Andrew Garfield, who stars as Sam Altman in Luca Guadagnino’s much-buzzed-about OpenAI film Artificial, is speaking out for the first time about the controversy that has surrounded the project in recent months.
At the New York premiere of his new movie The Magic Faraway Tree, Garfield told The Hollywood Reporter, “This business is in an interesting place and I’m fascinated by how things work. I’m really grateful to Amazon for making the film with us and I’m also really grateful to Amazon for helping it find a new home. And I think Neon’s a really, really exciting home for it. I think it’s a really good fit and I’m really excited to release it with them,” calling Neon, “a daring studio doing daring films so I’m very, very excited to be partnering with them on it.”
Artificial went on quite a ride earlier this summer, when Amazon MGM Studios suddenly announced it was dropping the feature just months after Amazon entered into a $50 billion investment with OpenAI.
“We have the utmost respect and admiration for Luca Guadagnino as an award-winning filmmaker — not to mention a longstanding relationship that we hope to continue,” a spokesperson for Amazon told THR in June. “We believe that Artificial will be better served if it were released by a different studio and are working closely with the filmmaking team to find the film a new home.”
