Soderbergh defends AI use in John Lennon documentary at Cannes

Steven Soderbergh is defending the use of artificial intelligence in John Lennon: The Last Interview, arguing that viewers deserve to know when synthetic tools shape a nonfiction film. The documentary premiered in Cannes’ Special Screenings section and immediately became one of the festival’s sharpest debates over where restoration ends and manipulation begins.

The film runs about 97 minutes and is built around a surviving two-hour interview John Lennon and Yoko Ono gave on Dec. 8, 1980, the day Lennon was shot. The conversation was originally meant to promote Double Fantasy, but it ranged far beyond publicity into love, creativity, the Beatles, family life and the couple’s relationship. Soderbergh said he was drawn to the “generosity of spirit” in the exchange and wanted the audio to carry the film.

Because some sections still needed visual accompaniment, Soderbergh accepted an offer from Meta to use its AI software to generate imagery for roughly 10% of the documentary. The result paired archival audio with stills, clips and AI-generated visuals, a combination that several critics at Cannes singled out as the film’s weakest element. Some reviews described the synthetic imagery as jarring even as the interview itself remained vivid and poignant.

Soderbergh has framed his position as a “pro-choice” attitude toward AI and said, “I owe people honesty,” emphasizing disclosure rather than concealment. He also said he is used to controversy and sees the dispute as one the film industry must confront, not avoid. That stance places transparency at the center of a wider argument now unfolding across film production: if AI is used to reconstruct missing pieces of a nonfiction story, audiences need to know exactly where the human record ends and machine-made interpretation begins.

The documentary also arrives as a deliberate effort to demystify Lennon and Ono, echoing the archival clarity Peter Jackson brought to the Beatles in Get Back while using a historical record to test what AI can and cannot do in documentary form. The interview took place at Lennon and Ono’s apartment in the Dakota in New York, and Lennon was killed later that same day by Mark David Chapman.

Deadline said this was Soderbergh’s first documentary since And Everything Is Going Fine in 2010. The film is being launched for sales by 193 ahead of distribution, ensuring that the controversy over its AI imagery will follow it far beyond Cannes.