CANNES, France — The day when John Lennon was assassinated, on December 8, 1980, he and Yoko Ono gave an interview to a San Francisco radio crew from their home in the Dakota Apartments in New York.
They were promoting their new album “Double Fantasy,” but the two-hour conversation covered a lot of topics. Although the interviewers had been warned “no questions about the Beatles,” Lennon and Ono were excitingly open. That day, Annie Leibovitz also took the famous portrait of a naked Lennon, hugging Ono.
The interview is just as naked. Both of them, and especially Lennon, improvise about love, their relationship, creativity, life after the Beatles, raising their young son, writing songs in bed, and much more. At 40, the musician sounds like someone who has found real clarity.
“I feel like nothing happened before today,” Lennon said.
In “John Lennon: The Last Interview,” Steven Soderbergh turns those surviving tapes into a documentary that does as much to demystify Lennon and Ono as “Get Back” did for the Beatles. The film premiered on Saturday at the Cannes Film Festival.
“I was very moved by his generosity of spirit throughout the entire conversation,” Soderbergh explained in an interview Saturday in Cannes. “It’s as if the world happened in a single day, in this apartment.”
Making it represented an acute problem. Soderbergh was determined to let the audio play. I could find ways to illustrate much of the film, but there was still a big gap when the conversation turned more philosophical.
“I worked on everything that could be solved except that, for as long as I could,” Soderbergh narrates. “Then came the inevitable moment of: ‘OK, but seriously, what are we going to do?’ We started trying things, and we ran out of time and money. That was where the Meta part came in.”
Soderbergh accepted an offer to use Meta’s artificial intelligence software to render surreal images for those sections, which make up about 10% of the film. When he broke the news earlier this year, it caused a stir. Was one of America’s top filmmakers using AI? And in a film about a Beatle, no less?
The AI parts (overwhelmingly beaten by critics at Cannes) are quite banal and do not differ much from the special effects. There are no digitally manipulated images of Lennon. But Soderbergh put himself at the forefront of an industry-wide debate about the uses of AI in filmmaking. For him, who has made movies with iPhones, it’s a conversation he’s eager to have.
AP: At a time when AI in film is under much debate, you’ve been very outspoken about its use here. Because?
SODERBERGH: Transparency is so important in the world outside of the creative context. We are not aware of the extent to which this is being used, and it is being used to manipulate us. We don’t know because they don’t say it. We found out later, by accident, from some whistleblower. I am my own whistleblower: “This is what he is doing.”
AP: Did you expect such a strong reaction?
SODERBERGH: I knew what was coming. I take this very seriously, and I understand why people have an emotional response to this topic. As I’ve said before, I feel like I owe people the best version of any art I try to make and complete transparency about how I do it. But yes, you cannot accept that Meta offers you these tools and offers you to finish the movie without knowing (in advance) that you are going to receive some criticism. That was part of the deal.
AP: Some fear that generative AI will tear up the film industry. However, you don’t see her as the bogeyman.
SODERBERGH: I think most of the jobs that matter when you make a movie can’t be done by this technology and never will be. As it becomes possible for anyone to create something that meets a certain standard of technical perfection, then imperfection becomes more valuable and more interesting. We haven’t yet seen anyone with any creative credibility fully embrace AI in something, and see how people react. I think it is necessary. How do you know where the line is until someone crosses it? I don’t think what I’m doing crosses the line. Some people might disagree. I still don’t know where my line is. I’m waiting to see.
AP: What kind of instructions did you give the program to create the animations?
SODERBERGH: Circles of light coming out of nowhere, things like that. A black rose that turns into something Busby Berkeley-esque and then a red rose. I wasn’t very articulate with the people I was working with. It was difficult to describe the things I wanted to see. The nice thing about this technology was at least the ability to have something in front of me quickly that I could react to.
AP: Has your experience given you any kind of framework for where you think this technology should be limited?
SODERBERGH: I have determined that my rule is: it has to be necessary. Is this the only way to achieve what I want to see? Is it really the best way to do it? That’s the real question. You’re going to see a lot of people doing things with AI that don’t overcome those two challenges.
AP: There is an ethical debate, but also an aesthetic one. Otherwise, this is raw human dialogue.
SODERBERGH: I needed a way to visually track them in flight, or I’m not doing my job. It is difficult to predict how long it will take us to find homeostasis with this technology. I think we will make it. If we look at this technology in the movie-making business, each department has or will have a very different relationship with it. I will have a different relationship than that of a screenwriter, that of an actor, that of the costume designer, the production designer, the sound effects people.
Each creative person will have their own prism and will be affected in different ways. Our inherent desire to have a simple template for how this should be approached is part of the problem. I don’t think that’s possible. I don’t think there is a one-size-fits-all solution.
AP: In any case, the conversation in the film is deeply inspiring.
SODERBERGH: Especially his burning desire to destroy the myth of the male rock star, at a time when no one had that in mind. That’s inspiring. What I hope young people who watch it take away from this is: this guy told the truth about everything from the beginninguntil the last day of his life. That’s just how it was done. And it was constructive. He had very strong opinions, but he was also very thoughtful, and all in the service of: can we do this better? Can we be a better version of human beings on this planet?