According to Variety, Sam Altman waved at Andrew Garfield, who plays him in "Artificial," the Luca Guadagnino film about the five-day period in 2023 when Altman was ousted from OpenAI and then rehired. The two have never spoken, and the film premieres Monday at the New York Film Festival.
The wave happened on Altman's own street. Per his Vanity Fair cover story, there were "notices on our street that there was going to be some filming or whatever," and he "paid no attention." Then one morning, walking out for coffee: "there were all these cameras and there was a guy dressed exactly like me with my same backpack," and he "felt I was in some weird glitch of the simulation or something." His full account of the encounter: "We waved and went on." His tally of the relationship between the man and the render who will share a face in theaters: "I waved at him that one time and that was it."
Garfield, for his part, declined to meet his subject while prepping, working off "the script and court transcripts and interviews and research." His assessment, to Esquire U.K.: "anyone who takes on that level of responsibility for a company or a technology that you know is going to do a hell of a lot of damage to the soul of humanity [must have] a certain ability to dissociate."
Altman's response to the film so far is the trailer. He says, "I don't think they're going for accuracy," and "It will not be good as an accurate depiction. Except for the walk." On the shot of his character rushing into a bunker with guns on the wall: "There's no bunker with firearms on the wall." He added, "That's an example of inaccuracy, but I did look kind of cool."
The studio-side twist: Amazon MGM dropped the film after Amazon invested $50 billion into OpenAI. Neon now distributes it. Altman says he did not speak to anyone at Amazon about the movie, "including Jeff Bezos." Guadagnino's answer to the whole dynamic: "maybe they love the movie." And "I'm not afraid."
YOUR TURN: When the original and the render wave, which one is the fan?
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