Steven Soderbergh Confirms Use of AI Images in ‘John Lennon: The Last Interview’ Documentary

Director Steven Soderbergh has revealed how he embraced using AI-generated images in his new documentary about John Lennon’s final interview.

Soderbergh’s film John Lennon: The Last Interview premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on Saturday. The documentary captures the final in-depth conversation Lennon ever gave before he was assassinated.

On December 8, 1980, Lennon and Yoko Ono sat down with a small radio crew in their New York apartment to promote the release of their album Double Fantasy. The pair had not long posed for photographer Annie Leibovitz’s famous portrait of a naked Lennon wrapped around Ono. What followed during that interview with the former Beatles member was an unfiltered, wide-ranging discussion about music, politics, fatherhood, and life. Just hours later, Lennon was killed.

In his upcoming documentary, Soderberg turns those surviving tapes into a documentary and presents the complete Lennon interview for the first time. The interview is framed by reflections from people who were there at the time, presenting him at the peak of his creative and personal life and openly focused on a future he would tragically not live to see.

Soderberg, who is behind films such as Erin Brockovich and Traffic, has been sharing how he used AI generative technology in making the documentary. The director has explained that while the majority of John Lennon: The Last Interview is composed of archival footage and stills, he also uses a handful of fantasy images created by AI.

“AI has been helpful in creating thematically surreal images that occupy a dream space rather than a literal space,” Soderbergh says about the documentary in an interview with Filmmaker magazine.

He adds: “Ninety percent of the visuals are archival stills, and 10 minutes, spread out over the 90-minute film, are these little pockets of images we created whenever they start talking philosophically.”

In the same interview, Soderberg admits that the technology “desperately requires very close human supervision.” But Soderberg also says he is planning on using “a lot of AI” for his next movie with Narcos star Wagner Moura set during the Spanish-American War.

‘Transparency is So Important’

In a further interview with AP News, Soderbergh says that he has decided to be transparent about his use of AI in his filmmaking despite the technology still being extremely debated and controversial in Hollywood.

“Transparency is so important (in) that the world outside of the creative context, we’re not aware of the extent that this is being used and used to manipulate us. We don’t know because they’re not telling. We find out after, by accident, by some whistleblower.” Soderbegh tells AP News. “I’m like my own whistleblower: ‘This is what he’s doing.'”

Sodebergh’s admission comes after Janice Min, a former editor of The Hollywood Reporter and CEO of Ankler Media, described what she sees as a culture of secrecy around AI use in Hollywood. Filmmakers are facing growing scrutiny over the technology, particularly after The Brutalist was criticized for using AI to enhance Adrien Brody’s Hungarian accent — a controversy some commentators suggested may have hurt the film’s momentum in the Best Picture Oscar race last year.

“The thing with AI right now in Hollywood: Everyone’s lying just a little bit,” says Min. “Studios are lying about how much they’re using it.”