John Lennon recreated with artificial intelligence?

The director Steven Soderbergh – Oscar winner in 2001 with Traffic – revealed that he used generative artificial intelligence for his new documentary, John Lennon: The Last Interviewin collaboration with Meta.

Soderbergh is collaborating with the late Beatle’s heirs to bring to life his last interview, in which he promoted the album Double Fantasy together with his wife and collaborator Yoko Ono. The task of the documentary would be to visually accompany the interview, which at the time was audio only.

Much of the material will be archival. However, the director of Ocean’s Eleven revealed that 10% of the film will be made up of AI-generated footage, portraying surreal moments that he says wouldn’t be possible with traditional creative methods.

So now we have a sort of chapter structure and we start to fill in the parts where John and Yoko are talking about a specific experience they had, or a specific piece of music, or a specific person, and we overlay that text with archival material: sometimes still images, sometimes footage, video. And we have a version of the film where the only gaps left are the sections where John and Yoko talk in abstract philosophical terms. This represents about 10% of the entire film, but it’s a real problem because we have to find something, some images that enhance what is said, but which are metaphorical. So we’re starting to experiment with artificial intelligence, trying to see if we can create images that fit this text. I’m trying to articulate ideas that lead to something interesting, but funding is running out.

The director admitted that artificial intelligence “It’s a very sensitive topic lately. Understandably.” However, he said he uses it in a way that does not replace human action: “There are two ways of using it,” he explained. “There is a way of using AI where the intent is to deceive or manipulate someone, to create an image that you want them to believe is real. And then there’s a use, which is what we’re doing in the documentary, where it’s obvious that it’s AI and that it’s being used essentially in the same way that you would use visual effects, computer graphics, or any other kind of non-photographic technology.”

He also explained the support of the Lennon family to this approach. “I asked Sean (Ono Lennon), ‘What do you think your father would have thought of this technology?’ And he said, ‘Oh, he would have wanted to experiment with it. He loved all the new technology. All the Beatles loved it. He would have wanted to play with it just to see what he could do. That’s how he was made.’ How he would have felt at the end, we’ll never know, but he said he would have liked to try it.”

As it didn’t happen with Now and Then. Published on November 2, 2023, it is the Beatles’ last song, created not thanks to artificial intelligence but to MAL (Machine Assisted Learning) technology, developed in the studios of director Peter Jackson and used for the documentary “Get Back”, which allowed Lennon’s voice to be isolated from an old demo from 1978, allowing Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr to complete the song.

The documentary John Lennon: The Last Interview will premiere at Cannes Film Festival this month.