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- Steven Soderbergh’s new John Lennon documentary sparked controversy at Cannes over its use of Meta AI-generated visuals
- Critics praised the Lennon interview itself but heavily criticized the film’s surreal AI-assisted sequences
- The debate around the documentary has become part of Hollywood’s larger fight over artificial intelligence in filmmaking
Steven Soderbergh arrived at the Cannes Film Festival this weekend with a documentary built around one of the most haunting recordings in music history.
The director’s new film, “John Lennon: The Last Interview,” uses a never-before-released radio interview Lennon and Yoko Ono recorded inside the Dakota Apartments on December 8, 1980, the same day Lennon was killed. By the end of its premiere, though, much of the discussion had shifted away from John Lennon entirely and toward artificial intelligence.
The documentary mixes archival photographs, audio recordings, and experimental visuals to recreate the atmosphere of the conversation. What has sparked immediate controversy is that Meta AI helped generate some of the visuals.
Soderbergh openly acknowledged that partnering with Meta on an AI-assisted film was guaranteed to irritate people. And critics at the festival largely targeted the movie’s surreal visual sequences, which appear during moments where Lennon drifts into abstract discussions about creativity, identity, and human behavior. Rather than attempting realistic recreations, the film cuts to dreamlike imagery, including flowers dissolving into geometric patterns, shifting pools of light, and painterly moving textures that feel closer to an experimental art installation than a traditional music documentary.
For some reviewers, those sequences were distracting enough to overshadow the emotional power of the interview itself.
AI controversy
Just a few years ago, most conversations around AI in filmmaking were theoretical. Now studios, editors, visual effects artists, and directors are actively experimenting with the technology while audiences grow increasingly suspicious of anything that feels synthetic.
The documentary avoids many of the uses of AI that people fear most. There are no deepfake voices or images of Lennon. The AI imagery functions more like a visual aid for audio recordings.
Soderbergh has argued that the technology simply gave him a way to create abstract visuals quickly and cheaply in places where conventional effects work would have been difficult or prohibitively expensive. According to the director, many filmmakers and media companies are already using AI tools quietly while pretending otherwise. In his view, the unusual part is not the use of AI itself, but admitting to it publicly.
Lennon AI
The AI debate surrounding the film has grown so large that it threatens to swallow the documentary itself, which has generally garnered positive reviews beyond the AI discussion.
A respected director premiering a John Lennon documentary with Meta credited as a technology partner was always going to trigger alarms inside the film world. Still, the documentary feels like an experiment unfolding in public, not a major manifesto. Cannes simply turned the existing AI tensions into a very public spectacle.
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