Overview
- Steven Soderbergh’s “John Lennon: The Last Interview” premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and is seeking U.S. distribution.
- The 97-minute film draws from the lengthy KFRC radio conversation Lennon and Yoko Ono recorded on Dec. 8, 1980, hours before his murder, and pairs the audio with photos, archival footage and music.
- Soderbergh says roughly 10% of the movie uses Meta’s generative AI to visualize abstract ideas with clearly artificial images, including stylized babies, mixing paints and mirrored crowd scenes.
- Critics at Cannes praised the power of the interview and the archival collage, yet many called the AI segments distracting or shoddy, while a few reviews noted the inserts are brief and meant to look unreal.
- Soderbergh defended the choice as disclosed and necessary due to time and budget limits, putting him at the center of a wider film-industry debate over when AI is appropriate in documentaries.