World premiere of “Artificial”: Luca Guadagnino’s drama on Sam Altman and OpenAI debuts tonight at the New York Film Festival

The world premiere of “Artificial”, Luca Guadagnino’s new film about Sam Altman and OpenAI, took place last night (October 5) at Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center, part of the 64th edition of the New York Film Festival (September 25 – October 12), as Variety reports. Guadagnino and most of the cast were present: Andrew Garfield, Monica Barbaro, Yura Borisov, Ike Barinholtz, Cooper Hoffman, Jason Schwartzman and Chris O’Dowd.

The film dramatizes the five-day crisis of November 2023, when OpenAI’s board suddenly fired Altman, only to reinstate him a few days later after an employee revolt. In the role, Garfield plays Altman; Monica Barbaro plays Mira Murati (OpenAI’s former chief technology officer); Yura Borisov (known from “Anora”) plays co-founder Ilya Sutskever, the central figure of the ouster; Ike Barinholtz plays Elon Musk; Mark Rylance plays Geoffrey Hinton, the “godfather of AI”. The cast also includes Cooper Hoffman (Greg Brockman), Jason Schwartzman, Zosia Mamet, Cooper Koch, Billie Lourd and Chris O’Dowd. The screenplay was written by Simon Rich, while the producers include David Heyman, Jennifer Fox and Guadagnino himself.

The film’s road to the screen has been as dramatic as its subject: Amazon MGM dropped the finished film last summer, shortly after Amazon signed a multibillion-dollar deal with OpenAI — a move Neon exploited to pick up the film after a bidding war, as Variety reports. Neon opens it in U.S. cinemas on December 25, 2026, with a wide expansion in January 2027 and a clear eye on the Oscar race. After New York, the film’s next gala is at the London Film Festival on October 11. NYFF artistic director Dennis Lim has called the film one “for the moment” — a treatment that, in his words, combines “clear-eyed horror, dark humour and a sense of existential urgency”.

Before the premiere, Sam Altman himself broke his silence about the film for the first time in an interview with Vanity Fair, as Far Out Magazine writes: filming took place near his house, and one morning, on his way to get coffee, he saw the cameras and “a guy dressed exactly like me, with the same backpack, walking so much like me that I felt like I was in some kind of madness in the simulation”. The two waved at each other, and Altman says Garfield has captured his “weird mannerisms”, but they have not met beyond that. Garfield, for his part, had told Esquire in August that he chose not to meet Altman.

Now all eyes are on the critical reactions after the premiere — the first real test of a film born from a story the tech industry would have preferred never to be told.