Filmmaker Luca Guadagnino keeps churning out films pretty rapidly these days. The “Call Me By Your Name” and “Suspiria” director managed to deliver both “Challengers” and “Queer” into cinemas last year.
He followed that up with the Andrew Garfield and Julia Roberts-led “After the Hunt” due out this coming October, and is reportedly gearing up to shoot his next film imminently – the ambitious $40 million-budgeted “Artificial”.
The project aims to be for AI what “The Social Network” was for social media as it follows the meteoric rise of OpenAI – the company behind ChatGPT – along with the personal rivalries, ego clashes, and ethical tensions behind the scenes.
Now, Puck News has done a report on the movie and says it’s facing a small problem – its script. Simon Rich (“An American Pickle,” FXX’s “Man Seeking Woman”) penned the screenplay for the movie which was reportedly bouncing around multiple major studios for months. They reportedly passed on the script, with one insider citing it as being too “dull”.
Tesla founder Elon Musk reportedly serves as a character in a handful of scenes and is said to be both “comic relief” and a big corporate villain who fails to merge OpenAI into Tesla.
It’s also revealed that the script’s story actually centers on Ilya Sutskever who will be portrayed by Yura Borisov (“Anora”). The idealistic Israeli machine learning engineer co-founded the non-profit OpenAI and made key breakthroughs.
The script reportedly shows how the man was “leveraged, marginalized and ultimately betrayed” by not just his “power hungry friend” and current OpenAI CEO Sam Altman (played by Andrew Garfield) but also the greed of the larger Silicon Valley community – greed that could ultimately cost all of humanity dearly.
Of course, as the report states, this was about earlier drafts with rewrites likely refining it. Guadagnino himself is expected to put his own stamp on the script as well.
Courtenay Valenti, the head of Amazon/MGM Studios, landed the project with producer David Heyman attached and rehearsals get underway this coming week in Italy.
