Soderbergh Uses AI in 10% of John Lennon Documentary
Steven Soderbergh brought john lennon back to Cannes on Saturday with a documentary built from surviving interview tapes and visual material generated with Meta artificial intelligence software. The AI sections make up about 10% of John Lennon: The Last Interview, and they pushed the film straight into the debate over how much machine-made imagery audiences will accept.
Cannes and Dakota Apartments
John Lennon and Yoko Ono gave the two-hour interview on Dec. 8, 1980, from their home in New York's Dakota Apartments, while promoting Double Fantasy. Lennon said, “I feel like nothing happened before today.” Soderbergh said he was “just so compelled by their generosity of spirit throughout the conversation,” and added, “It's like the world took place in one day, in this apartment.”
That setup gives the documentary its charge. The film is not just mining a famous last-day conversation; it is turning a recording tied to the day Lennon was shot, age 40, into a Cannes title that asks viewers to sit with memory, loss, and reconstruction at once.
Meta AI and 10%
Soderbergh used Meta's artificial intelligence software to conjure imagery for sections that make up about 10% of the film. He said, “Transparency is so important,” and added, “I feel like I owe people the best version of whatever art I'm trying to make and total transparency about how I'm doing it.”
The reaction in Cannes was harsher than the concept. The AI parts were overwhelmingly slammed by critics there, which turns the film into more than a Lennon portrait: it is now a public test case for whether a major director can disclose machine-generated work and still persuade viewers to judge the whole piece on its own terms.
Leibovitz on Dec. 8, 1980
Dec. 8, 1980 also produced Annie Leibovitz's famous portrait of a clothes-less Lennon wrapped around Ono. That image sits beside the documentary's audio source as part of the same day, but Soderbergh's choice to use AI for visual sections makes the film feel less like a cleaned-up archive and more like an argument about how to complete missing pieces without pretending they are untouched history.
For viewers, the practical takeaway is simple: this is a Lennon documentary with disclosed AI imagery, not a purely archival edit, and the most revealing part may be the friction between the two. If Soderbergh is setting a standard here, it is that the method has to be visible from the start, because the argument now lives inside the film as much as around it.
