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.”

After several weeks of speculation on if the movie would ever see the light of day, Neon stepped in to acquire the film. The move came after studios like Warner Bros., Netflix and Focus passed on it, as sources told THR that studios were reluctant to pick up the film for a variety of reasons, including political concerns.

Artificial has been described as a Social Network-esque story, following Garfield as Altman in the tumultuous period at OpenAI in 2023 that saw him fired and rehired in a matter of days. The supporting cast includes Anora breakout Yura Borisov as Ilya Sutskever, an OpenAI co-founder who led the movement to get rid of Altman, Monica Barbaro as chief technology officer Mira Murati, and Ike Barinholtz as Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk. A new release date has not yet been set.

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