’t take an AI to see where we’re headed and who got us there. “It’s not ‘How could this thing go wrong?’” says a character in the film, a warning given perhaps too little too late. “It’s ‘How could it not?’”