Steven Soderbergh has revealed that AI-generated scenes make up 10 per cent of his forthcoming John Lennon documentary, adding that he believes the late Beatles star would have approved of the technology. The Oscar-winning director focuses on Lennon’s final in-depth radio interview with Yoko Ono on 8 December 1980, just hours before his murder.
Soderbergh told Deadline he used artificial intelligence to create images and videos for sections where Lennon and Ono speak in abstract philosophical terms. The director said he wanted visuals that “enhance what they’re saying but is metaphorical”. He collaborated with tech company Meta, which offered to provide the technology and finish the film if Soderbergh agreed to be a test case for their tools.
The director described AI as a “very emotional subject”, but defended its use in the documentary. He stressed it was not being used to fool or manipulate viewers, but in a way akin to VFX or CGI, where the artificial origin is obvious. “There’s a use, which is what we’re doing in the documentary, where it’s obvious that it is AI,” he said.
Soderbergh also sought the opinion of Lennon’s son, Sean Ono Lennon, who said his father “would’ve wanted to engage” with the technology. “He loved all new technology. All The Beatles did,” the filmmaker recalled. “He would want to play with it just to see what it could do.”
